Usher in the Q2 Release 2023! This quarter, Staffbase is back with yet another feature-packed release. Now with these features, Staffbase ensures there is more power to you. Features like Chat Reactions and Email Personalization add that extra personal touch. Various news content-related features make news delivery, consumption, and migration more effortless than ever. The list continues.
Read the release notes to find out what's more in store. All of these are coming your way on May 11th, 2023.
Chat Reactions
Your employees can now easily and quickly engage with messages with six emoji reactions in your individual and group Chat conversations. The six different reactions of love ❤️, thumbs up 👍, thumbs down 👎, smile 😊, laugh 😂, and frown 🙁 give a variety of options to choose from. They are perfect for when you want to acknowledge a message or show support without writing a response.
Email Personalization
Making emails more direct and personal is a proven way to engage more of your recipients. When you prepare to send an email from the Employee Email web app or Studio integration, you can now add merge tags into the message body to automatically personalize each recipient’s first name and last name.
Resource Center in the Studio
We’re bringing support and inspiration resources to the Studio. While planning and creating your content, you can now browse for resources that help you with your task at hand. Unlock the full potential of your Staffbase platform with product tours and stay up-to-date with the latest release notes, community news, Campus courses, and more.
Contact API for Employee Email
Go beyond our standard integrations for Email contact data and build one that works with the tools you use. Our new Contact API allows you to sync your recipients’ email addresses and other attributes from any third-party human resources system directly into Employee Email for creating custom distribution lists.
Staffbase 365 News Central for SharePoint
News Central brings SharePoint even one more step closer to Staffbase. Now, let your editors create or edit Staffbase news posts with a click of a button from the comfort of SharePoint. The introduction of Single Sign-On (SSO) adds to a seamless experience, and Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps to deliver new features and fixes quicker. In addition, there are more improvements to the news layouts in store for you
News Channel Overview
This easy overview page for your News channels gives you all the information you need at a single glance. View or search for your existing channels, or create a new one right away. For each channel, you can see the relevant data, including the number of posts, space, and more. You can also add a new post directly or use the action menu to manage the settings or publication status.
Staffbase Power Automate News Sync
Unleash the power of Power Automate to sync news from SharePoint to Staffbase with the help of ready-to-use template flows. Select one or more of the three available flows, depending on your business use case. Now, migrating news content or using both Staffbase and SharePoint platforms to reach your different audiences is so easy.
Video Insights
Understand your employees' video viewing habits and boost content engagement rates with Video Insights. Editors can quickly access video metrics to measure how well a video is perceived and learn which videos drive high engagement and increase reach. Video Insights help you analyze the content's engagement rate and make data-driven decisions to deliver relevant content to your employees.
Search for Staffbase News in SharePoint
Introducing Staffbase PnP Modern Search Extensibility Library that leverages the capabilities of PnP Modern Search web part and Staffbase News API to bring search experience for Staffbase news content within SharePoint. Redefine the search experience for your users by creating a search hub for Staffbase news, customizing the standard layouts of Staffbase news posts based on their custom design, and even more.
Selected User Groups in the Directory
The Network plugin gives your users quick access to colleagues' contact details. With this new beta feature, you can now surface only the relevant contacts to your employees. You can select who's displayed in the Network plugin based on user groups. With this extra flexibility, you ensure your employees find the right contacts.
Improvements
News, Pages, Plugins, and Widgets for App / Intranet
- The Google Widgets have a new activation and sign-in method: Administrators now activate all Google widgets in the Third-Party Connections section of the Settings in the Studio. With this update, all Google widgets need to be re-activated once following the new procedure.
- In the Analytics dashboard, the layout has been updated to fit the new Studio design. The four different tabs are now shown vertically on the left of the dashboard instead of at the top.
- For the Screen Embedding beta feature, several improvements enhance user experience and usage:
- The font sizes were optimized for landscape and portrait mode, and the slideshows are now displayed with the easy-to-read Inter font.
- Setting up a slideshow in the Studio is easier now with the optimized preview, the sticky header when scrolling through the slideshow list, plus Spanish and French as newly available interface languages.
- Media in slideshows is now going to display also on older TVs as internal TV browsers based on Chromium 65 and higher are now supported.
- The below nine languages are now available as content languages. Among these, Pasthu / Pushtu, Persian Dari, and Persian Farsi are RTL (right-to-left) languages.
