Client Stories

As the coronavirus pandemic receded in 2022, many companies began the process of reintegrating in-office work back into their business, with varying approaches. Our client chose to resume office work on a hybrid basis.

They wanted a solution that would meet employee needs while still adhering to internal office policies, and turned to SYSCOM GLOBAL SOLUTIONS and our decades of IT support, maintenance, and management experience to develop it.

The client had two high-priority requests for this project:

• The solution had to support a health questionnaire for each employee to take the day before they traveled into the office.
• The solution had to support a “hoteling” function that enabled employees to reserve meeting rooms and desks before coming into the office.

*Hoteling refers to a seat reservation approach to office seating. When companies move to a hybrid schedule for remote and in-office work, many implement a free-desking approach. No one has assigned seating, but greater flexibility is attained via seat reservations.

Were the hoteling application to be deployed without the health questionnaire included, office administrators would have to create a questionnaire in Excel, individually send it to each employee in advance of their office arrival, and manually manage the responses on a file server. By including the questionnaire in the hoteling application, employees would necessarily have to fill it out before they were able to secure their seat in the first place, saving untold working hours for office admins.

Implementing an application that was easily administered and easily used by employees was of utmost importance.

Since the client had already implemented Microsoft 365, we decided to propose Power Apps. Its compatibility with their current environment, in terms of implementation costs and post-implementation maintenance, set it above other third-party apps.

Additionally, with a fixed office opening date, we didn’t have the 3-4 months it usually takes to develop a custom application from scratch. We had 1-2 months to proceed from request to implementation.

SYSCOM GS, a Microsoft gold partner, already had many consultants and engineers on staff who were experts in the Microsoft Power Platform and familiar with the client’s IT environment. Using Microsoft Power Apps kept costs down and enabled rapid delivery and implementation thanks to its seamless integration, no code/low-code apps, and our knowledgeable staff.

▼ Learn more about Microsoft Power Platform here:
https://test.uploadbook.com/syscom/solutions/digital-transformation/microsoft-power-platform/

There were two known issues prior to the project:

• First, the client wanted to perform two tasks with the same application, rather than doing each separately. We had to combine the pre-arrival health survey (including storing the results on a Sharepoint site) and the desk hoteling function.
• Second, daylight saving time in the US creates a one-hour discrepancy between summer and winter, causing issues when employees made reservations.

Knowing our timeline was short (1-2 months from request to delivery), we used an agile project management approach to begin work as quickly as possible. We were able to show the project to the client while it was still in development, allowing for immediate feedback and improvement. Through regular meetings with key stakeholders, we were able to respond and adapt to requests as they came in.

*Agile Project Management is a PM approach in which 70-80% of deliverables are created and presented to the client quickly. The client gives feedback, allowing the team to finish the project while simultaneously bringing existing work closer to the ideal state.

Microsoft Power Platform’s customization features are powerfully extensive, making the importance of setting clear goals from the start paramount. Our engineers participated in stakeholder meetings from an early state, stayed in constant contact throughout, and were able to respond to feedback quickly and effectively. The final product met and exceeded the client’s requirements.

In the course of our regular IT infrastructure work, we partner closely with the IT staff of the company. However, we prefer to go directly to the actual users when developing applications, and we did so here. Through interviews with end users, we were able to incorporate functions already available within the application to fulfill their needs, use seat drawings proposed by SYSCOM GS, and make the application much more user-friendly. Not only can it be accessed from a web browser, it’s also mobile-friendly on iOS and Android, allowing it to be used on the go.