Today we’re introducing a couple of improvements to the Activity Stream.

The most important change is that the Activity Stream is has become real time. What does this mean? It means that whenever posts a comment, submits a form, creates or updates a page the activity feed will get updated immediately! This includes discussions on pages that use the Discuss widget. This means you can finally have real-time conversations on Papyrs!

When the real time feed is working you should see a green light next on the Feed page (number 1. in the screenshot). If you don’t see the green light (even after refreshing the feed page) then your browser doesn’t support real time notifications.

We also added yellow envelope icons next to the groups on the right hand side of the activity feed. Click those icons to toggle whether you want to receive email notifications for activity in that group (number 2. in the screenshot).

Finally, new activity gets highlighted in the feed so you can easily recognize which items are new. New items have a brightly colored bar to on their left side (number 3. in the screenshot). The color of the bar depends on on your site’s Theme settings.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

Requirements: A recent version of Chrome, Safari (Mac or iOS), Firefox, or Microsoft Edge.

We’ve just launched a major new version of Papyrs, with a complete overhaul of the visual appearance and a ton of new features (including the highly anticipated responsive version for mobile devices).

• The upgrade is available today for all customers (at no charge)
• Customers can upgrade to the new version by navigating to Settings > Theme. If the new version isn’t to your taste you can simply switch back.
  

  Read all about this update here

2015 was a great year for Papyrs. We did a lot of work to improve performance and to make the Papyrs back end rock solid and faster than ever. This investment paid off. We didn’t have any unscheduled downtime this year our service was available 99.99% of the time, despite upgrades, software improvements, and the occasional hardware failure. More and more companies rely on Papyrs every day, so this is a result we’re definitely proud of.

To close out the year we’re announcing a couple of new features that we’ve recently rolled out:

Bulk change email notifications

With Papyrs you can subscribe to email notifications for each individual page. This way your email inbox doesn’t get flooded with emails updates about pages you don’t care about. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to a page with a click. Easy enough. However, when you want to change your email notification preferences for a hundred or a thousand pages having to change your preferences one by one takes a long time. So now there’s a single place where you can subscribe and unsubscribe for every page on your site in one go:

Just check or check the boxes next to the pages you want to get email updates for and hit save at the bottom.

Administrators can also change the email notification preferences of other people in their team. Just impersonate the user and visit their email notification settings page.

iFrame/Media widget and 3rd party widget improvements

• Custom iFrame widgets can now go full screen. Handy if you embedded Vimeo or YouTube videos onto your pages.
• You can now have use variables g_user and g_email in your iFrame widgets

For example you can do something like this to create a link that contains the user’s email address and name. Handy when you want to integrate with 3rd party applications:

<a target='_parent' class='yourbutton'/>

<script>
$('a.yourbutton')
  .attr('href', "#" + encodeURIComponent(g_email))
  .text('This button is for ' + g_user);
</script>

Active Directory just-in-time synchronization

Papyrs synchronizes every night with the Active Directory server to get the most up-to-date user information. This means that when a newly user is added to the directory they may not be able to log in to Papyrs yet, because Papyrs doesn’t know the user exists. We improved this: Papyrs now checks with the Active Directory server to see if there are new users during the login process.

Anonymous forms

You can now configure Papyrs Forms to be anonymous.

Just check the box labeled Make form submissions anonymous in the Form properties window. This is great for handling sensitive complaints and reports, where people may only be willing to fill out the form on condition of anonymity.

New RSS widget

Our old RSS widget relied on Google’s Feed API service, which sadly got discontinued last month. Papyrs now has a new RSS widget (still found as an option under Media Widget) that supports all common RSS formats.

Thanks!

We’d like to thank all our customers and all the individual users who use our service. Special thanks to those of you who took the time to report bugs and other glitches that help us squash the trickiest bugs.

We hope you had a great year and we wish you spectacular 2016! Happy new year from the Papyrs team!

We can’t believe the holidays are already here, or that the year is already nearly over. Time sure flies!

Anyway, let’s get to the updates we’ve been working on recently:

Bulk permission assignment

We updated the Bulk Permission assignment page to make it easier for larger groups to manage the permissions. The big improvements are that people can now set permissions for multiple people at once (and for multiple groups), select which pages to set updates for (based on tag or category) and permissions can be easily copied from existing users.

1. First you select with people you want to set permissions for. If you click on “Set Permissions” you’ll get a window where you can select individual people or groups to set permissions for.
2. (optional) You can use the Filter option to choose which page permisisons you want to update. For instance only pages in a specific category or only pages with a given tag.
3. (optional) You can use the checkboxes to the left to exclude individual pages. Uncheck the boxes and the permissions for those pages will remain unchanged.
4. (optional) You can use the dropdown box to copy permissions from an existing user or to set a default permissions. Click on Copy to copy the permissions.
5. Now you can select the permissions for individual pages. Select the appropriate permissions for every page from the list.
6. Does everything look right? If so, time to save. Click “Save Permissions” and the new permisions will be saved.

Read the full documentation here: Papyrs Permission Management Help.

LDAP diagnostics & support for multiple Organizational Units

LDAP integration has a number of great benefits:

• Adding many people to Papyrs has never been easier. It just takes two clicks. All their contact information (including name, email address, phone number) will be synchronized automatically so you don’t have to fill out the contact information twice.
• Users can log in without a username or password, so there’s nothing to forget. For as long as their computers are trusted by the Domain Controller (which is entirely under your control) they can access Papyrs and otherwise they’ll be shut out.
• Single Sign-On greatly improves adoption and intranet engagement rates. An intranet that isn’t in active use reaches only a fraction of its true potential.
  You can keep inviting guests and other external users. Papyrs can mix and match different login systems for different users. You can even use Papyrs for Google Apps and Papyrs with Integrated Windows Authentication side by side.
• Extra Secure connection. When people don’t need a username and password to log in then you won’t have to worry about people being careless with their passwords. And communication between Papyrs and the Windows Domain server supports strong (online banking grade) encryption.

However, up till now setting up the connection between the Active Directory server and Papyrs was more difficult than it needed to be. So we created an LDAP diagnostics page where people can see if the connection is working correct and if not, which steps have to be taken to get the integration working.

In addition we’ve made it easier to have Papyrs connect to multiple Active Directory servers or multiple groups (Organizational Units).

You can read the complete details on Papyrs integration with Activity Directory in the Active Directory help page

Code Widget

Sharing fragments of programming code (HTML, Javascript, Python, etc) on Papyrs pages works much better now thanks to our Code Widget. It has automatic syntax highlighting, indentation and it uses fixed-width fonts that look good on every browser. So when you want to share some code, now it’s a breeze:

And the code right on the page:

For the details see the Papyrs Code Snippet Widget documentation.

Performance improvements

Papyrs is noticeably faster now, especially for accounts with many users and many pages. Naturally, there’s still more work to be done, because Papyrs can never be fast enough.

More

We wish you all happy holidays, and thanks for reading!