Unlock the Power of your Expertise. In a competitive fast-paced environment having immediate access to the right expertise can make all the difference. In this article we will present an overview to the Atlas Expertise Directory.
Article Contents:
Implementation Details and Options on Data Integration
Overview
Atlas's innovative solution transforms the way you connect with specialists within your organization. Provided from within our Atlas Intelligent Knowledge Platform, it is designed to streamline the process of finding and connecting with experts, our solution will ensure you have the right knowledge at your fingertips when you need it most, empowering your team to deliver exceptional results.
Comprehensive Expertise Profiles: A detailed directory can be built to aggregate information such as name, title, role, location, contact information, role, experience, specialisms, assistants, resumes and even biography pages or external links. Brought to life via 'profile cards', you will have a complete view of the expertise available within your firm that's easily accessible and consumable.
Effortless Search and Discovery: With our intuitive search functionality, finding the right expert is quick and easy. Whether you need a specialist in intellectual property, corporate law, or any other legal field, Atlas Expertise helps you locate the correct match in seconds. Compatibility with Atlas Intelligent Knowledge Studio can also leverage AI!
Simplifies and Enhances Collaboration: By making expertise easily accessible, our directory fosters better collaboration and knowledge sharing across your firm. This leads to more efficient problem-solving and improved outcomes across your projects, matters, bids, or standard operations, improving teamwork and accelerating results
Customizable and Scalable: Atlas is designed to grow with your firm. Customize the directory to fit your specific needs and scale it as your teams, offices or service offerings expands, ensuring it remains a valuable resource for years to come.
Secure and Reliable: We understand the importance of data security when it comes to people data. Our platform is built with robust security measures to protect your sensitive information, giving you peace of mind, however you can leverage all Microsoft security features you might require at any point.
Transform Your Firm's Knowledge Management. Don't let valuable expertise go untapped. Empower your team and revolutionize the way you manage and leverage knowledge within your firm. Read more on our website or view the interactive demo on this page.
We also have a series of blogs on our website on the Expertise Solution and native Microsoft 365 employee directory too:
Solution Details
User experience
- Similar experience to current Atlas (In Focus) Search
- Fully configurable with search box, filtering, and possibility for more complex KQL (Query) based pre-configured search experiences. These can be built into a centralized page or the Expert directory content can be dynamic and appear where you need it to
- No end-user training required. Purposeful, clean and straight forward UI means anybody can use the Expertise directory effectively
Management experience
- Minimize reliance on 3rd party integrations
- Allows for a fully managed approach, either manual or automated
- Allows for augmentation of data (i.e. adding to the people data fields that are already stored against the User Profile)
- Reduce complexity in setting up new firmwide people experiences with continued support from ClearPeople consultants
- Different ways to query: People picker, Taxonomy picker, KQL query search
- Card designs: customizable card designs can be extended and expanded, with custom style sheets for more attractive formatting. Prioritize the information which is shown first and ensure it uses the latest UX design best practices and trends
- Possibility to have multiple In Focus card designs to show differing information depending on what the user is looking to search for
Admin and Backend
- Does not increase deployment complexity
- Multiple ways to bring in Expertise data:
- Leverage OOTB integrations against Active Directory people profile attributes
- Custom configuration utilising an OOTB SharePoint list with regular data imports and refreshes from data source
- More advanced integration through SmartHub Connectors for direct database fetch and display
Implementation Process
Every firm's knowledge and expertise needs are unique. There are many profile and expertise attributes our clients share, but every solution is distinctive and inimitable. Our implementation process ensures that your firm's specific terminologies, sectors, jurisdictions, and practice areas are fully integrated into the expertise directory, and the attributes you need to store and display are built in the correct manner for ease of both build and ongoing management.
1. Initial Consultation - We begin with a comprehensive consultation to understand your firm's unique requirements. This discovery period includes a comprehensive demo of the Expertise solution functionality, identification of key knowledge attributes used within your firm, and a discussion to tease out and baseline any specific requirements your stakeholders are interested in delivering.
2. Customization and Configuration - Based on the initial consultation, we build and configure the expertise directory cards to align with your firm's specific needs utilizing best practices and our wealth of relevant experience. This involves setting up profile attributes such as full name, email, languages, skills, role, title, manager, assistants, committee membership, resumes/biographies, previous experience, location, and specialisms. But there may be many more fields you would like to leverage.
3. Data Integration - Your team will need to understand how to regularly extract expertise data for integration or build additional user profile attributes to leverage out-of-the-box integration in M365, but we will be on hand to help advise on these processes. This helps ensure a seamless transition and minimizes disruption to your operations.