- Gujarati
- Kannada
- Kinyarwanda
- Malayalam
- Pasthu / Pushtu
- Persian Dari
- Persian Farsi
- Telugu
- Tigrinya
Employee Email
- Text editing improvements for the Email Designer:
- Better formatting support for pasting text from third-party text editors, for example, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Microsoft Outlook.
- Improvements to bullet points, for example, better indentation and the bullet color matches the text.
- Ability to combine multiple fonts, colors, and styling in a single text element.
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When you send an email from the web app or Studio integration, a new button labeled Review Email may be displayed instead of Send Now or Save Schedule. Click on the button to look over additional details about your email before you finalize sending or scheduling.
- This step in the sending workflow can be customized depending on whether your organization uses Personalization and/or Confirm Send messaging.
Included Minor Releases Since Q1 2023 Release
May 2, 2023
App and Intranet Improvements
- The Google Widgets have a new activation and sign-in method: Administrators now activate all Google widgets in the Third-Party Connections section of the Settings in the Studio. With this update, all Google widgets need to be re-activated once following the new procedure.
- In Pages, now when a user clicks on an anchor link that links to content inside an accordion, the accordion automatically expands to show the content.
- On the Discover Hashtag Page, news post results are now sorted by their publication date.
- In News and Pages, an error message is now displayed, when the uploaded media file exceeds the supported sizes.
App and Intranet Bugfixes
- When resending a News post, the notification text showed an incorrect number of characters. This has been fixed.
- In Surveys in the web app, the headings are now better accessible for screen readers and keyboard navigation.
Native App Bugfixes
- On the native app, folders with menu items didn't get updated when changing the visibility of a menu item, for example, when a user left an open group. This has been fixed.
Employee Email Notices
- All free Staffbase Email accounts created with the former Free Pro Teams (FPT) plan have been sunsetted. These accounts are no longer able to access the Email web app or the add-ins for Outlook and Gmail. Your account will not be affected if it is part of an Essential/Starter, Power/Business, or Enterprise plan.
April 13, 2023
App and Intranet Improvements
- The Staffbase platform now supports AV1 image file format (AVIF) for uploading images.
- In Chat, there have been multiple accessibility improvements for mobile app and web app screen readers. Screen readers can now better identify the inbox, message fields, new conversation, and back functions.
App and Intranet Bugfixes
- In User API, the creation date of the user account got incorrectly overwritten with the activation date. This is fixed now.
- In Surveys, when using a screen reader several texts were not read correctly or skipped. This has been fixed and will help users to navigate the page with screen readers better.
Deprecated Features for App and Intranet
- Staffbase no longer supports the self-sign-up method for onboarding. This has been deprecated. Learn more about available onboarding methods.
Native App Bugfixes
- In Chat on iOS and Android devices , screen readers can now better identify the menu button and back button.
- In Surveys on iOS devices, screen readers announced some text as a title, rather than plain text. This has been fixed and will help users to navigate the page with screen readers better.
Employee Email Improvements
- When you unshare your distribution list(s) in the Email web app or Studio integration, a new dialog will warn you about any upcoming emails scheduled for these lists by the user(s) whose access you are removing.
- Email users will no longer see an Import tab in their web app or Studio integration if they have no permissions to either upload contacts via a CSV file or create/edit integrations to sync contacts.
- When you sync a new distribution list from Azure AD to the Email web app or Studio integration, a new spinner will indicate if the number of contacts is unknown because syncing is still in progress.
- To help protect our customers’ data and privacy, a 12 hour login period gives you access to the Employee Email add-ins, web app, and Studio integration for a full work day.
You are prompted to log in again after your last login period ends.
In the Gmail add-in, these prompts are now set to appear only when you take an action that involves the add-in, for example:- Creating or editing an Email Designer draft in Gmail
- Turning on Employee Email tracking or scheduling for any draft in Gmail
- Changing the add-in settings
March 23, 2023
App and Intranet Improvements
- In Chat, the formatting inside of chat messages has been improved for a better user experience. The user’s name, time of the message, and edit label have been moved above the message. In individual conversations, the send date has been removed. Right-to-left languages are now also supported in all conversation types.
- In the Quiz Calendar, the time when a user answered the quiz question is now shown in the CSV export. This will provide better transparency to determine when users answered the quiz questions.
- When trying to embed private videos to a news post or page, a corresponding error message is now displayed, informing users that the video is restricted.
- When a user submits a form to a specific recipient, the email now also contains the recipient choice name the user selected. This is especially valuable in cases where a person acts as a recipient for more than one recipient choice option. For example, an office manager takes care of several offices and then receives form submissions for each office.
