The Future of Productivity: OpenFin Workspace Offers a New Way Forward

In the modern workplace, the desktop is where users spend the vast majority of their time, yet creating an environment that maximizes productivity and minimizes frustration remains an elusive task. At OpenFin, it has long been our mission to help the financial services industry navigate a fundamental challenge: Native applications provide a great user experience but are difficult to deploy, while web apps offer just the opposite. Through OpenFin OS, developers can deliver web applications that provide a native experience and convenient, intuitive workflows while eliminating many of the pain points that make traditional operating systems so difficult to build for.

In the years since our launch, the gap between what users need and what traditional operating systems can deliver has only widened. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has ushered in a new era in which work-from-anywhere is a common policy. To thrive in this changing world, enterprises must empower their employees with everything they need to be productive – not just in the form of powerful applications, but also with complementary workflow management tools.

OpenFin Workspace is our answer to these challenges. By combining a wholesale reimagination of the financial desktop with easy deployment, strong security and seamless interoperability, enterprises can ensure that no matter what the future of work looks like, their staff will be equipped to meet the moment with efficiency.

A Design of the Times

As much as the launch of Workspace is part of a long-term strategy to revolutionize the financial desktop, the finished product’s design has been significantly influenced by the events of the past 14 months. The pandemic crammed a decade’s worth of change into a single year, and it is only natural to take this into account.

The transition to work-from-anywhere was certainly jarring, but problems have persisted even after new normal set in. The average end-user experienced a 47% reduction in screen real estate, leading to cluttered desktops and sputtering workflows. Without the ability to collaborate in an office setting, many of these users were more reliant on their apps than ever before, compounding the problem.

Along with these changes, it must be acknowledged that the financial desktop came with plenty of shortcomings before the pandemic. Users were forced to shift between dozens of discrete apps in a single day – some studies suggest that up to 80% of their productive time was spent on context switching. The situation was already untenable – the prospect of long-term remote work environments simply put it into overdrive.

These realities informed the design of Workspace, which enables users to not just work from anywhere, but also work with anything. Our system is highly intuitive, with each tool performing a clear function and contributing to the overall experience. It transforms the environment but blends perfectly into the background, like a powerful AC unit. We also gave it a sleek visual profile to help distinguish it from the crowd – employees deserve to feel inspired by the technology they’re using.

Through all these considerations, we can fill a major void in financial services: a lack of user-centric solutions. Our approach enables users to take full control over their desktop experience and make the most of their setup. Put simply, we built a system that puts a smile on users’ faces – and that might be the most difficult function of all.

Out of the Shadows

As do all our products, Workspace optimizes user experience – but what does that actually look like when rubber meets the road? We offer an extensive set of unified tools to help users manage huge quantities of apps and information. The common thread is that while OpenFin once operated in the background, delivering the underlying software to enable interoperability and streamline processes, our name and products are now front-and-center.

It all starts with OpenFin Home, our digital assistant, where users can fully control their environment via a single interface and centralize tasks across all apps. Whether dealing with web or native apps, Home serves as a quick and painless launcher, saving users the trouble of scouring a crowded desktop for the right icon. In addition, search queries and other repetitive tasks can be automated, enabling users to focus on more valuable functions.

Then there’s OpenFin Browser, built solely for work. Users gain control over everything they need to get their jobs done – data, apps, tasks and more – organized for maximum productivity. Users decide exactly which tools and data flows are incorporated and leave out the inessential ones, creating a more focused experience. Browser enables data to flow seamlessly across the desktop, eliminating tedious manual processes such as data entry. It also offers maximum configurability, so users can create complex, multi-monitor setups or choose from pre-made templates.

OpenFin Notification Center is another example of how Workspace is maximizing productivity across the enterprise. Notification Center keeps all alerts, both internal and 3rd party, in one place, complete with robust prioritization capabilities and the ability to embed simple functionality in the notification itself. This way, users can resolve a notification without even opening the app from which it originated. In addition, they can customize existing notifications and create new ones. To learn more about OpenFin Notification Center, check out our recent blog post.

We also offer a Content Store, enabling firms to easily set up their own repositories of the tools and information that their employees need most. This content can be white-labeled and personalized down to the individual level, with powerful discovery capabilities so users never miss out on an item that could help them. Workspace also comes with a number of prebuilt integrations with mission-critical tools – Symphony, Bloomberg, Excel and Salesforce, to name a few – to accelerate timelines and ensure full functionality.

Of course, what we are offering is not a panacea for the numerous technology challenges faced by industry firms today. Workflow management is important, but only when combined with seamless interoperability and streamlined implementation processes can it make the maximum impact. To that end, we created and led the formation of industry standards such as FDC3 from the very start and continue to enhance OpenFin Container, which applies our user-first mentality behind the scenes.

Over one year in, the pandemic still seems to be posing new questions faster than our industry can answer them, but one thing is clear: the future of work is here today. OpenFin Workspace is your ticket to making this transition a smooth one for end-users.

Want to learn more? Get in touch.