4. User Training - To maximize the benefits of the expertise directory, we provide comprehensive training. This includes hands-on sessions and detailed documentation to ensure everyone is comfortable using and managing the new system.
5. Testing and Feedback - Before the final rollout, we conduct thorough testing to ensure the system meets your expectations and all requirements in-scope have been met. We gather feedback from key stakeholders and make necessary adjustments to ensure the Expert Directory functions flawlessly.
6. Deployment and Support - Once the system is fully tested and approved, our support team remains available to assist with any issues and provide ongoing support, advice and maintenance.
7. Continuous Improvement - We believe in continuous improvement and regularly reviews of the directory based on user feedback and evolving industry standards, planning and actioning imprvoements or new features or columns as needed. This ensures your firm always has access to the most up-to-date and relevant expertise.
Implementation Details and Options on Data Integration
As always, diving into the more granular details of an implementation is sometimes an in-depth, time consuming or technical process for the reader. To make this information more easily consumable, we have broken down the three available data integration options below, along with general considerations. More technical information on processes is available upon request. We will run through and demo all the options in our consulting sessions so your team have full insight and comprehension as to how they can proceed.
1. OOTB integration - AAD Attributes Sync to SharePoint Profiles
The first option is to leverage existing User Profiles and create new Azure Entra ID (Active Directory, AD) or SharePoint attributes to house your new expertise fields. This takes advantage of the existing attributes which will exist in your AD such as Names, job title, location, department, email, phone number, manager, etc. You can create up to 15 custom attributes but are limited to the formats provided. One important limitation is that multiple choice values are not supported in AD. AD syncs nightly to SharePoint profiles in m365 as standard. You can configure new fields in AD, which in turn could be fed from HRIS or HR process, or create the new fields directly into the SharePoint profile by script.
Once new expertise attributes are created against the user profile in AD, the client IT team will need to configure the sync between Entra ID and m365/SharePoint to bring in these new fields and ensure there is a new corresponding profile attribute field in SharePoint being populated by the sync. The process will not create new fields automatically. These profile attributes can then be pulled into Search and mapped to a Managed Property (RefinableString, RefinableDate, etc) for querying, sorting and filtering.
Some profile attributes already exist in SharePoint profiles and AD but are not synced (such as Assistant). Configuring the sync is done via PowerShell Script.
In Focus Profile Cards can then be edited and formatted to show the appropriate fields in the correct way.
The key benefit here is the out-of-the-box sync and existing data which is managed by IT at source and you can keep using the actual user profiles as the content type displayed. However, although this is a simpler approach there are some restrictions and limitations in the type and amount of data you can use, so this may not be appropriate for more complex iterations of Expertise solution. Only IT Administrators can manage the source of the data themselves - however this source profile data is often synced to Entra ID (AAD) from an HRIS or HR process. Of course, there is a dependency on the Entra ID profile information to be accurate - sometimes it needs to be revisited as part of this set-up process.
For more information on the standard M365 People Directory functionality, please check the ClearPeople Blog posts linked towards the top of this article.
2. Atlas List Integration - Feed an Atlas list with exported data against a new profile content type via custom sync
Building a list with a new Atlas content type allows the ability to create as many 'columns' as is needed. We have seen instances where over 30 columns have been leveraged. Each columns will house a profile attribute. which becomes a 'Crawled Property' in SharePoint. These can then be mapped to a Managed Property (RefinableString, RefinableDate, etc) for querying, sorting and filtering.
It's important to note that working from a list and a new specific content type, the new profile cards and information are distinctly separate from the user profile - we are unable to merge 2x data feeds into one experience, however you can still leverage the 'Microsoft Profile fly-out card' that contains the Profile and profile information - so this is the best of both worlds.
Working from a list in Atlas allows edit permissions to be distributed to the team owning the solution so there is flexibility in administration, and the ClearPeople team can help set-up and configure the list - we cannot access your user profiles or Entra ID explained in Option 1. The list is fed and filled from an external source. This could be an HRIS, from Entra ID, other Active Directory infrastructure (hybrid, on-prem, etc) or a combination with multiple syncs from different data sources.
Because SharePoint lists are used, we can leverage most of the ootb column formats, such as; multiple choice, multiple lines of text, date, etc, but not all formats. Search works best with single line of text so we always encourage this - so instead of a Boolean field, you have a single line of text which is Yes or No. This is better than a Yes/No choice field too. Calculated columns are not supported (as the column format is technically 'calculated', rather than text or date or choice) so we often run into problems getting these columns into and out of Search in the correct format. URLs (to resume's or website biography pages) are also better in a single line of text (rather than hyperlink format).
