TSG recently announced our integration with Slack and we are now excited to announce a Microsoft Teams integration for the OpenContent Management Suite (OCMS). This post will overview the new functionality this provides an organization, as well as our thoughts on future features that could be added.
The Rise of Messaging Platforms
In the last 30 years, organizations have increasingly relied upon email for internal and external communication. However, with the proliferation of email, a problem has cropped up – overflowing inboxes. Many of our clients receive hundreds of emails a day, each one adding to communication noise. It’s also common for clients to receive many emails per day marked URGENT, when in fact only a few may actually be truly urgent. In the past 5 years or so, messaging platforms have become increasingly popular to improve communication within the workplace. These platforms not only better organize chat-style communication, but also seamlessly integrate file sharing, audio/video calling, as well as screen sharing.
Similar to Slack, Microsoft Teams is one of newer entries into the cloud-based instant messaging platforms, facilitating direct and channel communications within a modern, intuitive user interface available on the web, desktop, and mobile. Teams evolved from Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype for Business and is available as a part of Office365 platform. Looking to gain a foothold in their existing enterprise customers, Microsoft has seen significant growth. With similar integration options and functionality and a growing enterprise customer base, integration with OCMS made sense.
ECM Notifications – Traditional Reliance on Email
Traditionally, when a workflow task is assigned to a user, the user is notified via email in addition to the task appearing in an in-application inbox. Optionally, a reminder schedule can be set up to periodically re-send email notifications for outstanding tasks generating further task reminder emails. The notification email typically contains details on the task to be performed and a link to the task in the ECM system.
Given that users are already inundated with noise in their email, many organizations have turned to modern messaging platforms to streamline team communication. While email notifications are still supported, the OCMS Teams integration can be utilized to send task notification alerts straight to the user in Microsoft Teams rather than relying only on emails that could get lost.
OCMS Teams Integration
TSG is committed to merging the information-sharing power of Teams with our ECM solutions, starting with workflow task notifications. When an OCMS user is assigned a workflow task, he or she receives a direct Teams notification from OCMS detailing the action required. The notification provides a link to the relevant content in OCMS, so the user can easily navigate to and complete the task.
See the video below demonstrating Teams notifications for OCMS tasks:
TSG continues to look for ways to leverage Teams in order to streamline OCMS sharing and communication. Potential future additions include:
- Channel archival – We talked to a client recently that creates and archives channels in Teams for specific projects. Once a project is finished it is archived. A future integration could include migrating all or part of the archived channel (ex: chat, shared files, etc.) to the ECM repository before archiving the channel in slack.
- Posting OCMS content to Teams – While looking at a piece of content, the user could choose to post the document or link to the document to a Teams channel from within the OCMS application.
- Post Teams content to OCMS – Directly from Teams, post a shared file to the ECM repository. Depending on the setup, this likely could integrate with our Capture 2.0 solution to properly index the document in the ECM repository.
- Search the ECM Repository from Teams – Easily search your ECM repository via a Teams command. For example: /ocms search Claim 123456
Let us know your thoughts below on TSG’s new Teams for OCMS Integration.
We are definitely looking to keep files stored in Alfresco rather than SharePoint when using Microsoft Teams in order to be able to more easily apply data retention and manage it when the time to take action comes around. I’ve seen a demo of an API between Teams and M-Files which looks good. I would welcome seeing this happen for Alfresco. We need to move away from offering lots of different places to store information, or being bound to store things where the s/ware provide wants you to (their product) to them defaulting to making it possible to integrate your existing tool with other apps as standard (making things better overall).