This July, we are releasing a whole bunch of formerly beta features to all our customers. These, and many other new features will be available starting July 30th.
Known Issue
On Android devices, issues with reopening the app after you've completely closed it may appear. Learn more about it and the workaround available on our support portal.
We are aware of this inconvenience and are diligently working on bringing out the Release 4.0, which will completely address this issue. Can’t wait that long? You can opt for the 3.9 version of the app that we improved with a quick fix, just send a mail to support@staffbase.com.
SAP Absence Plugin Enables Leave Requests via the App Now
How easy can it be to make HR processes available for your employees? With our new SAP connector, your employees can now request leave of absence directly from their app. No company intranet required, no work station required, no paper required. It’s as easy as that!
Our new SAP HCM Connector connects your on-premise SAP system to your employee platform. This gives your employees a single entry point and gives the app a consistent appearance across different HR services, starting with requesting a leave of absence. The HR department also has the advantage of all relevant data being transferred directly to and from the SAP system in real-time. Tasks like having to manually add a paper request to SAP are now a thing of the past.
Employees have a lot of advantages with the SAP Absence plugin. They can:
- See an overview of absences
- Request a leave
- See approved requests
The SAP HCM Connector can be tested for three months free of charge. We’re happy to support you with the setup of your connector. Contact Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager to try it out. Find out more about this exciting feature from our support portal article!
Activate the New Versatile Newsfeed!
The newsfeed is where users go to quickly and conveniently browse and interact with company content, so being able to dynamically present your content is crucial. After intensive beta testing, our new newsfeed is ready to bring appealing new layouts and intuitive social features directly to your users.
Here are some great reasons to activate our sleek new newsfeed:
- Social interactions, featuring likes, comments, and shares, make it easy for your employees to get involved and show support.
- Customize your newsfeed by choosing the layout that suits your content. We now offer the Standard, Enhanced, and Compact newsfeed layouts for article posts.
We’ve expanded what you can do with media:
- You can now use videos as the main article media, bringing a new dimension to your content.
- Picture channels have been upgraded to Media Channels and can now include both images and videos.
- Users can play videos directly from the newsfeed, boosting visibility and engagement.
- With the new newsfeed comes new gallery options: you can now choose between our enhanced collapsable photo gallery and the new slideshow gallery.
Activate the new newsfeed today and turn static readers into engaged users. Discover the new newsfeed layout settings from our support portal. Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager can activate the new newsfeed for your app free of charge.
With the New Notification Center, Never Miss the Latest!
Following the beta version of the Notification Center in our last release, we’re rolling out an enhanced Notification Center for all users with the latest version of the app. The Notification Center bell icon is placed alongside the user profile for easy access. Just click on the bell icon and you’re led straight to the notification feed, a one-stop center that lists all your read and unread notifications in chronological order.
What’s exciting about the new Notification Center?
- Get notified about new content with an easy-to-spot bubble on the bell icon.
- This convenient feature is available both to mobile and web app users.
- The notification feed will automatically mark content you already read so you can focus on the unread notifications.
- Manually change the read or unread status in the notification feed with a simple swipe in the mobile app or a click in the web app.
- Get notifications from third-party plugins and notifications sent via API tokens.
- Stay updated even when push and email notifications are disabled in your personal user settings.
The notification center is automatically enabled for all platforms free of charge. Check your mobile and web apps and see the feed of updates.
Restore Deleted Content with the Upgraded Trash Feature
Our upgraded trash feature is leaving beta status! Now you can delete and restore not only posts and comments, but pages, plugins, chats, menu folders, channels, and entire spaces as well.
Deleted items remain in your trash for a full 30 days before being permanently deleted. So even if you change your mind about deleting a department calendar or space for a different branch of your company, you can still restore them to your app up to a month afterwards without having to start from scratch. The new trash feature makes it quick and easy to recover valuable content. You can delete content and access the trash conveniently from the Studio.
We’ve also expanded the rights of managing editors and space administrators to allow them to restore certain content, check our overviews on rights and roles to see what role your editors need for restoring. Learn more about the rights and roles of restoring content for channels and posts, and pages and plugins from our support portal.
Office 365 Calendar Plugin as New Addition to the Office Integrations Family
Especially for desktop workers, the calendar is an important tool for organizing and coordinating everyday work with colleagues. We’re pleased to announce that Office 365 calendars can now be integrated into your employee app!
The Office 365 Calendar plugin supports personal, shared, and group calendars. You can access dates and events in any of these office calendars from your mobile device or from the web app. The Office 365 Calendar plugin brings the employee app closer to the vision of a front door to the workplace. This plugin is available for customers with our Enterprise package; and it only works for users with Office 365 accounts. To activate this plugin, reach out to Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager. Get started setting up your first calendar with help from our support portal.
Improvements
App
- The quick links at the bottom of your native app are now also available in the public area after activation by Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager.
- Desktop users can now search for employees directly from the employee directory. The search will also find pending users, if this option has been activated in the Studio.
- Information from the About page is now available under Settings.
- Individual web users can choose to opt out of chat by turning it off in their account settings. Please get in touch with Staffbase Support or your Customer Success Manager if you would like to enable the chat opt-out company-wide.
- On-demand translations are now also available for pages.
Plugins
- It is now possible to hide scrollbars within the Staffbase News Webpart for SharePoint.
- To ensure high security and maintainability, we’ve updated our Staffbase plugins to a new code base version. These updates will influence the following plugins: Netigate, Survey Monkey, SAML, SAP Fiori, Maps, Facebook, Time-tracking, Leave Request, Forms, Happiness, Calendar, Event Registration, Christmas Calendar, Meal Plan, and KPI Dashboard.
