I’m wondering if any of you have a good tool that your company uses for announcements or general communications. Typically I hold a monthly Epicor communication meeting where we have a rep from each area of the business so they can bring topics to discuss and also communicate back to their groups. Its a great way to learn what other departments are doing in Kinetic as far as customizations and projects and also I give announcements on upcoming webinars, new features that would benefit the business, upcoming upgrades, or bugs, etc. The last year we have had extremely poor attendance and I know the communication isn’t happening. I believe I can have better luck with a newsletter I just send out.
The downfall of a newsletter is that it happens monthly on a schedule so important announcements may not come out on time. We do currently see this downfall in our monthly meeting too. We have a company wide project list with progress updates so I think I can get away from my own update separately but I don’t know how to do announcements or other communications other than email (which really isn’t ideal either).
We don’t have Epicor Collaborate so i can’t push out anything to all users there and we don’t have an active intranet page. I would like something that somehow notifies users when there is a new announcement or a place they can go daily to see all of them.
What are other companies using that seems to work well?
I’m curious about the answer. Here is an idea, would it be possible to kick off a report in preview for all users and have it cached so when they login next it should open up?
I know I can do this for myself by sending something to preview and closing Epicor before it shows up.
If you’re an M365 user, you could create a Communication Site and post News Items. It will email them and be there to see. If you have a digital signage system like OptiSigns, it can display those screens as well.
I have used SmartSheet for years to hold issues and solutions for customers.
It is easier to use than SharePoint and it can be shared on the web.
I have put in WebUrls in the menu and custom home pages where users can post issues or questions.
The tool allows you to store attachments and comments.
On a daily basis - an alert is sent out to anyone that is listed as a subscriber of new issues and changes to issues.
Your entire tenant can belong to the communication site. You select who gets various items through Audience Targeting. tl;dr, you use group membership to determine a user’s audience.
Groups can be dynamic, so when you maintain your users in Entra/AD, they will be added to dynamic groups based on department or other properties. When you disable the user when they leave, they are removed from the group. There’s nothing to maintain.
Alright, does the generic login cost money to the org? I’m just thinking you’ll want to communicate to some employees that have no use of a login so now you’ll give them one and have to coordinate with HR and what not to disable it when they leave, etc. Maybe have HR administer it or be able to create these accounts?
So, Microsoft has HR provisioning that supposed to do this, since HR is the source of truth.
A login is free. Services will cost you: email, office, etc. My goal here is to have HR enter a news item on a communication site. That is published there and rolled up to the main Intranet. It is also emailed to the audience. Finally, display the news item on targeted screens around the building.
We’re using Teams and Sharepoint…if a news update is published to Sharepoint, we get a notification on Teams and can open it right up. There’s a separate quarterly newsletter for less time-sensitive stuff.
Are you able to capture statistics on how many people read your updates? I am really curious about this whole topic because I send some information by email but what little I send is completely ignored so its a huge disincentive to spend time trying to communicate more updates or more frequently.
I think in my ideal world, I would be able to control messages on a screen by screen basis (without customizing the screen). So for example the way that Epicor has added a toast message when you login that says kinetic has been upgraded and there is a link there to click what’s new. I want to be able to put a message like that anywhere in the application. I feel people are so inundated with email, teams, and other notifications they just completely tune it out. But if you are seeing the relevant information at the exact moment when you are thinking, hey why is this different, maybe it would be more effective.
We are also using Teams and Sharepoint. Plus we have 65" TV’s with Yodeck around the plant that shows Grow KPIs and other announcements. HR has access to add/change announcements and the Grow KPIs are auto-updated as it pulls the URL each time that screen displays.
One could create your own “tip of the day” and have that display at login for a day or so…