1. Town Hall Calendar Integration
Town Halls are a great way to bring executives and employees together in a moderated, real-time conversation inside your Socialcast community. Regardless of the topic, a Town Hall would typically cover something you don’t want to miss! Now, members of a community who plan to attend Town Hall will be able to seamlessly add the event to their calendars. There will be a “Add to Calendar” button in the Town Hall announcement or Town Hall page where members will be able to download an .ics calendar file and upload it their primary calendar (as long as it supports .ics files).
The .ics calendar event will include:
- The name of the Town Hall
- The description
- A link to the Town Hall page
- Town Hall start/end date/time
2. Export Challenges (Ideas) as a CSV
A Challenge offers a quick way to capture ideas from members in the community to solve tough problems, improve processes, and gain feedback. This data is important and should be readily accessible! You can now export the ideas in a Challenge into a CSV file. The file will list all ideas with their upvotes, downvotes, submission date, and status. To export the file, click on the Settings gear icon in a Challenge, and then select “Export Challenge as CSV”. The file will then be downloaded by your browser.
3. Simplified Behavior in the Share Form
We heard from some of our customers that there was some confusion on when to use an “@” sign to notify a user and when they could simply type in a colleague’s name. Going forward we tried to simplify this by allowing users to type a name with or without the “@” sign in the “People or Groups to notify” field of the Post form. This will bring up the suggestion drop-down and automatically add an @mention to a user’s message.
4. New Comment Notification
While typing a comment, you will now see a notification when a new comment is added to the message you’re commenting on. Clicking on the notification will show the new comment, so that your response remains relevant.
5. Paste Screenshot from Clipboard
Attaching screenshots to a post is a very common practice while working towards a resolution. We’ve made it easier to attach screenshots to messages and comments in Socialcast. In addition to saving a screenshot to your local drive and then attaching it, or using the drag and drop feature, you can now paste screenshots that have been copied to your clipboard directly in your post. Check with your Operating System shortcuts for more information on how to take a screenshot that is automatically copied to your clipboard. Note: Due to browser limitations, this only works on Chrome browsers.
External Contributor Enhancements
1. Requestable External-Facing Groups
When a request is made to join the External-Facing group, the group admin will then have the ability to decide if the request should be granted or not.
2. Added External Contributors to Search Dropdown
One major painpoint we wanted to tackle was the difficulty around searching for External Contributors and accessing their profiles. As you type the name of an External Contributor in the community Search bar, the auto-suggestion dropdown will now include names of all the External Contributors that are part of the External Groups you are a member of, or have access to. These External Contributors will appear under a section labeled “External Contributors” and will have the ‘external’ indicator over their avatar.
3. Improved @Mention Functionality for External Contributors
We’ve made many enhancements to the @mention functionality across our core app over the year, but External Contributors need to notify people in messages or comments just as full members do. Now, External Contributors will be receive the same type of auto-suggest functionality when trying to @mention people within their groups. The list of suggested names will be limited to only members of that specific external contributor group and not all members of the community.
4. Search Capabilities for External Contributors
We are now providing External Contributors with a Search bar and results page to access previous conversations from the External Groups they belong to. After conducting a search, the External Contributor will be able to filter message results by adding a date range or including web feeds. The search will only include content from the group they are searching from, at this time. However, in future releases we will allow External Contributors to search across all groups for which are members of (if they’ve been invited to multiple Externally-Facing groups within the same community).
*Please note that On-Premise clients will receive these features in a future release.