This month, we have some awesome new features, such as EZ Link and Sameroom integration, enhancements to existing features, and new iOS and Android mobile app updates! Check out what’s new for February* below:
1. Introducing EZ Link
In this multi-device era, employees are constantly transitioning from laptop to mobile, to home device. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to keep track of usernames and credentials for all the applications you use on a daily basis, and from a security standpoint it is not always acceptable to save usernames and passwords in browsers and on devices.
Socialcast has taken a giant leap forward in simplifying our login flow. This month, we will be releasing a new feature that we’ve coined “EZ Link”. Once this feature goes live and is enabled for your community, you will see it available on the web and mobile app.
Sure the link will expire in one hour, but we guarantee it will make your life so much easier!
The EZ Link will also be available as part of the sign in flow on our mobile apps. See the IOS and Android release notes below.
2. Contextual Search within Projects, Challenges, Town Halls, and Profiles
We’ve changed our search behavior so that if you’re working in a specific Project, Challenge, or Town Hall, or visiting a user’s profile page, you can now search for keywords directly within those objects. This is similar to how the existing Search within Group has worked. After searching for a keyword, you’ll notice the Search Results page will automatically filter the specific Project, Challenge, Town Hall, or User and yield the most relevant results!
When searching within a Project, we now show matches for Objective and Task titles. This is on top of the results we already show for the content found in discussions.
3. Manage Bulk Group Membership Invites
Do you use Socialcast groups to manage communication with large teams? Have you ever added a batch of invites only to have the team members change out from under you? Not to worry, we now have provided a quick and easy way to Cancel or Resend invitations for a batch of members for a given group! As a group admin, simply click the membership count link at the top right hand corner of your group page. Under the Invited tab, you will see the following changes:
- Ability to select multiple members
- Cancel Selected Invitations
- Resend Selected Invitations
4. Permalink to Comments in Email Notifications
Keeping up with key conversations in the community is critical in doing our daily jobs, which is why many of us also rely on email notifications to stay in the loop. We wanted to make it easier for users to be able to reference and jump to a specific comment if you’re subscribed or active in a discussion. That is why we made an improvement in our notification email: the timestamps included under the comments in the email notifications is now an active hyperlink that will take you directly to the message on the web and will highlight and scroll the specific comment into view.
5. Updates to Jenkins Integration
We’ve received feedback to support alerts for unstable builds. This information is critical in the Jenkins workflow, where a build becomes unstable if it was built successfully, but one or more publishers report it unstable. For example, if the JUnit publisher is configured and a test fails then the build will be marked unstable. Now, our Socialcast Jenkins integration will display an alert icon and message to represent an unstable build.
6. Custom Avatars for Integrations
We now allow you to upload custom avatars for a given integration. Often times, an Ops team might have a number of different JIRA, Jenkins, or PagerDuty integrations going with different queries in a given group. Now users can specify different avatars to visually differentiate the integrations.
7. New Integration: Sameroom
We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Sameroom. Sameroom offers real-time, bi-directional integrations between Socialcast and other chat services, like Slack, HipChat, Skype for Business, Flowdock, Campfire, IRC, Hangouts, and many more!
Check out this short 35-sec video that explains how their service works.
A community admin can enable/disable this integration by going to Admin Settings > Integrations > Apps > Sameroom > click on the gear icon > Enable. Once enabled, the Sameroom app will appear on the Apps page and all users will be able to create a tube or portal on the Sameroom website.
Visit this site for more information on supported Sameroom integrations with Socialcast: https://sameroom.io/integrations/socialcast-integrations
And just because we thought you’d might ask, here’s their Security Overview so you can review it prior to setting up the integration.
*Please note that On-Premise clients will receive these features in a future release.
Mobile App Updates
8. Socialcast iOS 3.8 App – Available Now
Requires iOS 8 or later
The Socialcast iOS mobile app 3.8 release introduces the new “EZ Link” – an even simpler way to log in to the Socialcast app – and other great enhancements. Check out the list of updates below and don’t forget to download the app in the App Store today.
- Introducing EZ Link: The simplest and fastest way to log in to the Socialcast mobile app! Tired of remembering your password when logging into your community? Now, after entering your community URL and email during the sign in flow, you will have the option to request for an EZ Link email to be immediately sent your way. The email will contain a link that automatically logs you into your Socialcast community on our mobile app so you can start collaborating right away!
- Note: The EZ Link button will only be available to users if your community has it enabled. See announcement above. This feature on mobile is currently only available for non-SSO SaaS communities.
- Ability to rename group chats
- Ability to leave group chats
- Ability to hide 1:1 chats
- Fixed: Deep-linking from emails into the Socialcast mobile app on iOS 9
- Other various bug fixes and performance updates
9. Discontinued Support for iOS 7
With the Socialcast iOS 3.8 app release, we will no longer support iOS 7. While users on iOS 7 with existing Socialcast applications may still be able to log-in, we will no longer invest in maintenance of those apps. Users will need to upgrade to a supported version of the operating system in order to download newer versions of the Socialcast app.
According to Apple and Socialcast user data, very few users are still using iOS 7 or earlier. We appreciate your understanding with this decision as it will allow us to focus more resources on our apps development across all our platforms.
10. Socialcast Android App 3.5 – Available Now
The Socialcast Android mobile app 3.5 release introduces the new “EZ Link” – an even simpler way to log in to the Socialcast app – and other great enhancements. Check out the list of updates below and don’t forget to download the app in the Google Play Store today!
- Introducing EZ Link: The simplest and fastest way to log in to the Socialcast mobile app! Tired of remembering your password when logging into your community? Now, after entering your community URL and email during the sign in flow, you will have the option to request for an EZ Link email to be immediately sent your way. The email will contain a link that automatically logs you into your Socialcast community on our mobile app so you can start collaborating right away!
- Note: The EZ Link button will only be available to users if your community has it enabled. See announcement above. This feature on mobile is currently only available for non-SSO SaaS communities.
- Ability to rename group chats
- Ability to leave group chats
- Ability to hide 1:1 chats
- Other various bug fixes and performance updates
