Overview of Lanteria SharePoint Products for SharePoint by Joel Oleson

This product overview was written by Joel Oleson for the benefit of both Lanteria and the SharePoint and Office 365 community to provide awareness and further information on products and solutions that help with adoption of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Joel Oleson is a top SharePoint and Office365 influencer that enjoys seeing solutions that address technical product gaps and further address business problems and promote business productivity.

Every organization has a human resources department. Every company struggles with determining which software to use for acquiring, strengthening, and managing those valuable resources. From recruiting to learning management needs to core HR documents and forms around onboarding and succession planning, each one of these areas could be a different system for your Human Resource Management System (HRMS) needs. It’s not a challenge to realize that human resources is key to an organization; employees are the center of the organization and, in most cases, the most valuable assets. In this agile world we live in, it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with variety of different HR platforms including learning management systems (LMS), Recruiting, Performance Management, Employee Onboarding, Employee Portals, and so on… Many departments continue to keep their business policies, and teams manage their documents and resources in SharePoint sites. Many even keep key employee data in special HR sites. In the buy verses build choice we all face when considering any product, this solution comes a long way in providing common business processes that companies need for managing their HRMS, which can simplify the decision of a growing business. In this Product Overview you’ll see a variety of different modules and see a small piece of this large HR investment from Lanteria. If this is an area you are in need, I recommend spending time on their website and seeing a demo for yourself.

I recently spent time with the Lanteria team and was impressed by their great progress. I had a chance to review their solution a couple of years ago. It has come a long way with many new modules including reporting, finance, budgeting, training, and more.

One thing that is clear is the focus on the various roles needed for effective HR solutions. Effective interfaces for the employee, the manager(s), and the HR teams all providing insights that can provide for happy employees, more effective managers, and the reports the HR team needs to succeed in making the right choices at every step of the way, from recruiting to onboarding to learning and performance management to final succession planning.

Lanteria HR is a SharePoint based HR and Talent Management solution, which facilitates and automates a company’s entire HR management cycle. The modules organize centralized storage of all HR information, including training, performance, leave and so on for each employee and organization as a whole. The solution provides both employee self-service as well as comprehensive HR Management and reporting in one place.

Human Resources

Lanteria HR management system provides 7 modules for operating different HR processes:

• Core HR
• Time and Attendance
• Recruiting and Applicant tracking
• Performance
• Learning management
• Self Service Portals
• Report Center

Some thoughts on Lanteria’s Approach

The Lanteria approach of “why not take advantage of your platform investment” is a breath of fresh air for many who have both become familiar with SharePoint capabilities. Adoption by the business of SharePoint continue to be a challenge, for others it’s integrating existing business process with the popular collaboration platform. When you’re using dozens of tools to get your work done, it’s a challenge to gain the necessary insights and analysis that is possible in simple out of the box reporting.

Figure 1: HR Performance Dashboard

Employee Tools

The Learning Management Catalog provides employee assessment in a company by planning and delivering targeted training programs. Adding your own videos, trainings, and documents is simple. Light weight workflows capture the essentials to see employee progress and capture feedback.

Figure 2: Lanteria Learning Management Solution – Learning Catalog

Core HR includes org charts to simplify employee lookup and employee information with only a few clicks. Both management and HR can see additional information that assists in the management of the entire company’s hierarchal structure, and allows one to define the relationships between the various departments, teams, employees, and their leaders within the organization.

Figure 3: Lanteria Core HR Org Chart – Employee Chart and Employee Details

Time and Attendance

The Time and Attendance module provides you with the proper tools that help set up the time available for employees, including holidays, sick time and vacation time. It also includes company’s absence policies, tracks employee leave records, and can include details such as time spent on various projects and activities.

Figure 4: Lanteria Time and Attendance – My Absenses

Performance Management

The Performance module streamlines the management of employee performance and appraisal processes, making it quicker and easier to track, quantify, and rate productivity for each employee.

Figure 5: Lanteria HR Performance – Performance Review Form

Goal Management

Employees and managers add goals and track progress providing transparency that makes review time much more effective and time well spent focused on the goals of the team and of the company. Reporting and analysis in this module, as well as many others, is rolled up for HR as you’ll see in the dashboards.

Figure 6: Performance: Goal Management Dashboard

Recruiting

The Recruiting module is an HR software that unifies and automates the entire recruitment process to ensure that you get the right people onboard. With Vacancy Tracker as part of the Recruiting module, managers can provide needs, and HR can more effectively staff and work with managers to find the resources with transparency with simple dates, roles, locations, and organizational information. This streamlines the hiring process.

Figure 7: Lanteria HR Recruiting: Job Openings

Once interviewed, all data can be collected in a single place for the most effective decision making and review cycle.

Figure 8: Lanteria HR Recruiting: Applicant Tracking

Supported Platforms:

The solution is available on SharePoint 2013-2016 as an install on your on premises farm as a solution. It also is available as a hosted SAAS solution and integration with Office 365.

No additional hardware is required. Licensing of Lanteria is based on the number of employees and the modules you are interested in purchasing.

Demo’s and free trials are available, as well as many more videos and screenshots on the Lanteria website.

Conclusion

Lanteria has done an effective job of focusing on three distinct audiences, the core HR function, the employee and the manager. This audience-based approach to usability including work streams, business processing, and reporting has really made the solution come together. Realistically I do see it as a great example of a solution. In the real world many will find they already have X Y or Z that’s part of this solution. Maybe you already have something for budgets, or something for performance management or LMS. The flexibility here of choosing the modules you need definitely makes that a better sale, but also in the extensibility and integration of what you get. The solution is designed to be the core solution or can be integrated with other information stores. As a modular solution where you can add what you need and only pay for what solutions you’re interested in, it provides purposeful solutions. The purpose is simply to work together as a solid team, increase performance and efficiency and achieve company goals.

I once worked at a company where employee profiles where in PeopleSoft and employee performance data and salary and compensation was in Oracle, but the users and HR documents and processes were in SharePoint. Having gone down the build vs. buy road on this one, we already had a lot of the platform decisions already made, but hand coding a single module from forms, workflows to lists and database integration in SharePoint was extremely timely and expensive and to say the least, the maintenance, upgrade and upkeep will plague them for many years. While it was great to show the solution as fully in SharePoint with backend Oracle and PeopleSoft integration, the resources we could have saved by using an off the shelf solution like Lanteria HR could have saved us a ton of time and money.

Managing employees can be one of the biggest tasks of a company, since they represent it and if they aren’t happy, clients will know it. Through an HRMS, the Human Resources department has a better view of the current heartbeat in the company, as well as being able to better connect with and reach out to employees with their needs over time, or as they evolve through their position in the company.

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