App and Intranet Bugfixes
- In Chat, email addresses with a period in the name were not working as expected. This has been fixed.
- In Chat, in some cases when read receipts were not enabled in the plugin settings, the option to disable them was still displayed in the profile menu. This has been fixed.
- In the File List Widget, when clicking the download button, some files were not being automatically downloaded. This has been fixed.
- In the Analytics Dashboard, in some cases the data was not matching when switching between news channels. This has been fixed.
- In some cases, the count of likes and comments shown on a news post did not match what was displayed in the Analytics Dashboard. This has been fixed.
- For form submisisons in the Studio, the recipient was wrong in certain cases. If an email address was mapped to several recipient names, the submissions always showed the first recipient name of the list, even if the user had selected a different recipient in the form. This has been fixed.
- In News, the sharing function for posts in the public area was not working as expected. This has been fixed.
Native App Bugfixes
- On the native apps, linking to a filtered view in the Employee Directory didn't work. Instead of a filtered subset, all users would be displayed. This has been fixed.
March 9, 2023
App and Intranet Improvements
- Media files are now uploaded more reliably. In addition, a progress indicator now shows the upload's progress as percentage.
App and Intranet Bugfixes
- In Update news channels, the customized preview image could not be saved when using different preview images for videos than the auto-generated ones. This has been fixed.
- In Chat, in some cases, the back button was not displayed after sending a message. This has been fixed.
- In Content Reviews for update and media news channel types, text was displayed multiple times in the review invitation emails and on the review page. This has been fixed.
Native App Bugfixes
- On Android devices, clicking push notifications did not redirect to the correct target when the App was open in the background. This has been fixed.
- On Android devices, the app's screen didn't rotate back to portrait mode when viewing videos in landscape mode. This has been fixed.
- On the native app, folders with menu items didn't get updated when changing the visibility of a menu item, for example, when a user left an open group. This has been fixed.
Employee Email Improvements
- Employee Email groups on the Team page are now sorted alphabetically instead of chronologically, making it easier to find your groups in a large list.
- When you map the fields of your contact lists in Employee Email, a new Skip Remaining Fields button will make the process faster to complete once your required fields are mapped.
February 23, 2023
App and Intranet Improvements
- The following eight content languages are now available: Gujarati, Kannada, Persian / Farsi, Malayalam, Kinyarwanda, Pasthu / Pushtu, and Persian / Dari.
- Screen Embedding with custom media now also works with the Secure Media feature activated.
- The Quiz Calendar and Meal Plan plugins now support RTL languages and displays the interface correctly from right to left.
App and Intranet Bugfixes
- In News channel of type Update, when embedding external Vimeo videos the thumbnail preview image did not display. This has been fixed.
- In the File Manager, when using the Image Files filter, the HEIC type files were not displayed. Instead, they were displayed as Other Files. This has been fixed.
- In Pages, image cropping for the Hero Image and Portfolio widgets was not functioning as expected. This has been fixed.
- In the Analytics Dashboard, in some cases, the number of invited and registered users did not align with the analytics shown in user management in the web app. This has been fixed.
- In Event Registration, in some cases the form elements for Title, Teaser Text and Image Caption as well as the form elements for Next, Previous, Zoom, and Close buttons did not have labels accessible to screen readers in the web app. This has been fixed.
- In the Analytics Dashboard, an error message was displayed inside the User Interactions donut graph in some cases for Space Administrators. This has been fixed.
- In News, article images for posts were not displaying in their full resolution size when opened. This has been fixed.
- In the Directory, users were displayed twice. This has been fixed.
- In Chat, in some cases, clicking on the first word of a group name functioned as a back button. This has been fixed.
Native App Bugfixes
- On Android devices, in Event Registration in some cases individual form elements were not connected to editing for TalkBack screen readers. This has been fixed.
- On iOS and Android devices, in Event Registration in some cases the form element for the Register Now button did not have labels accessible for screen readers. This has been fixed.
- On iOS and Android devices, in Calendar in some cases the Export Event and Open in Maps links were not usable for screen readers. In addition, the tab panel for List and Calendar views were not read out correctly by the screen readers. Both points have been fixed.
- On some iOS devices, the app took a long time to launching. This has been fixed.
- On Android devices, the SAML Integrations plugin did not work as expected with integrations that depend on the UserAgent. This has been fixed.
Employee Email Improvements
- When you send an email to your custom distribution lists via the web app or Studio, you will now be able to attach calendar invites as .ics files.
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