We’ve been working hard to make the 4.5 release the most exciting to date. The 4.5 release, scheduled for November 17th, is packed with powerful features that make creating and integrating engaging content simpler than ever before. Page Templates, Page Versioning, and the Staffbase Connector for Power Automate are just the tip of the iceberg. Discover all the new functionalities 4.5 has in store for you and your employees!
Celebrations Are in Order!
Digital news doesn’t have to be drab. When you have exciting news to share, spread the joy using our new Animation widget. The Animation widget lets you choose between four celebratory overlays for news posts:
- Confetti
- Fireworks
- Balloons
- Snow
Bring a smile to your employees’ faces by letting it rain confetti in a news post celebrating their accomplishments. This small accent adds a playful and engaging touch to those festive moments you share with your employees, and it takes just seconds to configure.
The Animations widget will be rolled out automatically to all customers free of charge with the 4.5 release.
It’s all about Pages
Pages are an essential part of your platform, but as their numbers increase, managing them becomes a challenge. But don’t worry! With release 4.5, your editors will have a plethora of new tools at their disposal to enable them to create and manage pages with ease.
Starting with our new Page Templates, your editors can dive right into creating interactive pages and win back hours spent tweaking tedious formatting. All they have to do is select a template when adding a new page and a structure is prefilled in the editor—now they’re ready to start filling in their content.
Administrators can even adapt page templates to fit your company brand. Ultimately, templates come full circle and benefit your employees by creating familiar recurring structures that help them quickly find their way around any page.
Staffbase offers three standard templates:
- Start page
- Location page
- Service pages
You can adapt any of these or create new templates of your own. All of these templates can be managed centrally in the Studio.
Also new to Pages, the new Plugin widget lets you embed plugins directly on pages. Not only can your users see plugin content, they can even interact with it and, for example, respond to surveys, scroll through next week's meal plan, or browse event calendars without having to navigate back and forth on the platform.
To round out our page improvements, we’re introducing page versioning so your content is always secure! Page versioning gives you full control over your content, allowing you to see at a glance who made changes to a page and when. Whether you want to view previous versions of a page or simply remove changes saved by mistake, from now on page versioning lets you access and restore any saved version of a page within seconds.
Starting November 17, these new features for Pages are available to Employee Experience Intranet customers. Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager if you are not yet using the Employee Experience Intranet and are interested in these new features.
Microsoft 365 Integrations Get Better Than Ever Before!
Staffbase unleashes new Microsoft 365 integrations that can make using both platforms in conjunction absolute bliss. Test our new beta features, the Microsoft 365 widgets and the Staffbase Connector for Microsoft Power Automate, to simplify your content delivery and automate your business processes.
Have your editors ever wondered how to make different Microsoft content or services coexist next to other content in a sleek layout without breaking a sweat integrating the two platforms? If so, your wait is over. Staffbase unveils 6 new Microsoft 365 widgets for desktop that help your editors easily add Microsoft calendars, tasks, files, teams feed and overview, and more in a single page. You can even add non-Microsoft content here to coexist in a compact design format without using a special template or custom CSS.
Now your users can collaborate on different content and services that are relevant to them from the same page in their employee app or intranet, without navigating away to different Microsoft platforms. In addition, all users can quickly log in to their Microsoft 365 account from the menu for settings in their employee app or intranet.
Give your employees more flexibility and empower your editors. Get in touch with Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to activate these widgets, which are a part of the Microsoft 365 Integrations product.
Next to simplifying content delivery, want to tackle the challenges that modern businesses pose by using different tools and systems specifically designed for each process? It’s true that despite all the advantages they provide, it’s very difficult to bring them together and make them function as a single automatic process. The Staffbase Connector for Power Automate helps you bind all these tasks performed in different tools into an automatic workflow using Power Automate.
Creating workflows to automate approval processes, run tasks on a schedule, or notify users as events take place are just some of the possibilities. If you want to create an automated flow by connecting your content, notifications, user management, or any other services in the Staffbase platform to business processes in other tools, the Staffbase Connector for Power Automate is your answer.
Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to test an automated workflow with the Forms plugin and transform manual tasks into an automated flow.
Hit Resend! Send Targeted Notifications
Since the last release, editors can see the reach of their news posts. Numbers are great, but now editors can go a step further and take action to increase the reach without worrying about spamming employees who have already visited the posts. Now, editors can choose who needs a gentle reminder and configure the target audience for a second round of notifications. Resend notifications to users who either didn’t visit or didn’t acknowledge a post.
In the months to come, we will continue improving the beta resend dialog for news and add even more features, like adding a new notification text for the resend and scheduling notifications. If you can’t wait to get your editors empowered to act on reach numbers, ask Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to activate the beta version free of charge for your platform.
Relaunch of the Staffbase Developer Portal
We have redesigned our Developer Portal for you! With the modern three-panel design, developers can now see all relevant information at one glance and select sample responses to API requests in the right panel. To boost developers’ experience even more, we added a Docs section with guides and getting started docs. And there are more docs to be expected here unlocking all the new possibilities of integrations with the Staffbase platform. Check out developers.staffbase.com after November 17th to see the new Developer Portal in action.
New Features
App
- It is now possible to link to a specific element on a page, such as a heading or image, using Anchor links. This feature simplifies on-page navigation for your users on lengthy pages.
Plugins
- You can now enable message deletion in Chat. This means that chat users can permanently delete their own messages.
- Users can now copy the text of chat messages from mobile devices. This makes it easier for mobile users to disseminate important information quickly without the need for retyping.
- You can now make the Chat plugin available to specific user groups or users in your organization.
Studio
- When adding content in a new language on news posts or pages, editors now have the option to machine translate their previously written content.
Improvements
App
- The Interesting Comments notification setting has changed. Now users with this setting activated will only be notified when someone comments on their posts or replies directly to one of their comments. This setting is activated by default for all new users.
- We are currently working to improve the Search functionality, but don’t want to keep you waiting. We will begin rolling out some of these improvements with the 4.5 release. Now you’ll be able to switch between a tab containing all search results and other tabs refined by content type, such as News or Apps. Additionally, user results in the “All” tab will now be displayed in a grid format above the content results.
Plugins
- In the Event Registration plugin you can now create recurring events, request additional information from participants using a new custom text field, export event participant lists, and more. In addition, a sleek new user interface makes the Event Registration plugin easier to use than ever.
Studio
- Now, you can automatically fill information into custom profile fields during user sync via the SCIM API.
- For Pages, News, and Journeys, content will now automatically be previewed in the language currently being edited. You can now also switch the language of the previewed content directly from the dropdown in the dialog.
- Editors can now generate URLs for preview content in a specific language for Pages, News, and Journeys, simplifying the feedback process for language-based reviews. Alternatively, an international URL option has been introduced, which, when opened, will automatically show the preview content in each editor’s chosen content language.
- The CSV file produced using the user export function now has an additional column for the status of a user as either active or invited.
- To avoid sending emails unintentionally when creating new users via CSV import, the default state for the checkbox to send new users an email invitation is now deactivated.
Included Minor Releases Since 4.4
4.5.0 - September 22, 2020
Improvements
- Conditional groups have left beta status and are now available to all customers. This allows you to manage internal groups based on tags associated with a user’s profile.
- A user’s content language will now be set automatically based on their device or browser language during the registration process. This smart language detection really improves the onboarding experience for new users.
- In the news feed, translations for Slovak have been updated for improved understanding.
Bug Fixes
- In Internet Explorer 11, the Forms Plugin was not loading in the Studio. This has been fixed.
- In chat conversations, the button to jump to the bottom of the conversation mistakenly displayed when the user was already on the latest message and did not disappear even after refreshing. This has been fixed.
- In Analytics, updating the date range led to incomplete data being displayed in some cases. This has been fixed.
- In the settings for Journeys, the help icon displayed in inconsistent sizes. This has been fixed.
