This November, we are releasing an exciting new product that will change the way you communicate with employees: the Employee Experience Suite. This exciting new front door to internal communications, as well as other new features and improvements for the app will be available starting November 6th.
Evolving from an App to the Front Door of the Digital Workplace
Did you previously have an intranet, various software tools, and your employee app? It is very time-consuming for your employees to organize all these tools and links. Now you can turn your app into the front door to your digital workplace with the entire feature package from the new Employee Experience Suite. As front door, the app combines everything your employees need for daily work and communication, with or without a computer workstation, in one place.
Using the launchpad, you can link "apps" used in your company, i.e., programs, portals, and tools that employees frequently need. You can set up the apps for different user groups. In addition, you might need to display large amounts of information if, for example, the old intranet moves to the app. In this case, try the new horizontal navigation for desktop. On mobile devices, everything stays the same so that there is enough space to read the content. On desktop, the first navigation level is displayed directly as horizontal navigation and thus offers immediate access to the content. In addition, you can create tables of contents with multiple layers and navigate through the layers in the app very easily.
Alongside horizontal navigation and quick app access via the launchpad, you can now create highly targeted menus for navigation. Individual menu items can be removed from the navigation for specific user groups — but can still be accessed via the search function. This gives more space to important information, while still keeping all content available.
And how do you make the front door to the digital workplace attractive? The new Dynamic Pages provides a set of 11 widgets, each of which displays different content conveniently and attractively on pages. Place links, contact information, and news horizontally or vertically. Use one, two, or three columns, which you can also adjust in size. Hide long texts in accordions and use tiles or buttons to encourage users to click. All of these possibilities will allow for cleaner, more streamlined designs, and graphically stylish, information-filled pages.
The features for the front door to your digital workplace are available in 3 brand new packages:
- All features combined in the Employee Experience Suite
- Launchpad and horizontal navigation in the Front Door package
- The 11 widgets combined in the Dynamic Pages package
Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to try these features and learn more about turning your employee app into the front door to your digital workplace.
Stage Content Better on Pages
There has been a change in the making for a while now: Pages have evolved from a platform for presenting purely static content, to one that nicely presents multimedia content and dynamic news. Now this evolution takes the next step with two improvements: a new beta version of the News Stage and new options for picture galleries.
To optimally stage your picture galleries on a page, you can now choose between the collapsable and the slideshow layout. This was previously implemented for news and is now available for your pages, too.
Activate the new beta version of the News Stage to test the flexible configuration options for editors. Additionally, the News Stage comes with an editor-friendly configuration dialogue for Employee Experience Suite customers. This means you don’t need custom HTML to set up the widget. With this beta version of the News Stage you can present news on pages in the same way as in the newsfeed:
- Play videos directly from the News Stage.
- Choose between two new layouts.
- Choose between different transition styles for the sliders.
- Include teaser texts to entice users to read full posts.
- Include social interactions, such as comments, likes, bookmarks, and sharing.
The new picture gallery layouts are available without additional charge to all customers. Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to activate the beta version of the News Stage and discuss possible configuration options.
Try Out the Beta Version of the New Employee Directory
We are excited to roll out the new Employee Directory, formally known as the Network plugin. With the help of newly introduced filters and a new user-friendly layout, the new Employee Directory makes it easier for users to quickly and reliably find the information they need for their work.
With up-to-date user data, our new filter function really pays off. Both system and custom profile fields can be set as filters within the Employee Directory. This means that the administrator can choose which profile fields should or shouldn’t be visible as filters in the Employee Directory. Enabling filters, for example, by location, department, or name, allows users to quickly find the contacts they need. The My Department toggle is another useful tool for users in large companies to view only their department members with just one click.
Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to activate this beta feature and help your employees stay connected.
New Features
App
- It’s now possible to add and play protected videos from movingimage. Please get in touch with Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager if you would like to enable protected videos provided by movingimage.
- You can now use traditional Chinese as a new content language.
Studio
- You can now choose a custom menu icon for news, pages, plugins, and folders. In the settings of each, global roles as well as space administrators will now see a new dropdown menu offering a selection of different icons.
- Previously, all Spaces had the same hierarchy level and could not be nested. Now, for the first time, the beta version allows the nesting of Spaces to create a hierarchy. Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager if you are interested in testing Spaces in Spaces as beta feature.
- Staffbase now offers new app distribution methods with the Apple Business Manager.
Improvements
App
- The app is ready for the new iOS 13 and Android 10, and compatibility with both system updates is assured.
- When viewing a picture in full-screen mode, the view is now clean and doesn’t show unnecessary details like the filename of the picture. Intentionally given picture titles will still be visible.
- The app supports iOS versions 11.4 and newer.
Studio
- Administrators can now reset the one-time password for a pending user.
- Swipe, autoslide, and navigation arrows can be disabled with a new setting for New Stages containing only one post.
Bug Fixes
App
- On iOS 13+ devices, images in the newsfeed and across the native app appear blurry in the image preview. This is fixed and images always show in the expected resolution now.
