Integrations offer the opportunity to connect your digital workplace to other services and view them directly in your Igloo. Bring in a view of your Sharepoint, Slack, Google Calendars, and make that information easily accessible to members, ensuring that your Igloo is a single pane of glass to view all of your solutions. An integration strategy is vital at the start of your digital transformation, especially when thinking about what and how to migrate into your digital workplace. 

The Integration widget can be added to any Page or Space, and connected to a number of other services. Placing these widgets on Pages or Spaces lets you include additional links or articles around them, or mix them in with your existing news and items to better manage the flow of information. Using the Unified Search integration, for example, members can easily search across several file applications, or talk with their team directly in your digital workplace using the Slack integration. Today we'll look at key matters to consider when planning, implementing, and maintaining your integrations. 

Integration Strategy

Before implementing, consider what integrations you need, and the functions they'll serve for your members. Typically, we see one of three choices here: a resource-focused approach, a team-focused approach, and a combination of the two. Resource-focused strategies place integration widgets in key areas to let members access the third-party service as a whole. A Slack widget on the homepage so members can easily talk with each other or access message histories there, or a Sharepoint widget on a Page with a Folder Contents widget, letting members browse all of the files in both areas. 

A team-focused approach leverages the customization options in the Integration widget, and deploys more widgets in individual team Spaces, connected to the specific areas of those services relevant to those teams. The Unified Search widget might be focused specifically on their files, for example, or an Outlook Calendar widget might display their team calendar directly in their Space. This approach brings relevant content from third-party services directly into the areas where people work. The learning curve can be steeper, but it places information directly at their fingertips. 

Implementation

For many services, implementing each widget can be as simple as dragging it onto the Page, selecting the service, and publishing your changes. Some services require additional adjustments on their side, such as administrator approval of the integration, or creating an API connector. In the Customer Care Knowledge Base, you'll find a guide to implementing every integration offered through the widget. The guides also detail the more nuanced adjustments you can make to the widgets, such as targeting specific folders or channels, or filtering members in the org chart widgets. If there's an integration that you'd like to see, submit a request in the Product Zone, and the Product Management team will be able to review it and investigate. 

Maintenance

As always, have a maintenance plan. The biggest challenge with integrations is that they involve interactions between your digital workplace and multiple services, and if there's an issue with any part of that connection, there's an issue with all of it. The Igloo release notes include updates to the Integration widget, but changes in the third-party service, or in any service used to authenticate to it, such as your SSO provider, can interrupt that connection. Make reviewing the widgets and their companion services part of your yearly health check process, and as always, if you encounter any issues, you can reach out to Igloo Support at support@igloosoftware.com.

Integration widgets can be an essential part of seamlessly migrating your organization into Igloo, and let you retain archives or collaboration tools you maintain in other services while managing them through your digital workplace. 

If you have questions about the Igloo platform, workflows, or best practices, you can leave a comment here, or ask a question in the Community area.