There is a dependency on the client team to configure the export and import of the data into the list and to test accordingly. This can be done through PowerShell script or through Power Automate or Power Apps. It is not a direct integration. We advise the flows are built and run on a timer job for 'hands-off' ongoing synching.
There is important consideration for syncing from the source data, especially trying to fill against pre-set choices. If importing as text, it's important the source data is consistent so there are not differences in spelling, special characters/symbols, abbreviations, etc. As if you want to create a filter, different entries, even if they mean the same thing, will become different options and will influence the effectiveness of search.
If you are looking to leverage Atlas Termsets for information (or any other Managed Metadata), which we encourate, there's a dependency to leverage the Microsoft SharePoint REST API - this is the only way to convert flat text (the usual export format from data source) into managed metadata. This can be extremely useful if you wanted to make someone's 'Department' or 'Location' dynamic - so that their Expertise profile can appear in that Department , Location/Office/jurisdiction workspace, or Legal Specialism workspace. Again, the same data formatting dependencies apply as the source data must match the terms available. You can leverage the API to create terms on the fly should they not already exist in your Term store.
All users will need at least Read permissions (visitor Access) to the list which houses the people data.
3. Upland SmartHub - Use an Enterprise Search Connector to pass through live information from other systems and SQL databases
This is a unique combinative approach to fetch and show content from external sources.. We partner with Upland (formally BA Insight) and leverage ootb Connectors to allow direct live feeds of data to appear within Atlas through their SmartHub Connector. Not only can you connect to external sources directly but the SmartHub interface allows you to manage and integrate metadata as needed. We can query and build Search Experiences directly to this data through SmartHub.
The ootb SQL connector is also useful if you need a more complex table approach instead of a list. Having different permissions to certain fields or columns is one potential use case as some HR system data can only be exported in certain ways and if you need to manage or alter the data prior to reaching Atlas, SQL tables can do more than SharePoint lists (e.g. if certain employee information is sensitive and limited to specific audiences). Clients have used the SQL Connector with 140 rows of data in the past. Managing and processing large amounts of data like this, sometimes SQL or direct integration via a connector is more acceptable in terms of data processing and ongoing management.
General Considerations
The data for the Expertise directory must come from somewhere. That source might be owned by different teams (rather than the knowledge team which own the Expertise Directory) such as IT (AD) or HR (HRIS) so the process is on other teams to ensure the data is accurate, consistent and up to date. There may be some preliminary reviews and alignment needed.
We have spoken about data cleanliness and dependencies above - put simply, you only get out what you put in, so the quality of data sometimes needs reviewing if not used for Search in the past or is becoming outdated or mismanaged.
- There are ways to enable fields or columns to be self-serve to the user should this be a requirement for certain fields. For example, if they need to update their own biography, about me, experience, or past projects. However, this will need to be completed through a power automate or power app flow with a friendly UI, using an email address or employee ID to drive the placement of new information. Because, of course, we do not expect users to update the list themselves.
- ClearPeople cannot access AD/Entra ID, HRIS or SQLs, so cannot assist directly in exporting or configurating syncs, flows or power apps, but we can assist in building and editing lists and columns in SharePoint. We can also assist in administration of the SmartHub Connector if permissions are granted to us.
- Style sheets and HTML formatting can be in-play for data-heavy cards and experiences, but depends on front-end coding experience.
- The data for the Expertise directory must come from somewhere. That source might be owned by different teams (rather than the knowledge team which own the Expertise Directory) such as IT (AD) or HR (HRIS) so the process is on other teams to ensure the data is accurate, consistent and up to date. There may be some preliminary reviews and alignment needed.
- We have spoken about data cleanliness and dependencies above - put simply, you only get out what you put in, so the quality of data sometimes needs reviewing if not used for Search in the past or is becoming outdated or mismanaged.
- There are ways to enable fields or columns to be self-serve to the user should this be a requirement for certain fields. For example, if they need to update their own biography, about me, experience, or past projects. However, this will need to be completed through a power automate or power app flow with a friendly UI, using an email address or employee ID to drive the placement of new information. Because, of course, we do not expect users to update the list themselves.
- ClearPeople cannot access AD/Entra ID, HRIS or SQLs, so cannot assist directly in exporting or configurating syncs, flows or power apps, but we can assist in building and editing lists and columns in SharePoint. We can also assist in administration of the SmartHub Connector if permissions are granted to us.
- Style sheets and HTML formatting can be applied as required. ClearPeople can provide a "starter pack" of styles that can then be further configured as required, but does depends on having front-end coding knowledge or experience.
There are many more details, smart features, best practices and helpful design insights we could put here, but these are best seen through a live demo. During your implementation of Atlas Expertise you will see a number of options and insights but if you are interested in finding out more please get in contact with your Atlas representative now.
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