Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with Chloe Devin, Co-Founder and Managing Director of WebVine about their use of SharePoint and Microsoft 365 services to create dynamic, productive and innovative workplaces with exceptional technology.
In this interview, we learn about:
- 00:19 About WebVine
- 01:14 WebVine use of Microsoft SharePoint and Teams
- 04:28 Importance of Copilot
- 05:35 About WebVine Clients
- 07:51 Ideal Size and type of client for WebVine?
- 10:01 Future work for WebVine
- 13:30 Find out more about WebVine
Links and Resources:
- More info about WebVine https://webvine.com.au/
- More about their intranet platform, https://ww.injio.com
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Tammy regularly helps Not for Profits make IT investment decisions. Let her know if you need some help.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Association President, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT decisions as an independent consultant. She does not take commissions nor sign partnership arrangements with vendors.
Video Transcript with WebVine (Minor modifications have been made for clarity)
Tammy Ven Dange -Today I welcome Chloe Dervin, co-founder and managing director of WebVine. Chloe, thanks for joining me today.
Chloe Dervin – Thank you so much, Tammy. It’s been a great pleasure to have this chat with you.
About WebVine
Tammy Ven Dange – So tell us more about WebVine.
Chloe Dervin – So WebVine’s a specialist technology consulting and software organisation. So we’re based in Sydney, in Redfern, and we service clients all around Australia and New Zealand and sometimes internationally as well.
We specialise in working with our clients to really energise their Microsoft 365 stack of technologies. And in particular, we work around SharePoint and Teams and the Power Platform. So really helping with their digital workspace and the digital transformation for users in that environment.
WebVine use of Microsoft SharePoint and Teams
Tammy Ven Dange – It’s such an interesting part of Microsoft. I think a lot of people will say, “Well, we have Microsoft partners,” and they offer usually a different range of services from that suite. Why did you guys decide to focus on SharePoint and Teams?
Chloe Dervin – That’s a really great question and I suppose it takes me back to how the organisation came into being and really what our interest was. It really is around intranet.
Interestingly enough, the first intranet I did was way back in 1998. That’s quite a long time ago, isn’t it, when I was working for what was then AMP Investment, which is the group of AMP companies. I was pretty fresh in my career and asked to create an intranet there. We created an intranet for the organisation, also an extranet as well. So that was the first experience with intranets.
Then fast-forward to 2010, I’d done a lot of work in Australia and then over in New York and just settling back in Australia and looking at what was going to be the next focus for my career, and we came across SharePoint.
Particularly, we found this incredible platform, SharePoint, and it was being used heavily for document management and also for team sites and comm sites, and found that it was not being done very well.
We saw an opportunity to actually come in and help organisations create order out of what was basically a SharePoint mess. So we were brought into organisations to really do some SharePoint fixes and ended up seeing the opportunity there, not only to help organisations really with the governance around their SharePoint sites, but also that it was an incredible platform that could really provide a lot of value for organisations more in through the intranet space, and really an underpinning of an incredible digital workplace that was starting to evolve for organisations.
Our first client was the Commonwealth Bank, and we ended up doing about 13 intranet fix-its or SharePoint fix-its there. That was really the genesis of the business, seeing that there was such an incredible opportunity.
The focus has always been around that core capability of SharePoint. It’s an incredible platform. It still today underpins a lot of what happens in the Microsoft ecosystem around collaboration and underpinning Teams, and is really an incredible platform with so much leverage and capability. So that’s a lot of our focus.
And then the different enablers on top of that, such as the Power Platform capabilities, and such as all these new generative AI Copilot capabilities, which are now going to be making the platform even more powerful. There’s plenty of work to keep us busy within that small part of the ecosystem.
Importance of Copilot
Tammy Ven Dange – Especially with the Copilot and these additional things around AI, I know it’s going to be quite important for organisations to be able to have a very structured document management and data management structure, which I assume is probably going to be underpinned with SharePoint and OneDrive as well.
Chloe Dervin – As we know, Satya Nadella’s talking about Copilots for each of the apps. So at an app level, you’re going to have the capability to dive in deep. But then across the whole Microsoft ecosystem, it’s going to tap in to make it a really powerful integrative experience.
And yes, so we’re helping our clients really focus upon what do you need to get lined up now to prepare for Copilot. We’re still at the beginning stages of jumping on board, playing with that. A lot of our clients are at the beginning stages of that. They’re very excited about the possibility of generative AI and how that’s going to enhance productivity for their staff.
But there’s a lot of cleaning up your house to getting things ready, getting things in order in terms of governance, cleaning up access, making sure you have the right licencing, all of this type of thing to do in preparation for this new wave of opportunity and productivity that Copilot and the generative AI promises.
About WebVine Clients
Tammy Ven Dange – Now I know you work with a lot of Not for Profits. Could you tell us about the clients?
Chloe Dervin – Look, it’s been a real treat for us to work with a lot of nonprofits over the years. One of our early clients was Camp Quality, Ronald McDonald House. These days we’re working a lot with Berry Street, AccessEAP, Achieve Australia, Community Living Australia, and Sylvanvale.
There’s a whole stream of fantastic organisations. And all of them are very unique in what’s important for them in their organisation. Of course, resourcing is a big issue for them, how to make their buck go a bit further.
