Author Archives: Diederik

Add 360 degree photos to your intranet

In this blogpost we show how you can easily add interactive 360 degree images to your intranet site. Maybe you got a cool image of your city, or of your office, or of something else you’d like to show off. Here we’ve embedded an interactive image of Amsterdam at night:

You can zoom and pan right on the intranet. Also works on mobile devices.

Step by step instructions

Adding a 360 view image to your intranet isn’t difficult. These are the steps.

  • Find the image you want to include on Google Maps. You can use the “360” tab in the images section to filter for suitable images.
  • Click on the 3 vertical dots next to the image author and select “Share and embed”
  • Choose “embed a map”, then “copy HTML”
  • Add a Papyrs Media/Iframe widget to your page
  • From the embed HTML you copied earlier, take the embed url (starts with https://www.google.com/maps/embed?") and copy that into the “include a web page” field.
  • Hit OK and the widget should appear on your Papyrs page. You can use the “resize” button to make adjustments as needed.

That’s it. Just a cool trick we wanted to share.

Access Papyrs from your own domain

When people sign up for a Papyrs intranet site they get their own subdomain by default: https://yourcompany.papyrs.com. You can also access your site from a custom domain, like https://intranet.yourcompany.com. This is much nicer (and certainly easier to remember for your coworkers). There was a downside, though: an SSL security certificate is needed to encrypt the connection to the custom domain, and getting one signed could be a complicated process. You would have to download a signing request from us, then purchase an SSL certificate from a 3rd party vendor, then provide the signing request to the certificate authority, and then you would have to send the signed certificate files to us. It worked, but it was just too complicated.

Out with the old; in with the new

We can now issue SSL certificates on behalf of our customers. This means that moving your Papyrs site to your own domain has never never been easier. It’s just a matter of updating the subdomain of your choosing to the Papyrs service (DNS update) and we take care of everything else!

  1. Decide on a subdomain name you would like to use, for example
    https://intranet.yourcompany.com (you need to be owner of this domain).
  2. Change the DNS settings of your subdomain to point it to the address of the Papyrs servers. You can do this by adding a CNAME record to the DNS zone file. Point the CNAME to custom.papyrs.com.
    • Some DNS providers require the . (dot) at the end, others don’t
    • Just to be clear: we literally mean custom.papyrs.com here, so don’t replace “custom” with your account name.
      If there is an existing A record for your subdomain, remove it so only the CNAME to custom.papyrs.com remains.
  3. Fill out the form at https://yoursite.papyrs.com/settings/custom-domain/. Your new domain should get activated within 24 hours, and the transition will not involve any downtime.

(Available for Papyrs Business customers and above. For more info see White Label documentation)

New Feature: embed PDF documents in Papyrs

A new feature in Papyrs makes it really easy to embed PDF files directly on your pages.

When you drag a Media/Widget to your Papyrs page you’ll see a new button for PDF files:

Just upload the file and you’re set:

You can upload multiple PDF files on a page, and PDF files are automatically indexed for easy searching! In addition PDF files can be downloaded and printed directly from the Papyrs page.

Embed Google Suite Content

You can still embed Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Charts onto Papyrs pages. For more info about that see the Papyrs & Google Suite documentation.

Read-only forms and a video widget

Today we launched two new features for Papyrs.

Read-only Papyrs Forms

Like most features in Papyrs, you can use the permission system to restrict user access. For some forms regular users should be able to view records submitted by other people but not edit them. Or maybe users should only be able to view the forms they submitted themselves. Or maybe users should not be allowed to view any form records at all.

form_permissions
Form access permissions can be set by clicking “change form properties” below the Form Submit button

When a user is allowed to view a form record but not edit it, there are now two view options: 1) the reports view and 2) the read-only form view.

form_list_view
In the reports view you can get a list of all form records matching your search criteria (who created it/when was it created/what form fields are selected)

form_ro_view
In the read-only view users who are not allowed to make changes can still view a form record the way it was originally filled out.

Video widget

Today you can add videos directly on your Papyrs site. This is in addition to the previous video options: you can still add videos to Papyrs pages using the YouTube widget and videos from other platforms (like Vimeo) can also still be embedded onto Papyrs pages. Now there are two new ways to add videos to your intranet site: using the Papyrs Video widget and as attachments to Feed and Discuss comments.

video_feed
When mpeg 4 videos (*.mp4) are added as attachments to comments a video player will show automatically.

Of course the videos will play on your mobile device as well:

mobile_video

When you add a Media/Widget to a Papyrs page you’ll now see a new Video icon show up on the “Social Media” tab (we’re going to find a better place for the video widget soon). Here you can upload a video directly onto your Papyrs page:

media_widget_video

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!