Imagine walking into your office in 2025. Instead of starting the day with emails piling up or data entry tasks waiting for you, an AI agent has already handled these. It’s sorted your priorities, analyzed market trends, and even prepped a client presentation with actionable insights.

Digital First Australia is pleased to announce that one of our esteemed clients, Barnardos Australia, has been recognised with the prestigious "Best Intranet Project for Non-Profit" award by Powell Software. We have had the privilege of partnering with Barnardos Australia for several years, and their intranet journey is indeed commendable.

Excellent customer experiences encourage your customers to purchase your products, be repeat customers, and recommend your brand. It keeps your brand prominent, helps maintain ongoing relationships, and fuels emotional connections, which is especially important in between purchases. So how do we live up to customers’ expectations, especially in the digital-first sales reality of today? Read on for insights into understanding today’s customer, the current sales landscape, what Microsoft’s research is showing, and how we can help deliver a connected sales and marketing approach that work for your organisation.

Digital First Australia are proud to announce that we have been awarded the Valo APAC Partner of the Year 2022.

Digital transformation is not a new requirement for business leaders, but the pandemic has boosted the urgency as companies rush to improve agility, speed, and data-driven decision-making.

The cloud has become an important starting point for companies transitioning to an agile structure. Many leaders are eager to reorganizing their business plans to include a hybrid cloud

Global youth leaders from Special Olympics collaborated using Microsoft Teams to help develop a transportation app. With Teams, Grace and Jack were able to make progress on their important project despite the limitations posed by Covid-19 stay at home orders.

Toyota Motor North America had been running Skype for Business on Azure. When Microsoft phased out those datacenters, TMNA moved to Teams. The switch to Teams Only included a superior audio conferencing and calling experience, including Teams Phone for external calls.

Microsoft will be updating the Azure AD and Microsoft 365 login experience with new Company Branding capabilities. You can apply your company’s brand guidance to authentication experiences with pre-defined templates.

Britax Romer designs delivers products to retailers across Germany and Britain—and its retailers expect comprehensive, real-time digital selling solutions.

Microsoft are introducing three new SharePoint team site templates dedicated to helping you create sites for your IT helpdesk, crisis communication team, and new employee onboarding team.

As people spent more time outdoors during COVID-19, Kent Water Sports experienced a huge spike in product demand for its outdoor water and snow activities equipment.

Microsoft are adding the ability to create private drafts for pages and news posts.

Rehiring for key positions is an expensive inconvenience that most companies want to avoid: employee retention is far more preferable. But how do you stop your best people from quitting?

What new Digital Workplace trends are dominating in 2022? What features should you be looking for to ensure your business is future-ready?

As leaders puzzle over how to make hybrid work actually work, big questions loom such as what is the role of the office?

Find out what benefits a multilingual intranet can have for your business

Teamwork, collaboration, communication and applications are the keywords that come to mind when we discuss the current digital workplace. These words also describe the key benefits of Microsoft Teams.

Learn how to manage projects and tasks in Microsoft Teams with the Planner and Projects app.

Spread some virtual joy to your employees by using the Starbucks app within Microsoft Teams.

Our work meetings are looking a little different nowadays aren't they? Microsoft Teams has a new Q&A feature that will allow a more interactive virtual meeting for whatever requirement your meetings need.

Learn more about the presenting features in Microsoft Teams that make working remotely as effective as working in-person.

It's a well known fact that app-switching can result in a loss of productivity for employees. To combat this in the digitalworkplace, Valo have made it possible for content editors to cnect a news article to a Microsoft Team and a channel.

Digital First are the proud winners of the Valo APAC Partner of the Year Award and the Valo APAC Marketing Master Award for 2021.

The workplace changes have seen businesses really assess what technology they are using to empower their employees to work at their smarter wherever they are. This assessment has naturally left many to question which Office 365 version is right for them.

Microsoft's Metaverse is here but what exactly is it?

The hybrid work culture will remain, and Microsoft Teams offers employees the choice and flexibility to assist with this transition to hybrid working.

Now that we are fully vaccinated and able to return to our offices the question for many businesses at the moment is, are we ready for hybrid working?