- We’ve updated our server and client SDK for plugin development to the latest PHP version.
- You can now decide how the Link Plugin will open a link.
The default setting opens the URL within the app. For native apps, you can change the default behavior to use a separate mobile browser.
Studio
- For spaces, there is now the option to set the visibility of an individual space to “all users”.
- It is now possible to enable on-demand translation for specific areas in the app. You can find the on-demand translation settings in the language settings.
- One-time passwords generated by the app now comply with the password policy. Additionally, the minimum length of a password has been increased to six characters.
Bug Fixes
App
- On Android devices, the app had problems to reopen after you closed it completely. This is fixed now. Additional information also provides our article on that known issue.
- User names were sorted unusually in the employee directory. User names are now sorted alphabetically.
- When deleting a picture from the user profile, the same picture could not be uploaded again. This has been fixed.
- Folders in the menu refresh automatically to display changes to group settings.
- On iOS, in some cases, push notifications did not open to the corresponding post. This has been corrected.
- An error occurred when opening a link from a folder description. This has been resolved.
- For iOS devices, the browser back-functionality was disabled in the in-app browser.
- In certain cases, an incorrect error message was displayed when changing a password during the registration process. This has been fixed.
- A misleading error message was displayed when trying to sign in with an invalid username or email. This has been fixed and the error message has been adjusted to be more secure.
- Some sign-in methods were not working properly when the Staffbase News Webpart for SharePoint®️ was configured. This has been fixed and all sign-ins are working properly again.
- If users were asked to register with a first and last name only, the registration step to enter profile data displayed a broken layout. This has been fixed.
- In rare cases, SSO registration timing issues caused problems with conditional group registration.
Plugins
Forms:
- In rare cases, when a form was submitted using Internet Explorer 11, the answer submitted by a user was displayed as “on” in the form submissions. This has been fixed and the correct user input is now displayed.
- When using custom colors consisting of three characters instead of six, forms would not load for app users. This has been fixed and all colors display correctly.
Links Plugin:
- On iOS devices, the navigation bar in the Links plugin was not working properly. This has been fixed.
- When using the Links plugin, it was possible to click “through” the header and unintentionally open the user profile page.
- The deletion call meant to detect if a third-party plugin has been removed was not working as expected. Additionally, the deletion call did not differentiate between testing and productive environments. Both issues are now fixed.
Meal Plan Plugin:
- The Meal Plan plugin suggested all previously entered meal titles in a drop-down menu, including repeated titles. The plugin now suggests each previously entered meal title only once.
Studio
- In rare cases, it was impossible to move single news posts to the trash. This has been fixed.
- When using special characters such as hyphens within the short name of a legal document, the confirmation dialogue for this legal document was improperly displayed. This has been fixed.
- Previously, it was possible to select an invalid sign when setting background or text colors. If this happened, the settings page would not load. It is no longer possible to select invalid signs when choosing a color.
Included Minor Releases Since 3.9
3.9.4 - May 28, 2019
New Newsfeed (beta)
- When trying to view the total number of Likes for a post, the popup showing those numbers didn’t open as expected. This is now fixed.
- Opening a post in the new newsfeed from a notification was broken. Clicking on a push notification or on an entry in the notification center (beta) will now open the respective post.
- In some cases, opening a news post didn’t work from a user profile or the statistics dashboard. This now works properly with the new newsfeed.
- On the startpage, the buttons to show all news and to show older posts were missing in the new newsfeed. This is now fixed.
- When viewing the newsfeed for a channel with update posts, the scrollbar behaved unexpectedly and wasn’t usable. The scroll bar now works smoothly again.
- When switching to the new newsfeed, the newsfeed widget on the start page broke and did not display channels anymore. This is now fixed and the start page widget works with the new newsfeed right away.
Trash & Restoring (beta)
- We added several new elements to the Trash feature. You can now delete and restore:
- Channels
- Pages
- Plugins
- Spaces
- Menu folders
- Also, Staffbase improved the authorization for deleting and restoring content. Now, the system-wide role of Managing Editor and Global Administrator can delete and restore the content in the whole platform. Space Administrators can do so with the content in their respective space. Additionally, if you are the editor of a post or plugin, you can delete as well as restore the respective content.
- In rare cases, it was not possible to move single news posts to the trash. Deleting posts now works properly.
App
- Attachments to pages or posts once again open in a new tab in the app.
- Clicking on a push notification will now open the respective post. Previously, only the app itself was opened.
- Desktop users are now able to search for employees directly within the employee directory. The search will also find pending users if the corresponding option has been set up in the admin panel.
- The quick links at the bottom of your native app are now also available in the public area.
- Folder menus were not automatically refreshed after changing group settings. This is fixed now.
- When opening a page inside a folder, the focus was wrongly set to the first media element, causing the focus to sometimes jump somewhere on the page. The focus now stays at the top of the page.
- The iOS status bar is now always visible. Previously, when closing a video from the full-screen view, it could be that the iOS status bar was no longer visible.
- Accessibility: It’s now easier for screen readers to recognize if a popup is opened, so a screen reader will not read hidden content anymore.
- Staffbase also improved the performance of our new newsfeed.
- When declining the legal documents during registration and trying to register again afterward, the app behaved unexpectedly. The registration once again works properly.
Forms Plugin
- In rare cases when using IE11, the value “on” was wrongly submitted. This has been fixed and now and the correct value is saved.
- When using custom colors consisting of three characters instead of six, forms were not loaded. This has been fixed and everything is displayed correctly.
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