Brainlitter » Meet Pear – Regroove’s Fictional Company

Meet Pear – Regroove’s Fictional Company

If you have ever attended Microsoft training in the past or worked with sample content while working within Microsoft systems, you are probably familiar with ‘Northwind Traders’, or “Contoso’. They have others of these ‘example’ or ‘fictional’ companies in fact (Volcano Coffee, World Wide Importers and Blue Yonder Airplines comes to mind).

We wanted one too

We wanted (needed) one of our own here at Regroove, for demo’ing the power of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Navo. So, we just made one up, complete with an Office 365 subscription, virtual desktops, public website, logos and a complete brand. We called it Pear (get it, Apple?), because we are cheeky that way.

Now our demo’s flow beautifully. We have a fun, fictitious company that we can use to show the power of productivity, working out loud, the capabilities of navigating a different company organization with the amazing capabilities of Navo (particularly the unique SharePoint Mega Menu, etc.), all without exposing our own internal workings or sensitive internal systems. Freedom of expression for our story telling, isolated demos for security, the works. #amazing. #smitten.

Meet Pear

At Pear Inc. we make really expensive consumer electronics that are shiny and slippery.

pearadiddle.com

Established in May 2019, Pear Inc. was created as a fictitious company to be used in demos and presentations for itgroove.  Much like Microsoft’s Contoso or Northwind Traders, Pear is a tease at Apple. The domain name, pearadiddle.com is because other variations were ridiculously expensive and a “paradiddle” is a very popular drum rudiment and was a fun play on words.

What It Looks Like

We are actually circling back to the Pear colour scheme in the next few weeks as the colour of a pear doesn’t necessarily demo well (greeny/yellow) so the environment will no doubt change a bit but I’m sharing what we have today because I feel like talking about it today. 🙂

Pear inside the Regroove Intranet – this is our central communications page/site for finding all of the various Pear Assets the team may need.
Pear even has its own website – pearadiddle.com (a fun take on the famous drum rudiment)
This is Pear’s internal SharePoint Intranet, complete with Navo providing a comprehensive and security trimmed SharePoint menu (and where we alternatively show off its MegaMenu option).
This is Pear’s Intranet in the Navo app, in Light Mode.
And this is Pear’s Intranet in the Navo app, in Dark Mode.
This is the Pear ‘Floating Intranet’ in the browser, available on every website – Chrome and Edge Chromium as delivered by our Navo Browser Extension (it’s awesome, you’ll see…)
Finally, and most groovy – Pear’s Microsoft Teams environment, naturally with Navo leading the way to finding everything a (fake) employee needs. 🙂

Meet the (Fictitious) people of Pear

I love a good fake name and I went with some of the classics for the employees of this non-existent company.

  • CEO: Adam Baum
  • CFO: Patty O’Furniture
    • Accounts Receivable
      • Mel Function
      • Anne Teak
    • Accounts Payable
      • Ray Bann
  • Head of Sales: Al Fresco
  • CTO: Barb Dwyer
  • Director of Product Development: Brock Lee