Today is an exciting day at Polinode! We are thrilled to announce that we now have direct integrations with both Microsoft Teams and Slack. With so many organisations recently moving to a situation where most or a significantly increased proportion of work is now done remotely, we decided to accelerate these integrations a few months ago. For a number of years there has been a trend towards more internal communication taking place across Enterprise Social Networks such as Teams and Slack. And so, both in the current environment and because of this trend, we feel that the ability to tap into the natural network data that these tools produce will be particularly powerful and insightful for organisations. A handful of organisations who have been testing the integrations over the last couple of months have already proved this to be true!
How Does it Work?
The Teams and Slack integrations are available to any Enterprise and Partner customers who would like to take advantage of them. They sit alongside our existing integrations with Microsoft Active Directory, Office 365 Email, Office 365 Calendar and the Microsoft People API. All of these integrations are simple to setup - they just take a couple of minutes! All that is required is for an admin user of the tenant to provide authorisation to Polinode by clicking a button, i.e. oAuth approval.
For the Teams integration, Polinode will then receive real time data on collaboration between employees that is taking place on the Teams platform. By default this includes all posts in public channels as well as the replies to and interactions with those posts. We have also included the option of enabling the integration for private DM’s as well, i.e. this is configurable. Importantly, Polinode does not store or analyze any content, just the metadata of communication between individuals.
Our Slack integration works in a very similar fashion - an admin user for the Slack tenant provides Polinode with permission to access message data. By default this includes posts, replies and interactions in public channels but can also include private DM’s as well if desired. Our Slack integration will also collect historical communication data as well.
Can We Combine Data?
Yes! This is one of the most exciting parts of the new integrations. You can setup multiple integrations at the same time, for example our Office 365 Email integration as well as our new Microsoft Teams integration, and then run a query to produce a resulting network that includes say both Teams data and Email data on the same network. This is true for any and all of the integrations - you can combine them in any way you like! The screenshot below shows an example of combining Email and Teams data together where we have sized the interactions by total interactions across both data sources.
Can We Limit and Filter Data?
Yes, you can limit the collection of data to any Azure Active Directory Group or Groups. You can also generate networks for analysis for a particular group and/or for a particular time period. It’s possible to generate multiple networks across different time periods, for example the last three months as well as the three months prior to that so that you can compare periods. We have designed both the data collection as well as the analysis piece with a great deal of flexibility in mind...but still making sure it’s intuitive and easy to use.
Anything Else that We Should Know?
Well there is another new feature that we have snuck in at the same time that we think is quite important as well - optionally we are now also able to collect data on the formal reporting relationships at the same time. If an organisation has the “reports to” data in their Office 365 tenant we can import that data into Polinode so that you can analyse the formal networks alongside the informal networks.
How Can I Learn More?
If you would like a live demo or to learn more please send us an email at info@polinode.com. We’d love to walk you through the integrations and answer your questions!