Collaboration is about communication, and at least for the time being, communication is all about email. So Papyrs sends email notifications to keep everybody in your team up to date. We send emails when a new form is submitted, when a page is modified, when people discuss something via a Discuss widget ans so forth. This is great because it allows you see what other people in your team are up to from your PC, Mac or mobile phone in a glance. We even highlight changes made to a page (it’s a huge time saver!)

Often you don’t just want to read what’s going on, you want to actively contribute to the conversation. Up till now you had to click on a link in the email that would take you to the Papyrs page. And then, on the Papyrs page you could take part in the conversation. This approach has a number of downsides:

1. Guests and casual users of Papyrs may not want to log in just to reply to an email,
2. or they may have forgotten their password,
3. or they may be on a slow mobile device and therefore can’t easily get to Papyrs.

The solution — reply-by-email

So from now on you can reply to Papyrs activity notifications directly from your email client:

Hit send and in just a moment the activity feed will be updated so everybody knows you’re going to join the rest for lunch:

This happens completely automatically. Papyrs will analyse the email you send. Figure out who you’re replying to. Create a Papyrs comment in the activity stream. And finally, Papyrs will notify everybody who has elected to receive email updates with your new email message. It’s completely automated and it happens in seconds!

So collaborating with Papyrs has never been easier! You don’t have to be logged in to take advantage of this feature, because you’re already logged in to your email software. That takes care of the first problem and second problem. And since email works great on mobile phones and tablets problem 3 is also taken care of.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading and for using Papyrs. Not using Papyrs yet? Why not give the free trial a spin?

More updates soon!

Today we’re launching a big version upgrade for Papyrs. An important part of storing and sharing information within your company or organization is navigation, to make sure everybody can quickly find what they’re looking for. Papyrs already had a powerful find-as-you-type search, and navigation widgets allowed you to add table of contents, links to other pages and category tree controls to a single page. We’re now launching a fully customizable global menu bar.

With the menu bar you can easily add global navigation to your Papyrs intranet site. Because the menu bar is global, you only need to create the menu once, and the navigation is automatically available from every page. This is a great way to link to pages you use frequently, but you can also add all kinds of other (external) links, or add hierarchical navigation using drop down menus.

Menu Editor
Like editing pages, we wanted to make sure everyone can build their own custom menus without the need for any technical knowledge. That means no scripts, markup codes or configuration. To make this work we built a new custom menu editor. Like the page editor, you can create your own designs by just clicking and dragging building blocks in the editor. We wanted to find the right balance between flexibility and keeping things easy to use and simple, so we introduced the following building blocks you can add to the menu bar:

• Page Links
  link to a page
• Links
  links to an (external) URL
• Categories
  add a category and its pages as a dropdown menu
• Custom Dropdown Menus
  add a dropdown menu, to which more Page Links and Links can be added
• Internal Navigation
  add a button to access standard functionality like the All Pages overview or the Activity Stream

Links to pages and categories a user cannot access are automatically hidden.

You can access the menu editor under Settings > Menu Bar.

More Menu
By default, the new menu bar contains the same navigation buttons as the old menu buttons (Home, All Pages, Activity Stream, People Directory and Settings). Because all buttons can now be modified or removed, we’ve added the More Menu, to make sure you can always access all standard functionality. The More Menu is always the first item on the menu bar.

More Features..

We’ve also added a couple of other features over the last few weeks:

Custom Form Submission Message
You can now customize the Thank You message when someone submits a form. To change the message, edit the page (Page > Edit Page), and edit the widget with the Submit button. You can then set the message in the dialog (shown below):

Auto-save draft
If you’re working on a new draft, or editing an existing document, Papyrs will now periodically auto-save your changes to the draft. As before, when you’re done editing the draft, just click Save to publish the changes (or discard the draft to cancel the changes).

User Impersonation
If your plan comes with the Admin Console, administrators can now impersonate other users in your account. This lets administrators view pages and settings as if they were another user. This can be useful to make sure the settings are correct, or to help a user with some question. As long as a user is impersonated, all actions are performed as this user (such as posting a comment, changing settings, etc.); to exit impersonation mode click “Stop Impersonating” in the yellow top bar.

