SP Marketplace
Out-of-the-box SharePoint Solutions for an Integrated Digital Workplace

The IT structures of a new business often grow organically, with systems added in isolation, department-by-department, to meet immediate needs. By the time the business reaches the small-to-medium enterprise level, productivity often drains down through the chaotic mix. “Employees of customers have told us, ‘It’s harder to do business inside my organization than outside,’” relates Darrell Trimble, CEO of SP Marketplace. “Company news, events and announcements are lost in a stream of email, and employees end up carrying around notebooks with all the different logins to the applications they need to do their job.”

Not only productivity suffers. Operating in such an environment is costly, from the additional time to onboard employees to the periodic training required as new software versions roll out. Moving a structure with 30, 40, even 50 or more applications to the cloud or adding mobile capabilities can be an insurmountable challenge in the complex IT infrastructure

Helping organizations overcome such challenges, SP Marketplace offers SP Digital Workplace Solutions, which provides out-of-the-box Operational Portals and applications that transforms SharePoint and Office 365, to create a true Digital Workplace where employees can get work done and access information and internal services through an Intranet Portal structure with a common user experience.

Trimble sees two main trends in the Digital Workplace. One is the evolution of SharePoint itself, which has long provided centralized document storage and team sites, but is now becoming a true Intranet—not just a homepage for company news, but a portal structure providing a Digital Workplace with a consistent, common user experience across the organization. Another is the move from SharePoint on-site to SharePoint online. “With SP Digital Workplace Solutions, we turn SharePoint into an organizational hub,” explains Trimble.

SP Marketplace’s portal solutions provide each department with its own easy-to-use Operational Portal and a consistent user experience. "The staff needing to provide internal services like HR, IT, and facilities management are pure overhead,” Trimble points out.

We build all our solutions using SharePoint and Office 365 components much as you would with a set of Lego blocks

“The more productive they can be, and the more automated those services can be, the lower the costs to the organization. Employee self-service is enabled through MyHR, MyIT departmental service portals.”

Trimble takes great pride in the fact that all of SP Marketplace’s solutions are 100 percent no-code customizable, especially since customers can choose the modules that are right for them. “We build all our out-of-the-box solutions using SharePoint and Office 365 components much as you would with a set of Lego blocks.” Power users at the customer level can then easily customize further through the SharePoint web interface.

SP Marketplace also solves the problem of stale Intranet content with dynamic connections to its department portals. Organizational activities automatically generate new content—the hiring of a new employee or the acquisition of a new customer is pushed from the HR or CRM portal which becomes news in the Intranet. Departments can also publish organizational announcements, news, and events on their own Operational Portals, such as HR announcing a new benefit, and push it to the Intranet.

Today, SP Marketplace is reconstructing its workplace solutions to take advantage of Microsoft’s evolution of SharePoint to become a seamless and transparent element of Office 365. The new platform, SP Digital Workplace Solutions will be available in the second half of 2017. “Our products are very pragmatic, not over-engineered, full-featured, yet simple,” concludes Trimble. “Because they are 100 percent customizable, they grow with our customers. A solution we implemented two years ago won’t look the same today.”