Can everyone see my screen? How many times have we all asked that question? Read this article and learn how to share your screen during a Teams meeting with confidence.

This blog post is a simple and helpful guide on how you can create a Microsoft List as a tab within a Microsoft Teams channel and how to create Microsoft Lists from this step.  

Predefined templates help to address crucial business processes with pre-configured layouts that include columns, colour formatting, and data structure. Choosing to begin with a template is a quick and easy way to build your first Microsoft List up.

See how the City of Houston, Texas is using digital transformation to actively prepare for an increase of three million people during the next twelve to fifteen years.

With Digital Workplaces spending more and more time in virtual meetings it is important that teams stay as focussed and productive as they can be during online scheduled time together just like they would in real-time scheduled physical meetings.

Find out how to record your meetings within Microsoft Teams to have as an online record of virtual collaboration.

Discover the power of automated processes and personalised solutions with Microsoft Dynamics 365.

A helpful guide on how to create a document library within a SharePoint site.

To eliminate noise interruptions, Microsoft Teams offers a noise suppression feature for the Teams desktop app to help keep our meetings focussed by suppressing this inevitable distraction. 

How to add a SharePoint document library directly into a Microsoft Teams channel.

Whether you are working from home or hybrid working, cyber attacks have become a sudden cause of concern for many.

Keeping focus within our meetings as we work remotely has never been more important and Microsoft Teams has unique features that help eliminate distractions.

WorkLab: Microsoft’s new podcast discussing the hybrid work conundrum.

Choosing the best Office 365 version for your needs can be daunting. Loads of information online available on the different benefits and features of each 0365 can make the selection process time consuming and challenging for many.  

It can be difficult to coordinate collaboration within your team especially if you are using older methods of communication such as email which can sometimes be missed and ignored during our busy working days. 

For one winery in Italy, Microsoft Teams has provided a solution in response to the unexpected global pandemic.

This video is a quick introduction to low-code capabilities and how Microsoft Power Apps uses this technology to empower businesses to create innovative apps. Discover how to reduce inefficiencies and solve business challenges by quickly and easily creating custom applications.

While Power BI has excellent connectors to Dynamics 365 products, it fails in that its very slow to run report queries over large entities containing your data. Therefore, a data warehouse is required to really optimise your data for reporting.

Microsoft have released a Premium Per User license SKU. This means instead of paying more than $6000 per month for premium licensing, you pay only $25 per user, per premium license, per month

The ECE loads your dataflow table data into a SQL-based cache inside the Power BI Service

Which Warehouse has the best architecture? What’s the best approach that conforms to Microsoft best practices? All architects should be future-proofing their designs, not just aiming to meet business requirements.

The primary objective of self service reporting is for employees like business executives to get the data insights they need in that moment to help drive a decision. This give them the ability to not only consume a report, but also play around with the dimensions of a report, or create a new report so it becomes a little more ad-hoc. This captures the BI dream!

Optus and Telstra have committed to ‘free COVID-19 offers’ to enable customers to maintain business as usual in terms of their personal and professional lives. Good news for both employers and their employees who may have been worrying how to manage their workload.

If you’re still deciding whether or not Dataflows is a good fit for your next data warehouse project, this is a “must-have” summary of what you need to consider

Digital First Australia are proud to announce that we have been awarded the Valo APAC Partner of the Year 2020.

Digital First Australia are proud to announce that we have been awarded the Valo APAC Partner of the Year 2020.

The pandemic has shown many of us that now is the time to focus on doing business in a more streamlined and innovative way, and an intranet can help facilitate that.

How can organisations ensure they empower their people to perform to the best of their potential?

Australian businesses can now begin to consider the prospect of life after lock down and the Federal Government has released details of the 3 step plan to restart the economy and return Australians to work safely.

Microsoft Teams has been implemented in your organisation to enable communication between remote workers, but did you know it was much more powerful than that?

This forced work-from-home experience is showing us that remote working arrangements are a viable strategy for many businesses and that this is likely to be true even after the crisis is over

As organisations have been forced to evolve their operations and adapt to remote working for the long term, we look how Teams measures up to another popular cloud platform, Zoom, and which has superior functionality.

