The April release is full of some spectacular and highly anticipated new features that we're working on right now. In addition to the great preview features, other new features and improvements will be available from April 16th:
Preview of the All-New News Feed
This news feed is fast, awesome-looking, and totally engaging, with new in-feed functions:
- Endless scrolling
- Automatic nice portraits with blurry background
- Videos as article images
- "Bye bye, picture gallery." and "Hello, image slider!"
- Full-size images for all articles in the feed, not only the latest article, but for all articles for you when scrolling down
- Social interactions like comments and likes
- Play video in the feed
Additionally, users can now test the on-demand translation of news themselves. The new news feed and news translation are available to preview. Ask Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager if you’d like to give them a try.
Preview of the New Notification Center and Notifications API
With the new in-app notifications, your users will always find the latest posts and comments. The notification center is also an option for desktop users who want to have notifications in their web app for the first time. If you would like to be one of our test clients, contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager.
For third-party plugin developers, the public Notifications API allows the sending of mobile push notifications. The Notifications API is already available. For information on how to use it, read the details in the Developer Portal.
Preview of the Content Trash with Restore Function
All deleted news posts and comments are now moved to the trash. This allows administrators to restore them if deleted accidentally. After 30 days, posts and comments are purged from the trash. The trash is still in beta mode and we’re working on adding more items; for example, folders, chats, channels, spaces, pages, and other plugins.
Please get in touch with Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager if you want to try it. With the next release, Staffbase will roll out this feature to all customers without additional cost.
Connected HR Services Directly in Your Employee App
SAP Fiori Plugin:
You can now embed an SAP Fiori Launchpad or SAP Fiori App into your web app. The integration requires a single sign-on to SAP Fiori.
The SAP Fiori plugin can be activated for customers with Enterprise packages. Reach out to Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to discuss your use case.
Preview of the Leave of Absence Plugin:
This preview gives you the look and feel of how easily employees can request a leave of absence within the app.
Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to get the preview activated in your platform. Staffbase is eager to get your feedback on usability and to learn more about your requirement; for example, regarding the tools and systems with which you want to connect.
Office 365 Files Plugin Coming
And here comes another SharePoint integration to improve your employees’ workflows: With the new Office 365 File plugin, you can show file lists of documents stored in SharePoint Online. Employees can open the files without leaving the employee app, but the document collaboration is handled via SharePoint.
The plugin is available for Enterprise Package customers. The plugin will be fully rolled out shortly after the release. Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager if would like to install the plugin and want to receive an update once it’s available.
New Features
App
- You can now authenticate users to your employee platform with OIDC (OpenID Connect). With this addition, you have even greater flexibility for your SSO (Single Sign-On) processes and the choice of identity provider systems.
- For user authentication via SSO, it is now possible to use several identity providers simultaneously. This makes the user onboarding easier for companies that work with a number of identity management systems.
Plugins
Happiness:
- Admins can now configure the content in multiple languages.
- It is now possible to download user submissions from the Happiness plugin as a CSV file.
Studio
- Recovery codes are now automatically generated with the same security settings as one-time passwords. This makes recovery codes compliant with your company’s individual security guidelines.
Improvements
App
- If your company’s style of addressing its employees is more formal, you can now use the user’s last name as a salutation in emails, e.g., when sending a recovery code.
- The app now detects language dialects of Traditional and Simplified Chinese as well as Brazilian and European Portuguese, and automatically translates the interface accordingly. Previously, you had to choose one of the dialects for your company.
- For push notifications on Android, Staffbase adopted the latest Google® standard to make your app future-proof for Android versions to come.
- On Android devices, you can now upload files on external websites through the Link plugin.
- Staffbase supports HTTP/2 as a major revision of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web. This leads to a more stable and improved performance of the app.
- For the web app, support of Internet Explorer 10 ends. Internet Explorer 10 exposes the web app to security risks and due to outdated technology prevents future updates of some components of the web app. Therefore, Staffbase recommends using the latest version of the internet browser.
Accessibility
Throughout the app, Staffbase added many improvements that help visually impaired people navigate the native app and the web app with a screen reader:
- Dialogs throughout the app are now labelled correctly so that a screen reader has the information to read what kind of dialog has been opened. Also, the screen reader’s focus is now set properly on the according dialogs.
- To allow visually impaired people interactions with the app, a screen reader must recognize the according interactive elements like buttons or input fields on the interface. Now, interactive elements throughout the app are set for recognition by a screen reader.
- The Chat has been improved for accessibility via screen reader. There are some functions that create so called dynamic content. For example, searching for a user results in a dynamic list of search results depending on the search term. In the Chat, dynamic content is now properly accessible for the screen reader.
