The Socialcast team is happy to announce that Chat, our newest secure instant-messaging tool, is now available! Read more about this month’s feature enhancements below and let us know what you think.
1. Socialcast Chat
The Socialcast team understands the importance of having a reliable, real-time, persistent, and searchable company-wide chat tool. This month, we are excited to unveil our latest major feature enhancement, Socialcast Chat, formally known as Private Messages. Our goal with Socialcast Chat is to make a more responsive, lightweight, and persistent chat tool that customers can use for their everyday business communication needs, and have that experience flow seamlessly between web and mobile devices.
You will notice a brand new Chat menu pinned to the right-hand side of your browser. This will show an expanded list of all your favorite and recent chats. With this change, we have removed the Private Message flyout from the left-hand navigation menu. To start a new chat, simply click the “+” icon at the top of the Chat menu. You can start a conversation with a single person or with multiple people.
Your chat conversation will pop-up in a mini chat window. Simply start typing your message in the text field and hit Enter. Some features that we support include:
- Highlighted blue chrome banner on unread chat windows
- Infinite scroll and load of previous chat messages
- Support for markdown and markdown Emojis
- Ability to hide a 1:1 chat. Click the gear icon > ‘Remove from chat list’
- Ability to add members, rename, or leave a group chat. Click the gear icon.
- Full conversation view (similar to old Private Message view)
- Ability to change group chat photo in full conversation view
- Browser tab flash notification
- Orange unread notification counter in chat menu
If you have email notifications for Chat enabled, you will now only receive an aggregated email for any unread chats after 5 minutes of inactivity.
The mobile experience of using Chat will remain the same as it did for Private Messages. In our next mobile app releases, you will notice that we’ve renamed Private Messages to “Chat”. You will still be able to access all your chat messages and receive push notifications so you don’t miss a beat! We will continue to improve the mobile Chat experience over time so stay tuned!
For more information on how to use and manage the Chat feature, check our resource HERE.
2. Participants Stat added to Town Halls
Moderators and Speakers of a Town Hall want to know how many people were actually in the “virtual audience” between the start and end of their Town Hall session. To make this statistic more clear, we have added “Participants” to the Town Hall Stats section, and removed “Views” as many felt this was confusing. This statistic should now show the number of unique members that visited the Town Hall page while the Town Hall was in an active state (Note: Town Halls can be reactivated at various times).
3. Ability for Moderators to Answer Questions in Town Halls
Many of our customers who use Town Halls during live meetings/sessions end up assigning moderators with the responsibility of note-taking and dictating a speaker’s live answers. So in addition to speakers, any time a moderator comments to a question in the Town Hall, the question will be marked as “answered”. The answered question will show up in the respective ‘All Answered’ filter.
4. Added Additional Challenge States
Customers that are using the Challenges feature extensively have requested for more states for Challenge ideas. As a moderator of a Challenge, you have the ability to crowdsource ideas from your community and take actions on the best ideas. The state of an idea also promotes transparency to participating members and let’s them know if an idea has been accepted. The two additional states we have added include “In Progress” and “Completed”.
*Please note that On-Premise clients will receive these features in a future release.