Digital First are offering a free consulting session to SMB's impacted by the coronavirus and require assistance improving their digital workplace.

Whether you’ve been a nervous nelly from the get-go or are now just realising that coronavirus (COVID-19) is going to impact each and every one of our lives in some capacity, it’s imperative at this point that we prepare ourselves for a range of socio-economic effects.

The Victorian Government will pump billions of dollars into the economy to help Victorian businesses and workers survive the devastating impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. Premier Daniel Andrews and Treasurer Tim Pallas today announced a $1.7 billion economic survival and jobs package.

The Andrews Labor Government today launched a hotline for businesses dealing with the significant challenges posed by the COVID-19 outbreak. Businesses across the state can now access information on dealing with COVID-19 by calling the Business Victoria hotline on 13 22 15

Working from home may become compulsory for many workers in the wake of the Coronavirus and it’s important to make sure you set yourself up properly, look after yourself and plan your day. Here's a few tips for those being encouraged to work from home recently: you're working from home, not Mars. Interacting with other (non-infected) people during the day is allowed, even if they're not your work colleagues.

Some quick ways a company can adopt working from home policies in the wake of Coronovirus

We’re incredibly proud of one of our Principle Consultants, Chris O’Connor, who’s about to take on a challenging cycle in memory of his beloved sister Kath who sadly passed away recently.

As we enter into 2020, Digital Transformation (DX) isn’t losing its importance as an integral part of the modern workplace.

Embrace digital transformation and be inspired to create your own adventure in the quest to reach your digital vision.

Creating a compelling customer experience is the lifeblood of a company’s brand.

Despite the benefits of fintech being consistently highlighted by experts in the financial services industry, we are still witnessing a reluctance by major players to integrate meaningful tech into their business.

The new update of Microsoft's Wunderlist has been announced this week.

A brief explanation of how we successfully managed a large corporation's financial remediation program.

This article will discover the 5 main domains to target and the 5 obstacles to overcome when a business plans to create a Digital Transformation Strategy.

Digital First attended an event in WeWork Bourke Street to learn more about Artificial Intelligence, specifically chatbots.

Still struggling with whether you should digitize your business? This article will detail the benefits of going digital, along with increasing your competitive edge.

While shares take a rollercoaster ride in this industry’s market, we don’t want to dwell the past, instead taking a forward-thinking approach to understand how those in the finance sector can change their processes to rebuild consumer trust.

You’ve clicked on this article because you have a CRM system already in place but it’s just not performing as well as you thought it should. Do not fret, Digital First are here to help. We’ll walk you through the 7 steps to creating a CRM strategy for your business.

The MS Inspire 2019 conference held in Las Vegas last week has encouraged us to look beyond just celebrating the success of Word, and explore what else is on the horizon for the tech trendsetter.

Amongst terms such as ‘Chatbots’ and ‘Voice Automation’, one trend you probably heard being thrown around a lot this year was “Digital Transformation.” Yet now, it’s July, and you haven’t really ‘transformed’ anything, except clearing out a few files from your desktop.

We researched how consumers are spending their time online and the data points to a willingness to pay more for a personalised product.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) will launch a pilot scheme on July 1, 2019 with the big 4 banks to test these open banking systems.

The Royal Commission into the Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry has identified and exposed many examples of major non-compliance across the entire industry in Australia.

The popularity of Microservices is disrupting operational landscapes in the digital world, and with the growth and evolution of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions set to continue, we are seeing a mass exodus away from old monolithic models.

Untangle complex processes and transform business process applications across your entire organisation.

Microsoft Office 365 delivers the power of cloud productivity to businesses of all sizes, helping save time, money, and free up valued resources.

It’s one of the newest additions to the Microsoft 365 group; Microsoft Flow is a cloud-based software tool that creates and automates workflows to be sent within a team, either via email or text.

I recently attended a conference with business leaders from across Australia from all sectors and all shapes and sizes, I found that we were often having the same conversations and thought it would be useful to share a few principles that we try to adopt with clients at Digital First.

Currently sitting at #1 in the Inc. 5000 rankings of the fastest-growing U.S. private companies, that is valued at $116 million USD is Loot Crate, a subscription box company that appeals to our inner 'gamers and nerds.' So how have Loot Crate become so successful?

This article will discuss how NASCAR overcame their logistics issues faced for running each event by using Microsoft Office 365 and the associated products.

There are four key technologies used by businesses worldwide. We have created a handy list that details each of their purpose and what problems they solve.

Whether your goal is getting more blog subscribers, demo requests, direct sales, or simply increasing brand awareness, ranking on the first page of Google is a tremendous achievement, and a key part of any SEO plan.

Researchers at the University of Washington have produced a photo-realistic former US President Barack Obama.

Mark Zuckerberg, the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, was under scrutiny this week as he spent two days testifying to the US Congress, regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal where over 87 million users had their data leaked.

On the 12th of March, Microsoft Teams celebrated their first birthday and how far they’ve come since their launch. In such a short time, they have managed to evolve into a global system that provides new capabilities for each customer.

Digital First aren’t a one-sided organisation and we love to analyse both sides of the story before we make our opinion. However, the research into Juicero is an exception. Let’s find out why…

The evolution of marketing will be discussed and how companies today are still using old techniques, but with a modern twist.

We all know customer service is important to any business, however expectations have risen, and what can cover these expectations?

On Friday the 19th of January Digital First decided to take advantage of being based in Melbourne by attending the Australian Open 2018. It was a very hot day, 42°C/ 107°F to be exact! So, we spent the morning and early afternoon in the much-needed shade, hydrating with water and maybe some beers….

The Hackett Group conducted a study to investigate this further; Analytics: Laying the Foundation for Supply Chain Digital Transformation. The study stated that making analytics the top priority for each business strategy is key for 2018, but how can this be implemented?

The French company, Netatmo, who make ‘smart-homes’ through the creation of specialised household products; have released a chatbot on Facebook Messenger to enable another way to control this technology.

Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center is currently testing a self-driving car in Pittsburgh, USA. Its purpose is to primarily test the automatic driving capabilities, as well as collecting valuable data using: lasers, camera and radars.

The music publisher; Wixen Music Publishing, Inc. who represents artists like; Audioslave, The Doors, Sonny & Cher, The Beach Boys and Missy Elliott are suing Spotify for $1.6 billion due to a vast copyright infringement.

State surveillance, what is it? Why is it needed? This article will discuss and compare the bills for surveillance in the UK and Germany. It will explore the benefits and the drawbacks of having an entire population being watched.

LEGO are releasing the app LEGO AR-Studio very soon and it touches on the previous worldwide phenomena; Pokémon Go. Users will point their phones at a table or floor and LEGO creations will appear, all in the quest to locate the golden bricks.

On Friday, the 1st of December, the world's largest lithium-ion battery was launched in South Australia.

An online post recently published by theconversation.com asked a very interesting question; How can a digital system authenticate an analog human’s identity? This article will discuss the past, the present and the future of verification and how secure the processes are.

Earlier this week, TechCrunch tweeted an article relating to YouTube Kids and how inappropriate videos are being watched by children.This article will discuss what content is filtering through, how this is happening and what is being done to fix this.

Today the WeWork offices in Bourke Street, Melbourne, were visited by the Minister for Innovation and the Digital Economy, Philip Dalidakis.

On the 10th of October 2017, BPI Network tweeted “Is the main driver for #DigitalTransformation competitive threats rather than a desire to innovate?”

This article will explore the meaning behind Digital Disruption; how this is currently operating in organisations and why it ties into digital transformation for business.

On the 23rd of October 2017, Christine Boursin tweeted ‘#AI needs #Data, #BigData needs a #Strategy’. This article will define the term ‘AI’ and what benefits will it enable for a business if they use this new technology.

Digital Transformation is taking the world by storm in many ways and the most recent technology that has got everyone talking is, Virtual and Augmented Reality. This article will define each of these, providing their benefits and drawbacks, as well as their purpose in the future.

It's 2017 and it is a time of Digital Transformation. However, for a business to find a place in the new ‘Super Smart Society’ they must first overcome the ‘Five Walls’ that hinder this.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is fast becoming the hot topic for businesses as it combines existing technology with communication. This article will discuss the benefits and the drawbacks of IoT in this digital transformation climate.