The Happiness plugin has also been improved for accessibility via screen readers. Dialogs and elements in the plugin are labelled correctly and the focus setting for the screen reader works properly.
Plugins
Forms:
- When an editor created an empty form, the user would see a blank page. This has been changed and the user sees a notification that the form is empty.
- Users would see the button to access previous submissions even though they had not submitted any data. Now, the button is only shown when data has been submitted.
- When exporting form submissions, the labelling of the export button was misleading. The position and naming of the export button has been improved to make it clear that all submissions of the chosen version are exported.
SAML:
- Until now, the plugin included the standard information givenname, nameidentifier, and surname. If your web application needs to include more information to authenticate users, you can now add custom claims. Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to set this up.
Studio
- Previously, when you filtered a user list in the user management, not all user groups could be selected. This was due to a limit of 100 groups that could be displayed in the filter. Now, all groups can be accessed and additionally, users receive suggestions once you start typing a group’s name.
- The performance of analytics has been significantly improved, especially when using multiple filters and long time frames.
- Now, links are properly tracked and are shown on the content tab of the analytics dashboard.
Bug Fixes
App
- Randomly generated one-time passwords for inviting new users could contain characters that caused them to be incorrectly displayed in the admin area as well as in invitation mails. This will no longer happen and the passwords are always correctly displayed. All security requirements for one-time passwords are still in place.
- Newly added legal documents did not show up in the app’s About page. This is fixed now. The confirmation dialog for legal documents was not affected and will display all relevant documents.
- The app was not displayed properly on the 2018 iPad Pro 11-inch. Now, the app is displayed properly.
- Configuring less than 15 parallel sessions of the app was not possible. Also, in rare cases, an error message was displayed when entering a large number of parallel sessions. This is fixed now and you can set smaller numbers of parallel sessions.
- When creating a user via the User API, English was the user’s content language, regardless of the app’s default language. This is fixed now.
- In some cases, when creating new users via the user API, the group memberships of tag-based groups was not saved correctly. This is fixed now.
- On Android 4.4 devices, input fields in the user profile were not displayed properly. Also, the text editor toolbar was displayed in the wrong place when a text was entered. Both issues have been fixed.
- On Android 4.4 devices, when opening an input field, for example, in the chat, a large part of the app’s interface could be overlaid by a white block. Input fields now work properly.
- If a company name contained single quotes, the openlink did not work. This is fixed.
- On iOS 10.3 devices, the status bar was always black. From now on, the status bar is rendered in the company’s brand color.
- When receiving multiple chat messages in a conversation, the unread counter wrongly showed one unread message only. The unread counter now works properly.
- In rare cases in a group chat, names of the groups in the chat would be wrongly displayed as managed by admin for the group administrator. From now on, full group names are displayed to group administrators.
- Links clicked on iOS devices were not tracked correctly for analytics. This has been fixed.
- In the Google Chrome browser, the download of videos was not working when viewing the video in an embedded view. We had to remove the download option for now but will add it again once a fix is possible.
- After changing the access settings for open groups, the menu for users was not updated accordingly. Only after manual reloading of the app the folders were displayed correctly. From now on the menu for all affected users is updated immediately after changing the access settings.
- In rare cases, no push notifications were sent for scheduled for news posts due to a timing issue. We improved this behavior.
- On iOS devices, when submitting data on pages embedded via the Links plugin, users sometimes encountered duplicate requests. This has been fixed.
- On some devices, the close icon in the picture galleries was missing. This has been fixed.
- The counter for Likes wasn’t instantly refreshing. This has been fixed.
- On some Android devices, the buttons for social interactions for a post were not aligned properly. This has been fixed.
Plugins
Forms:
- When adding a field for additional user information between other form fields in submitted forms, data was displayed in the wrong column. This is now fixed.
- Email notifications for form submissions had a broken layout in some email clients.
- In rare cases, the value of a text field in previous form submissions was not shown, although it was stored correctly. Now, all text field values are shown correctly.
Maps:
- On iOS devices, it was not possible to close the info box above a location marker in some cases. This is fixed now.
- On iOS devices, typing into the search bar caused display problems. Now, the search bar works properly.
Studio
- When using a hyphen in the short name of a legal document, the document wasn't displayed properly in the confirmation dialog. Hyphens are now allowed in short names.
- Removing a user from a user group directly in the edit user dialog did not work. The user remained in the group. This is fixed now.
- The analytics tracked unregistered access to non-public content. This could happen in rare cases when trying to open a URL directly without being signed in. These access attempts are no longer tracked in the analytics. Even though there were access attempts, content was never actually accessed. Your non-public content is protected and safe.
- After a post was deleted, data for this post was shifted by four rows in the CSV export from the analytics dashboard. This is now working correctly.
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