- When leaving the editor for the welcome page or the legal documents settings dialog, the Discard Changes dialog was displayed incorrectly. This has been fixed.
- In the list view for spaces and subspace, the loading indicator did not display. This has been fixed.
4.4.5 - September 8, 2020
Improvements
- For Search, the auto-complete function for the search input field has been disabled. Now the suggested matches are fully visible.
- In the Studio, under Spaces, the number of subspaces listed in the overview of a space has been increased from 100 to 500.
- In the Studio, the number of user groups listed on one page has been increased from 50 to 100.
Bug Fixes
- In the Studio, space administrators weren’t able to move pages to other spaces. This has been fixed.
- In some cases, when folder names were too long, the user profile menu and other items in the header were not displayed. This has been fixed.
- In Chat, the button to create a new conversation was still visible to users who did not have the permissions to start a chat conversation. This has been fixed.
- In Chat, informal German language is now available again.
- On Internet Explorer 11, using bullet and numbered lists in the Pages editor caused an error. This has been fixed.
- In certain cases, the Add page button was displayed to users without the required permissions. This has been fixed.
- In the Calendar plugin, the formatting was broken for users using Polish as their plugin interface language.
- Under Comments in the Studio, the number of likes for a comment was not displayed. This has been fixed.
- In the dashboard of the Studio, links to comments are now working again as expected.
- In Analytics, the data was not always calculated within the correct time zone. This has been fixed.
4.4.4 - August 25, 2020
Improvements
- In the Forms plugin, the default setting for the field type Single Choice is no longer automatically pre-selected. This will reduce the number of users who submit the form without changing the default choice by mistake.
- An additional text has been added for both form editors and end users submitting an anonymous form to clarify how and what kind of user data is stored.
- The Launchpad Apps now supports a fallback language in the search. If a Launchpad app is not maintained in the user’s content language, the app will still display results in a fallback language when using search.
Bug Fixes
- In the SAML Integrations plugin, previously given authentication data was not shown as expected in the Studio. This had been fixed.
- In Safari browser, images in news posts did not load fully. This has been fixed and all images load as expected.
- In News, links and buttons did not respond until the page was reloaded. This has been fixed.
- For news posts, the number of post visitors and the reach percentage were different, depending on whether the statistics were viewed from the News overview in the Studio or using the Statistics button from the user view. This has been fixed.
- When linking between two news posts in which Comments have been deactivated, users mistakenly received an error message that comments could not be loaded. This has been fixed.
- After changing the sorting settings for a news channel in the Studio to Top News or Recent News, the new sorting was not reflected in the user view on Chrome browser.
- In the Launchpad, the sorting menu did not close when clicking outside of the menu dialog. This has been fixed, and the menu closes automatically when users click elsewhere in the Launchpad.
- Under Comments in the Studio, it was no longer possible to see which post each comment belonged to. This has been fixed.
- When new users were invited to the platform via email invite, this action was not tracked in the user changelog in the Studio. This has been fixed.
- When editing a Page in Internet Explorer 11, it was not possible to delete most content types. This has been fixed.
- On Internet Explorer 11, the SAML plugin did not load. This has been fixed.
- In the Chat, video attachments were not visible for users using Internet Explorer browser. This has been fixed.
- When the visibility of the Chat was restricted for certain users, these users could still see the desktop quick link icon for chat in the header. This has been fixed.
- In the German configuration dialog for the Hero Image widget, some texts displayed in English. This has been fixed and all texts in the dialog now display in the correct language.
- If the visibility setting of a news page was turned off for all device types in the main menu, the news page could not be configured to display in the News Stage widget. This has been fixed.
4.4.3 - August 11, 2020
Improvements
- In the search, the number of results displayed has been reduced from 10 to 5 per page for better usability.
- When creating new users via CSV import, the default state for the checkbox to send new users an email invitation is now deactivated.
- User exports via CSV now contain a new column for users’ account status.
- In the Personalization widget, the names on available fields for personalization have been improved for better readability.
