What Is Digital Employee Experience (DEX)?

Overview

We are in a very different world than we were just a few years ago. Before the pandemic, working remotely was rare in many fields. But now, attitudes have changed. Some employers realized their employees did a good job remotely without in-person supervision. Workers adjusted to the limitations of the pandemic, and many discovered that remote working improved their work/life balance. And many employees had time to ask themselves if they were truly happy in their jobs. The result is that now more than ever, employees are demanding a pleasant, supportive, and above all, flexible workplace experience. Employers are striving to become anywhere organizations and enabling their workforce to be productive remotely, no matter the circumstances.

That is what Digital Employee Experience (DEX) provides. DEX is an Omnissa solution that measures digital workspace experience, analyzes the data, helps deliver an enjoyable employee experience, and helps remediate issues that may arise. For example, you can use DEX to increase efficiency and productivity by eliminating time searching for corporate resources, handling passwords via single sign-on, nipping issues in the bud, and running remote screensharing sessions when IT support is needed. If you want to ensure your employees are satisfied with their work environment and technology experience, DEX is the solution for you.

Take a look at this introductory video to see what else DEX can do to help you provide an optimal employee experience with the flexibility employees crave, without sacrificing security, efficiency or productivity.

Now that you have a high-level overview of what DEX can do for you and your organization, read on to learn about the key features and architecture.

DEX features provide flexibility

What the recent shift to widespread remote work means for employers, IT departments, and system administrators is a greater demand for flexibility. Employees want and need the tools and technologies to be productive on multiple devices, fast and secure connectivity, and the ability to work from any location, including at home, on the road, in the office, or on the front line.

Digital Employee Experience provides such flexibility, as well as a way to measure its own success. DEX gathers information from employees and their devices, and uses that knowledge to give employees the most effective support possible for maximum productivity. This includes detecting and removing obstacles, identifying and resolving issues, smoothing pathways to employees getting the resources they need, and measuring employee sentiment to determine how well these efforts are received.

Measure employee sentiment

You can use DEX to evaluate how successfully you are delivering effective employee experience.

Keep employees productive on any device, from any location, with seamless access to the communications, tools, and workflows they need
Increase efficiency by making self-service corporate resources easily accessible to employees
Proactively send surveys after OS updates or new apps are delivered, or after an issue, such as an OS crash, to collect feedback and automate support if required

Prioritize incident impact

You can use DEX to spot incidents and issues that might impact employee productivity, and equip your helpdesk and support team to provide support for remote workers.

Nip issues in the bud with Experience Score dashboards and automated anomaly detection powered by AI and machine learning
Create automated notifications and workflows for device, app or network issues
Conduct remote screensharing sessions whenever interaction with IT is needed

Reduce time to resolution

You can use DEX to reduce the time it takes to resolve incidents and issues.

Provide remote employees with access to notifications, system updates, ability to take action on business processes, and more
Eliminate time spent searching for apps and remembering passwords by providing single sign-on and a single launch experience for all apps
Empower the service desk with device, user and experience data directly within the ITSM, versus requiring access to multiple tools and consoles
Surface anomalies to the admin before employees report an issue
Leverage machine learning to find the probable root cause of incidents

Maintain security and consistency

You can use DEX to provide a secure and consistent remote workspace on any device.

Provide consistent experiences across mobile and desktop, regardless of device management status
Provide remote workers with secure access to corporate resources, including secure virtual desktops, no matter what personal or corporate device is used

Manage Day 1 Onboarding, Day 2 Ongoing, and Offboarding

What happens on Day 1 can color a new employee’s entire experience. You can use DEX to provide a smooth onboarding experience on Day 1 of a new employee, as well as their ongoing Day 2+ experiences. And when it’s time for offboarding, DEX helps provide an exit that is secure and under control.

Keep employees engaged during onboarding by enabling them to choose the devices and tools they need, including over-the-air provisioning, auto-enrollment, secure authentication and access, personalized app catalog and home page, SSO to any app, contextual notifications with workflows and micro apps, automated tasks, and more
Ensure that critical apps and devices run smoothly day-to-day, have good Internet bandwidth, a media-rich directory with integrated collaboration, corporate communications powered by custom notifications, a personalized home page, remote control and support, secure productivity apps, and more
Facilitate offboarding if and when it comes time, with automated unenrollment processes, end access to corporate resources, wipe corporate apps and data from BYOD personal devices without touching personal data and apps, and inform former remote workers of alumni benefits, 401k roll-over, and so on

DEX architecture & components

DEX is comprised of an interlocking set of software and services that interact to provide everything you need for an effective digital workspace experience.

Deliver

The DEX solution provides the necessary tools to deliver a high-quality employee experience. This end user experience is delivered by Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, Hub Services, Workspace ONE UEM, Horizon and Omnissa Access. Working together, they provide secure access to the apps and resources employees need to be productive.

Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub

Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub is an employee-facing app for web, mobile and desktop devices. This is where both remote and on-site employees find and select the tools they need to get the job done. This includes single sign-on capabilities and a unified app catalog that supports native, web, SaaS, and virtual applications and desktops, a people search function to find colleagues, a custom home tab that can be used for an intranet or other useful sites, remote troubleshooting assistance, and more.

Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub helps you deliver virtual desktops and apps and resolve issues. Using Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, you can provide app access and corporate communications services from pre-hire, onboarding, Day One, day-to-day, and offboarding. You can empower your remote employees to access any app on any device they choose while balancing usability, security, and privacy. Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub is powered by Workspace ONE Hub Services, described below.

