Judson Althoff joined Microsoft to lead the company’s North American sales and marketing staff. It’s a lot to keep track of, to put it mildly, so he asked for regular reports from all of his teams.
The sales reports that arrived presented information in a variety of views, with metrics varying from one report to the next. It wasn’t clear how marketing made an impact on sales, and Althoff couldn’t get a clear picture of what was happening across his organization.
So he gathered up his leadership team last spring and asked a question: Why isn’t there one experience that lets me see every element of the business?
His question ultimately led to the creation of Windows Apportals, a set of mini Start screens that let users pin essential data and apps and access them in one place. Their organizational power comes from Windows 8.1’s nested file directory structure—a feature that no other mobile operating system (OS) has, says Grad Conn, U.S. Central Marketing and Operations lead at Microsoft.
Windows 8.1 provides the organizational power behind Apportals, a set of mini Start screens that are helping businesses fight app fatigue.
Althoff’s challenge—to find clarity amidst a sea of data and apps—is shared by people around the globe, no matter what their role, Conn says. The ongoing app explosion has led to app fatigue. The info we need is squirreled away somewhere within that endless scrolling tide of apps; finding it can be frustrating.
Windows 8.1 provides the key to the answer. In a madcap, six-week “sprint,” the taskforce that answered Althoff’s challenge discovered that Windows 8.1’s architecture could help businesses organize critical apps and information for virtually any role. They built an Apportal called the Sales Productivity Solution (SPS). It let Althoff quickly drill down and see everything happening across his org in one place. He demoed SPS just a few weeks later at a company event, which got people excited.
It’s not hard to see why, says Praveen Palepu, program manager lead for Marketing Operations and one of the employees who helped drive the sprint. He calls Apportals the best showcase around for Windows 8. “This is the killer app for Windows 8,” he says. “No other mobile OS can do this.”
The power of Apportals stems from their simplicity. Apportals are made up of Tile Groupings, similar to the main Windows 8 Start screen. The Tile Groupings in an Apportal are composed of “Grid Tiles.” They’re similar to Live Tiles in that they can display streaming information, but they are not repositionable by the user.
As a result, organizations can create line-of-business apps and consumer apps that are composed of collections of apps, applications, pinned links and embedded apps—all within a single Apportal. And there are no restrictions on what you can add. If it can run in Windows 8.1, it can run in an Apportal.
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