- On iOS 13, the cursor did not appear in input fields. This is now working properly.
- On iOS 13 devices, it was not possible to copy and paste into most input fields. This has been fixed.
- In rare cases, an image needed to be uploaded to a post twice. Image uploads now work at the first attempt.
- In some cases, the login dialog did not reopen after being closed. This has been fixed.
- When typing a comment or when in chat on iOS 13, the keyboard blocked the view of the input field. This has been fixed and the input field is now visible.
- If users deleted their own comment, the text on the button was too long to fully display. The button is now clearly labelled.
- In some cases, the changes in the order of items on the menu were not reflected in the app. This has been fixed.
Plugins
- When using the Forms plugin in Internet Explorer 11, answers selected in dropdown menus were not visible. This has now been fixed.
- In the Happiness plugin, the smiley icons displayed with a background color. The icons now display properly with a transparent background.
Studio
- The user funnel in Analytics did not count pending users. This now works properly.
- On Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge, the space chooser menu did not display properly after being opened a second time. This has been fixed.
- On Microsoft Edge, in some cases when editing a space, the user selection dropdown menu failed to appear. This has been fixed.
- When a news post with social interactions (such as comments and likes) is moved to a news channel in which these social interactions are disabled, they were still displayed. This has been fixed.
- The Zendesk support widget in the Studio is no longer visible when disabled.
- The buttons to remove content in plugins are now named consistently.
- In the user group management, pending users of the group were not displayed. This has been corrected and all users are displayed again.
Included Minor Releases Since 4.0
4.1 Web App - September 17, 2019
New Features
- More flexibility for News Stage widget: The beta version of the News Stage widget, which can be inserted on any page, now has two new layouts and different transition styles to choose from. On top of that, now videos can be played directly from the widget, teaser texts are presented upfront on the start page of the app, and social interactions are possible directly in the widget without opening the post. Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to activate this beta feature.
- The picture gallery feature from the newsfeed is now available for pages, too.
Improvements
- Traditional Chinese is now available as a content language.
- In the Absence plugin, users can now submit both hourly and all-day leave requests.
- The Absence plugin now supports customizable coloring to align with company branding.
Bugfixes
- In some cases, accessing a User API caused an error even if a valid API token was used. This has been fixed.
- In update posts, badges to point out a highlighted or to be acknowledged post were misaligned. This has been fixed.
- In some specific cases on iOS devices, the menu icons were not displayed properly. This issue has been fixed.
4.0.5 - September 04, 2019
Improvements
- The plugin for integrated content now works also in the public area of your app.
- When using the Absence plugin with the SAP® HCM connector, users will now see a standard icon for all absence types. The leave request form is now more user friendly and the users will only see relevant absence types and have an intuitive date selection.
- In the space chooser in the top of the admin menu, spaces are now arranged alphabetically.
Bugfixes
- In the Absence plugin, the hover effect for buttons was not functioning and the colors used in the date picker did not contrast enough for the selection to be seen. Both issues are now fixed.
- When editing the image details in a post, the toggle label displayed the wrong color. The toggle label now displays the colors the app is branded with.
4.0.4 - August 21, 2019
New Features
- With the SAML plugin, you can now seamlessly integrate external content not just through the single sign-on experience, but also by deep linking to the respective page inside the external application.
- We have released a new lightweight integration for third-party content, the Integrated Content plugin. With the Integrated Content plugin, users now see seamlessly embedded content and simultaneously have access to the native sharing feature of the mobile device. This overcomes previous pitfalls of embedding external content and improves the user experience significantly.
Improvements
- In the app’s chat and in the newsfeed, accessibility improvements for visually impaired users have been implemented.
- The anniversary chatbot now logs the date and time of sent messages, which makes it easier to investigate which messages have already been sent. Additionally, when problems occur during sending anniversary messages, the error handling has been improved.
- For your custom plugins, you can now freely decide whether you want to use authentication via basicAuth. If you’ve previously encountered problems with custom plugins, disabling basicAuth can improve the login flow for your users.
- The Absence plugin with SAP HCM connector is now able to handle different absence types. Previously it was limited to one type. We are working on further improvements to make the integration between the employee app and SAP® even more versatile. Stay tuned.
Bugfixes
- In the notification center, some notifications were not displayed with the expected interface language. The notification center uses the correct language now.
- On some Android devices, it was not possible to scroll up and down in the app. This has been fixed.
- When unpublishing or deleting an article post directly in the native app, the app got stuck loading the next view. Unpublishing and deleting articles now works properly again.
4.0.3 - August 7, 2019
Improvements
- The minimum version for native apps was raised to 3.2.
- When clicking on an event in the Office 365® Calendar plugin a dialog now opens with more information about the event. You will see the event organizer and access the link that takes you to the event in the Office 365® calendar.
Bugfixes
- Images in a post were scaled in the full screen view. This does not happen anymore.
4.0.2 - July 24, 2019
Bugfixes
- In Internet Explorer® 11 when filling in a form, values selected via dropdown menu were not visible. This has been fixed.
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