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Products We Like for the Digital Workplace

Technology is important. How well it helps your people is critical. Centric’s expertise with products like Office 365, SharePoint, Kentico, and Liferay can help guide you in choosing the right products to help your employees collaborate effectively.

Start with Why, then look at What and How

In order to select the best tool it’s important to first understand why the organization needs a new capability. Is it core to their business? Next move to the ‘what’. What are the functional, use case driven needs of the organization? Once we have a solid understanding of why and what, then we can focus on technology – the ‘how.’ What tools, products, solutions, development capabilities are available to best support the why and what.

Joe Hartsel

National Modern Workplace Practice Lead

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Building the Digital Workplace with the Right Tools and Technologies

Centric has grown to trust the capabilities of many products. We’ve found Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint, Kentico, Liferay, and Sitecore to provide useful out of the box features most organizations can quickly leverage. These products are also well supported and stable. They have partner and add-in product networks that extend the base functionality without the need for complex custom solutions.

Office 365 and SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint has become a de facto technology for document collaboration and intranets. Office 365 has often been associated first with email, then with other Modern Workplace capabilities.

As SharePoint’s install base has grown, Microsoft has continued to improve the platform by adding new features and functions that allow the platform to serve many different roles. Office 365 and SharePoint online are two great examples of these features and functions.

On the flip side, we see many organizations who are frankly frustrated with SharePoint, and this frustration is measurable. We see this often through low user adoption and side-stepping the technology for something else.

Given this, we’d like to think our view on the tool is practical and based on the reality we see with our clients. In particular, we think that:

Organizations need to determine the use cases that are a good fit for SharePoint out of the box.
“Guardrails” or clear boundaries where SharePoint is simply not a good fit should be established early in SharePoint and Office 365 projects.
There is value in proving out out-of-the box capabilities or proven third party add-ons first instead of jumping right into complex custom development.
Adoption requires planning, governance, and specific “KPI” measurements of the tool.

Learn how to drive Office 365 adoption in your workplace.

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Kentico CMS

Kentico is a fully integrated ASP.NET Content Management System (CMS), E-commerce, and Online Marketing platform – one that can fully optimize an organization’s digital experiences across multiple channels. Kentico is optimized to provide responsive mobile experiences across the today’s leading mobile platforms.

Kentico has been recognized by Gartner Group as a notable vendor in their magic quadrant for web content management – specifically noting that it “demonstrates a good focus on the needs of midsize organizations.” Real Story Group (RSG) continues to rank Kentico as a leading mid-market WCMS tool, providing advanced marketing tools at an affordable price point.

Kentico fits nicely with mid-market organizations who are interested in improving their digital footprint. It is simple to use, supports content development and publication as well as sophisticated marketing analytics. Kentico is extensible – organizations can build and customize web applications (extranets, partner portals, etc.) while leveraging traditional CMS templates and tools.

Liferay Portal

Recognized by Gartner Group as a leader in the Horizontal Portal magic quadrant for six consecutive years, Liferay has proven itself to be highly scalable and stable open source alternative for website development, intranets, and team collaboration.

The Liferay Digital Platform features an extensive portfolio of mobile optimized out of the box capabilities that include content management, collaboration, social communities, and workflow. Liferay is

A platform. It can be extended, integrated and leveraged in complex organizations with multiple and disparate technology tools and solutions.
An enterprise alternative to large complex vendor specific portal tools.
Consistently out-performing large monolith vendors’ tools like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and out-ranks tools in Gartner, Forrester and Real Story Group.
Is community oriented, committed to its employees and firmly believes in building the open source framework.

Curious about our Liferay service and capabilities?

Sitecore

Sitecore Experience Platform delivers automated, flexible, and predictive customer experience management. Seamlessly combining web content management with customer intelligence, it empowers marketers to understand the context of how customers are interacting with their brand.

Centric has been delighted to partner with Verndale, a platinum Sitecore partner with deep experience providing strategy, experience design, and implementation on the Sitecore Experience Platform. Verndale’s focus on architecture and design, health assessments and advanced marketing analytic development fit well with Centric’s deep experience in WCMS design, management and implementation and middleware integration.

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