- There has been a security update to the SAML plugin to make using Symfony safer.
Bug Fixes
- Images cropped in the Hero Image widget displayed blurry. This has been fixed.
- Images dragged and dropped into the page editor were added as attachments instead of displaying in the editor. This has been fixed.
- In some cases, images for users created via API could not be displayed. This has been fixed.
- In some cases after web app releases, navigation elements did not respond when clicked on. This has been fixed.
- In the public area, the bottom quick links navigation bar was not responding. This has been fixed.
- When comments were moved to the trash, the trash entry displayed with HTML markup. All trash entries now display properly.
- In the Group Chooser, using the search function and pressing Enter caused the dialog to close unexpectedly. This has been fixed.
- Data security has been enhanced for Spaces.
- In the trash, sorting elements by date of deletion did not work properly. This has been fixed.
- In the Studio, users change logs sometimes displayed empty. This has been fixed.
- In chat group conversations, the view jumped to the top of the conversation when users added or removed participants, changed admin permissions, or changed the conversation image or name. This is now fixed.
- A large amount of blank space displayed in the News Stage widget for news articles with no teaser text. This has been optimized.
- The iOS bottom navigation bar no longer appears when disabled for links.
- Email analytics reports did not display the correct weekly metrics. This has been fixed.
- When editing the main menu in the Studio, clicking Create a folder caused unexpected changes in the button layout. This has been fixed.
4.4.2 - July 28, 2020
Improvements
- In the Maps plugin, the types of content that can be added to location descriptions have been changed for enhanced security. Adding html-tags is only possible to show images or links.
- In Chat, the labelling of the button to remove a user from a group conversation has been improved.
Bug Fixes
- In the horizontal menu, when hovering over menu items in the 3rd level of the flyout, they were not highlighted. This has been fixed.
- Reach was calculated incorrectly for user groups of over 10000 members. This has been corrected.
- In Chat, it was not possible to navigate back to a group conversation from the group information page. This has been fixed.
- In Chat, messages sometimes appeared twice directly after being sent. This has been fixed and messages appear as expected.
- When printing user access codes, long access codes caused the formatting to break. This has been fixed.
- When using the Hero Image widget, once the opacity of the image was set, the overlay color could no longer be changed. This has been fixed.
- In confirmation dialogs for legal documents, the header was displayed in the incorrect color. This has been fixed.
- In global search, when expanding the breadcrumbs to view the file path, a scrollbar was displayed for users in Firefox browser. This has been fixed and a scrollbar no longer displays.
4.4.1 - July 14, 2020
Improvements
- In the SurveyMonkey plugin, when opening a link to a survey, the URL was set to German. Now, this has been modified to accommodate all languages.
- In the Chat plugin, a confirmation dialogue has been added for users, who want to opt out of a chat conversation.
Bug Fixes
- In article posts, it was not possible to drag and drop media into the editor. This now works as expected.
- In the Event Registration plugin, the Export Event function was not working. This has been fixed.
- In form submissions, the + sign was being incorrectly interpreted as a single space. This has been fixed.
- In the Forms plugin, when configuring custom messages in the Form settings, it was not possible to add emojis. Now this works again as expected.
- When making form submissions inaccessible to editors and admins, the warning message before saving was not displayed. The warning now works as expected.
- In Internet Explorer 11, it was not possible to open plugins in some cases. This has been fixed.
- On certain browsers, an error occurred when uploading documents. This has been fixed.
- The Chat could not be opened from the Latest Activities column in the admin dashboard. This has been fixed.
- When using the Chat in Internet Explorer browser, words in chat messages were broken in the middle, instead of being brought down to the next line. This has been fixed.
- In the News Stage widget, arrows to slide between posts were not centered. This has been fixed.
- In the News Stage widget, the dots to slide between news posts were not visible in certain cases. This has been fixed.
- Links in widget titles and hyperlinks were not clickable if placed underneath the News Stage widget on Pages.
- The search in the open group chooser, only worked for the first 100 groups. This has been fixed.
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