Workspace ONE Hub Services

Workspace ONE Hub Services is co-hosted with Omnissa Access. You can think of it as the server-side component that corresponds to the user-facing Intelligent Hub client. Remote workers use Hub—either the Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub native app or the Hub portal via a web browser—to access the features you enable in Hub Services.

For more information about Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub and Hub Services, see:

Omnissa Access

Omnissa Access is one of the core systems that form the DEX base, and it is essential for a successful employee experience. Collocated with Omnissa Access is Hub Services that enables remote workers to find and access the features they need to get their jobs done. Access can make corporate resources easily accessible to employees. More than just apps, remote employees need secure and seamless access to authentication, enrollment, entitlement, communications, workflows, notifications, system updates, virtual desktops, calendars, apps, provisioning, data, and more. At the same time as accessing these corporate resources, employees also need secure access to the Internet.

To learn more about Omnissa Access, see these resources:

Workspace ONE UEM

At the foundation of the DEX solution are the core Workspace ONE systems, of which Workspace ONE UEM is one. By working together with Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, Hub Services and Omnissa Access, UEM helps deliver an optimal end-user experience.

Workspace ONE UEM and Intelligence work together to provide telemetry-capturing capabilities from devices and applications. Telemetry data can be collected from devices that are either UEM-managed or in registered mode. The devices must be corporate-dedicated or corporate-shared, since Experience Management does not collect telemetry from BYO devices. This data can then provide vital insights for remediating any issues that arise.

Check out this document that explains how to utilize the Omnissa DEX solution on third-party managed Windows devices.

Here are other great Workspace ONE UEM resources:

Measure & analyze

To measure success, your IT team can utilize Experience Management, a feature of Workspace ONE Intelligence. Experience Management monitors device performance, connectivity, app performance, and more. Telemetry data is gathered from devices to analyze the environment and help predict potential issues. Employee sentiment is also gathered and combined with the other data to form an employee experience score with which to measure success and help maintain a high-quality employee experience.

In addition to measuring user experience, you can also use Experience Management to analyze the environment to ensure ongoing success.

Experience Management, powered by Omnissa Intelligence

At the heart of DEX lies Experience Management, the tool for measuring success in the form of user satisfaction. Built on top of Omnissa Intelligence, Experience Management monitors device performance, connectivity, app performance, and so on, and analyzes the environment to identify, predict, and mitigate potential incidents. Experience Management calculates a score to measure the success of the employee experience based on telemetry collected from devices and apps, such as connectivity, and device and app stability. You can watch this score to keep your fingers on the pulse of your on-site employees and remote workers’ experience.

You can use Experience Management to support your IT admins with telemetry collection, observability, incident analysis, and remediation capabilities.

For more information about Experience Management, see:

And to learn about Experience Management tools for Horizon, see this video.

Remediate

To remediate any issues that may arise, you are provided with an arsenal of tools, including Workspace ONE Experience Management, Intelligent Hub, Workspace ONE Assist and the ITSM Connector. The IT team can use Freestyle Orchestrator within Omnissa Intelligence to create automated remediation workflows triggered by Experience Management data. Workspace ONE Assist is available for remote, real-time remediation. And multiple employee self-service tools are included with Intelligent Hub. Your service desk team can utilize tools within the Experience Management dashboards as well, to perform root-cause analysis. In addition, surface device and user data, as well as experience analytics directly with the ITSM tool so that L1/L2 service desk personnel don’t need access to Workspace ONE UEM or Omnissa Intelligence consoles to get the job sone.

Workspace ONE Assist

Workspace ONE Assist provides remediation capabilities to address and resolve issues in real-time. Workspace ONE Assist gives you remote control over Windows, Android, macOS, Linux, and Windows Mobile devices, as well as to view iOS devices remotely. A plethora of features enable you to assist employees remotely such as connect to remote devices and troubleshoot in real-time, highlight items onscreen as you guide remote workers through tasks, service unattended frontline and kiosk devices between shifts, record remote sessions for training purposes, and much more.

To learn more about Workspace ONE Assist, see:

Workspace ONE ITSM Connector

The Workspace ONE ITSM Connector for ServiceNow provides service desk personnel with integrated access to troubleshooting and remediation actions directly from ServiceNow Incident Management or the Service Operations Workspace for a seamless workflow. The ITSM Connector brings together capabilities from multiple products, such as Workspace ONE UEM, Experience Management within Intelligence, Assist and Freestyle Orchestrator.

Once you have the ITSM Connector configured, the service desk can quickly assess employee experience metrics and perform root cause analysis using color-coded device, app and experience data points. In addition, the service desk can remotely control a device’s screen by leveraging Workspace ONE Assist to troubleshoot in real-time and perform remediation actions all from within ServiceNow without having to access the UEM or Intelligence consoles. Remediation actions include resetting a password to unlock a device, lock or find a lost or stolen device, wipe enterprise data from a decommissioned device, request the automated retrieval or logs, or reinstall a problematic application or UEM profile.

In addition, the UEM admin can automate frequently occurring support issues using scripts or Freestyle workflows and make these available to service desk teams directly within ServiceNow. So, when these issues are reported by employees, service desk personnel can resolve them with the click of a button.

To learn more about the Workspace ONE ITSM Connector, see this documentation.

Summary

To be an anywhere organization means your employee workforce can work remotely from anywhere, on any device. Now you’ve got an idea what DEX can do, the flexibility it can provide, and how to make your organization a successful anywhere organization too.

Learn more about DEX

Here are some great places to go to learn more about DEX: