Vorsite Cloud Services

Top 2 New Features of the New Year

Written by Heidi Black | January 31, 2017

Schedule meetings faster with FindTime - FindTime is an add-in for Outlook that helps you come to consensus on a meeting time across companies. Have you ever spent more time deciding when to meet than actually meeting? FindTime offers intelligent suggestions on what days and times work best for people within your organization. Propose your selected times to all attendees and allow everyone to vote. Once you reach consensus, FindTime sends out the meeting invite on your behalf, eliminating the time consuming back-and-forth usually required to find the best meeting time.

How FindTime helps plan your meetings

FindTime is an add-in for Outlook that helps you pinpoint times to meet by looking at available free/busy data for your attendees as well as creating a poll where attendees can vote on the times you suggest or suggest new times themselves!

Recipients can receive invites on any email provider and can access the FindTime voting website on any device. FindTime is best for Office 365 users with Outlook 2013, Outlook 2016 or Outlook on the web.

Microsoft StaffHub - There are an estimated 500-million frontline staff workers around the world in retail stores, hotels, restaurants, manufacturing and other service-related industries. These employees typically don’t have their own office, desk or computer—making it hard to access and share information important for the workday. Far too often, these workers rely on manual processes and outdated tools—cumbersome creation and printing of paper schedules, bulletin boards crammed with notes and a flurry of phone calls and text messages to cover shifts.

Microsoft StaffHub is a new application for Office 365 designed to help staff workers manage their workday—with schedule management, information sharing and the ability to connect to other work-related apps and resources.

Manage schedules

Microsoft StaffHub makes it easy for managers to create, update and manage shift schedules for their team, streamlining what has been a labor-intensive process.

Employees have access to all their shift information, including the ability to easily swap shifts with others right from the Microsoft StaffHub mobile app. No more having to go into the breakroom at work to look at the bulletin board.

Employees can view their upcoming shifts at a glance on their mobile device and can request to swap a shift with someone else.

The app home screen provides a summary of upcoming shifts as well as any important notes. Employees can also see who else is scheduled for the day, which is useful if they want to know who they’ll be working with or if they want to swap shifts.

When schedule conflicts come up, Microsoft StaffHub makes it easy to swap a shift or offer a shift to someone else. Requests are always routed to the manager for approval, and updates and notifications are automatically sent to the team.

Share information

With Microsoft StaffHub, managers can quickly distribute important information to their team, such as policy documents, news bulletins or videos. Managers also have a fast and reliable way to send quick messages to team members. For example, to let an employee know “there is a spill on the floor” or “the regional GM is arriving in 20 minutes,” simply tap the employee’s name and type a message. Employees can also send messages directly to each other or to the entire workgroup.

Managers select the content they want to distribute to their team.

Employees can view the files on the mobile app.

 

Connect to other apps and resources

Companies often use multiple systems and tools to help manage their workforce, and we want to make it easy for Microsoft StaffHub to connect to these existing systems. StaffHub supports connections to Kronos, a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions. Initially, this integration enables managers to import individual and team schedule information from Kronos’s Workforce Central platform directly into Microsoft StaffHub. This functionality will initially be in private preview to a small group of Office 365 and Kronos customers. Stay tuned!

Microsoft StaffHub also supports the ability for admins to define custom links for workers to view in the mobile app, which can point to important resources or sites, such as HR systems for reporting time off, or to custom applications, built with tools such as Microsoft PowerApps. Managers can also export team schedule information to a .csv file for use in other systems.

Microsoft StaffHub is enabled today for Office 365 customers with a K1, E1, E3 or E5 plan. Team managers can sign in at staffhub.ms, and employees can download the app on iOS or Android.

If you want more information about these two features, please contact Vorsite at sales@vorsite.com or (206) 781-1797. Look out for an invitation in the next coming weeks to our “How to Enhance and Improve the Office 365 Platfrom” event. You won’t want to miss this unique and educational event!