That’s really why we love working with these organisations because for us, it’s about you already have the Microsoft capability, we want to work with you to really enhance that capability to make it optimised for you to leverage that platform more for your organisation. And so that’s our real focus.
I think the other thing that we really love to do is because we’re a specialist organisation, we find that a lot of these nonprofit organisations do have some internal IT capability. It’s more generalist and across so many different platforms and infrastructure.
We like to be able to partner with them as a specialist resource, help them with their SharePoint, their digitization, their automation, and come in as when needed to help and support them, their team can rely on, that’s an extension of them, but that they need to draw in when they need us.
That’s a really great way to work with nonprofit clients. And we also provide a support capability as well. On an ongoing basis, we’re there for maintenance and enhancements should they need us.
So they’re some of the examples of how we work for nonprofits.
And whether it be the document management space or whether it be more on the intranet platform space, which is what we’ve done for a lot of the clients, that’s the area that we can really best work with them and provide that specialist capability.
Ideal Size and type of client for WebVine?
Tammy Ven Dange – Do you have an ideal size client or ideal type of client?
Chloe Dervin – The ideal really is where we can be that valuable specialist expertise that, as I said, they may have some internal IT experience and even if they do have that SharePoint experience.
It’s not so much on size because you could have a 5,000-person organisation and the bulk of those people could be frontline workers or out there on the field, but they have a very small head office and a very small IT and operations capability.
The size doesn’t necessarily dictate, but it is really where they are looking for more of that expertise to come in and support them. And what we really love to do as well, we find that we can add the most value when we have that ongoing partnership because we get to really understand their business.
That’s a big focus of how we want to work because once we really understand what’s important to you, what are the key value drivers, what are the pain points, then over time as we are aware of new technologies and new capabilities, we’re always thinking, “Oh, that might be actually useful for that client.”
Recently it came up, we were working on a multilingual capability, this is actually for a university, and we’re thinking, “Oh, who’s this going to be valuable for? Which of our other clients do they have that particular need that we can apply and suggest for them?”
A lot of value comes in a deep understanding of what’s important for an organisation and how to take advantages of developments in technology and what we can suggest to them. Because let’s face it, there’s just so much going on all the time in the changing and evolving technological landscape that it’s impossible for an organisation to keep on top of it.
We like to provide that value of, “Here’s what we’re seeing around our particular expertise of the stack. This is what would be of value and interest to you and your organisation.”
Future work for WebVine
Tammy Ven Dange – Chloe, is there anything else you’d like to share about WebVine or things that you’re working on?
Chloe Dervin – I think the focus that we like to help our organisations with is focus on document management and collaboration.
Obviously there’s a lot there, whether that’s working documents or more of the policies and procedures, how to get that in order, the governance associated with that, the permissions, or whether it’s migrating from an on-prem environment or even a network file environment over to the cloud.
We’re seeing a lot of organisations want to take advantage of that. And of course that’s also a prerequisite to engaging with more of the generative AI capabilities down the track, to have your capability in the cloud.
So we do a lot of work with that. We do a lot of work around creating digital workspaces, so powerful intranets, the front door for an organisation to engage with, to keep people on the same page, aware of what’s going on in the organisation. And creating powerful hubs for their teams to do their work on a day-to-day basis, whether that be interacting with all of their work platforms coming through that central hub.
We have an intranet accelerator called Injio. That’s our software piece, which is an accelerator. What that means is that we’ve come up with the best capability for an intranet.
What we saw over time was that around 80% of what organisations need in a digital workplace intranet is common. So what if we prebuilt that capability so that we could provide a rapidly deployed and more cost-effective way of an organisation building an intranet? And then that remaining 20%, we can work on. The 20% that’s unique for that organisation, we can work on with them hand in hand.
We take our clients through a process of discovery and design, trying to figure out what exactly is going to be the right solution with that intranet platform for them and take them through that process. And then brand the intranet and build it out for a capability that’s really valuable for them and their teams.
Then of course, once that’s in place, there’s so much that can be done then in terms of that digital transformation. What automated processes can we add on top of that to simplify the work life of their teams and their staff? So using the Power Platform capability to do that.
The next level of all of that will of course be all of this Copilot capability as well, and enhancing the depth of access to information and the synthesis of information for people that are using the capabilities.
We’re really excited about this next wave, but know that for a lot of organisation, there’s going to be quite a few steps in place to help them along the journey of feeling comfortable that they’ve got everything in order, that people are going to be accessing the information that’s right for them, so the permissioning side of it.
And also that they’re going to be able to take advantage of this new technology, that they’re not going to be left behind. And so that’s where we’re really helping to work with our clients on that.
Find out more about WebVine
Tammy Ven Dange – Chloe, if people want to get in touch with WebVine, where should we send them?
Chloe Dervin – They can come to our website, which is https://webvine.com.au.
Also our intranet platform, which is https://ww.injio.com, is also a resource as well.
And we’ve got a lot of information on the websites as well, a synthesis of information around the stack that we work with to help organisations.
Tammy Ven Dange – Well, we’ll go ahead and put those links on the website so that people can find them easily. Chloe, thank you so much for joining me today and talking more about WebVine.
Chloe Dervin – Thank you so much, Tammy. It’s been great.