City of Culver City

The City of Culver City, California is a 5-square-mile, urban community of approximately 41,000 residents surrounded by the City of Los Angeles. Culver City is home to the headquarters of National Public Radio West and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Culver City has approximately 720 employees and an adopted FY2021-2022 budget of $267 million.

As the webmaster of Culver City for more than 15 years, Anissa Di Vincente was part of the team that redesigned the city’s website to ensure that residents and businesses could accomplish more tasks online. The focus of the redesign was to create a website that made sense for citizens, business users and staff.

In terms of the city’s staff members, Di Vincente knew that she needed a smarter way to get the right content to the right users at the right times within their SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) applications.

However, the solution Di Vincente was using only offered that contextual help for SharePoint Online, not Microsoft 365. Not only that, but the product was very limited in what it could do as it didn’t let her customize any of its features.

“It was very limited . . . as you only got what they gave you and that was it,” she said. “The platform was not user friendly in terms of administration and it was only good for SharePoint, not Office 365.”

What Di Vincente wanted was a solution that allowed her to provide users with contextual help at the moment of need and also let her do some customizations to meet the requirements of the organization. Di Vincente knew that providing employees with contextual information and help when and where they needed it would enable them to be more productive since they wouldn’t have to spend time searching for that information.

Even though Di Vincente understood that the contextual tool she was using had its limitations, she really wasn’t looking for a replacement. At least not until she found out about VisualSP.

“I was at a Microsoft conference and VisualSP was there,” she noted. “And when I learned about the product and what I could do with the product, not just what it could do for me, I knew we had to have it.”

So when she returned to the office, she sang the praises of VisualSP to Culver City’s chief technology officer, explaining that it would give her editing capability, the ability to create her own custom help items and the flexibility to customize the solution. And the fact that VisualSP supported all the products in the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, not just SharePoint, was a huge selling point.

“I told the CTO that when the subscription on our current tool ended, we needed to replace it with VisualSP,” Di Vincente said.

The CTO agreed and Culver City implemented VisualSP in 2018.

With VisualSP, Di Vincente’s users can now get the contextual help they need with a simple click of a button. And she said being able to display help items based on the sections of the applications they’re using simplifies the help process.

“I can also create my own help items as needed, create or incorporate help items into a SharePoint widget and make my own walk-throughs,” she said. “This software is so customizable and flexible that you can do pretty much anything you need with it.”

Di Vincente noted that her experience with VisualSP just keeps getting better and better. For one thing, she said that VisualSP really works on customer satisfaction because they want your company to succeed with its solution.

“VisualSP has made a lot of additions to the product since I first came in,” she said. “It’s really changed from just offering contextual help to enabling us to proactively send out information that the employees need to know about, whether it’s help items or using the pop ups or banner announcements. So if we’re having a webinar or maybe some open enrollment deadlines are coming up, it’s a nice, easy way to get the staff’s attention because they don’t always notice emails or read them.”

Di Vincente and other department heads also use VisualSP to promote various internal programs. For example, in 2021 the city strengthened its polystyrene ban to include a ban on single-use plastic water bottles at city facilities that would take effect in September of that year.

In August, a public works manager sent emails to alert employees to a “lunch and learn” online workshop she was holding to discuss the ban. Only two or three people showed up, including Di Vincente, who decided to work with the public works manager to attract more employees to the next workshop using VisualSP.

“I told her we would make a VisualSP pop-up announcement, which we ran for a few days,” she said. “Then right before the second workshop we ran a banner announcement and she ended up having close to 30 or 40 participants in that one. That shows that while the emails were ineffective, VisualSP was able to get the attention of the employees.”

The features and value of VisualSP were far greater than the other contextual product the city was using and Di Vincente said that the city would have been wasting money if it didn’t make the switch. And although the price for VisualSP was highly competitive, it was the flexibility the VisualSP platform offered that won Di Vincente and her colleagues over.

“Our last platform was only for SharePoint where VisualSP is for all of Office 365 and can also be used for any web-based application,” Di Vincente said. “The value of having one product for use with multiple applications and that is fully customizable was a no-brainer for wanting to make the switch.”

And Di Vincente is thrilled that she isn’t receiving as many phone calls and emails from employees looking for information about one topic or another relating to SharePoint or Microsoft 365. With VisualSP, Di Vincente can send users directly to the VisualSP help tab to get that information, which is a big time saver.

Di Vincente said that VisualSP’s customer service has also been amazing. She said that representatives of her previous product never reached out to her to ask how she was doing with their product or keep her informed about product updates. VisualSP reps, however, ensure that they keep her updated, and they also ask for her input about their product.

In addition, VisualSP offers monthly customer roundtables where they demonstrate new updates and get feedback from customers on what they would like added to the product or the improvements they’d like to see, she said.

Di Vincente also noted that VisualSP offers monthly webinars so users can learn more about various applications or user functions. Recently, the company added free monthly account reviews where they go over your VisualSP stats and work with you to reach your goals, she said.

Di Vincente has talked to her coworkers who manage other systems, including Accela, the city’s permitting system and Munis, its finance system, about implementing VisualSP. Those coworkers agree that being able to have that contextual help in those systems will be really beneficial for their users, especially first-time users.

“My coworkers are kind of excited to be able to create those help items,” she said. “And I love the idea of having it everywhere. In the sense that then I can also use it with our staff who may not be on SharePoint. And I think overall, it’s going to really help citywide because for all our applications, we’ll have one product that we can all use to get all [employees] all the information they need.”

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