More Theme options
Some extra theming options were added to the Theme Settings page:

• Background Image
  Upload an image to use as the background image (instead of a flat background color).

• Background & Banner Options
  When a background or banner image is set, it’s now possible to either repeat or hide the image. The “Repeat” option will horizontally and vertically repeat the image until it fills the banner or background area. This is especially useful if you’re using pattern images, for example. The Hide option allows you to (temporarily) not show the image, but use the background or banner background color instead.

• Menubar Background Gradient color
  If this color is different from the menu bar background color, a gradient color is used on the menu bar (from the background color, to the background gradient color). Unfortunately old versions of Internet Explorer won’t support this, so users of those browsers will just see the menu bar background color.

We hope you like all the new features!

Zapier is a great service that allows you to connect/sync between all kinds of web services. Best of all, it’s based on a concept we like a lot ourselves: simple drag & drop! Without any programming knowledge you can simply connect any of the – over 150 – services listed in their service directory. And today we’re happy to announce Papyrs is now one of them!

So how does it work? If you sign up for Zapier, you can start connecting Papyrs to other services, or the other way around. Zapier calls any integration between any two services a Zap. The possibilities are pretty much endless, but just to give you some ideas for example Zaps for Papyrs:

• Post the text of a new email in GMail to a Papyrs page
• Post a new Stripe charge to the Activity Stream
• Post a message to a page when a new WordPress blog comment arrives
• Post a HipChat message when a new Page is created
• Create a page to which all new Facebook updates are automatically added
• Post Tweets to the Activity Stream
• Add a new Desk case to a Page
• On a new GitHub commit, post a message to the Activity Stream

Let’s have a look at creating a Zap for the first example. Click on Create New Zap in your Zapier dashboard. Drag and drop the two services you want to connect. On the left side you drag a service which will trigger an action for the service you add to the right. We currently have a trigger for newly created pages, and actions to create a Textboxes and Headings on a Page and post new comments to the Activity Stream. We’re planning to add many more actions and triggers later on. For now, let’s set a new email in Gmail as the trigger (left), to create a new Textbox on a Papyrs page (right).

You need to enter your account information next. For Papyrs you need to enter your API key (go to Settings > Account in Papyrs to request one). Then, simply drag the fields from the email you want to add to the new Textbox.

That’s it. A new Textbox will now be added to the selected page once a new email arrives.

Go over to the Zapier.com home page and give it a spin (literally, the spinner shows you some examples of what’s possible).

This is just a quick update. With Papyrs you’ve always been able to quickly add a bunch of images to a page. Just drag an Image Gallery widget to the page, then drag&drop the images you want, re-order them if needed and select the size of the thumbnails you need. Now we made it even better, by adding proportionally sized thumbnails.

To use the new functionality, check “Proportional Thumbnails” in the Image Gallery settings window:

We also added two additional thumbnail sizes: “XLarge” and “Gigantic”. For those situations where large thumbnails just aren’t large enough.

Resending team invitation emails

Another feature we’ve added is the ability to resend invitation emails to all people who didn’t accept them yet. When you invite a large number of people to your team, some people might have been in the middle of something and forgot about the email. Using the “Resend invitation” button, you can resend the invitation to someone. With the new button, “Resend all unaccepted invitations”, you can resend all unaccepted invitation emails (i.e. emails sent to people who didn’t join the team yet). You can find the button under Settings > People > and click someone’s “View invitation status”.

Thanks for reading! More coming soon.

Happy new year everybody!

We hope everybody had a great holiday and is looking forward to a great 2013. We think 2013 is going to be an exciting year — we can’t wait!

To kick off the new year we’re announcing a number of features (some of which we launched at the end of last year, but we didn’t put on our blog yet). Alright, here goes:

1. Bulk Change Permissions

Account administrators can use this to change all of a person’s page permissions at once. Go to Settings > People and you’ll see a link “Set Page Permissions” next to every user in your group (except for administrators, because they already have access to every page).

Click “Set Page Permissions” and you’ll arrive at a page where you can set all the permissions for that user. This is how it works:

1. Select who you want to copy permissions from (or leave as is).
2. Click OK to update the list of permissions for every page.
3. Review the changes (and make adjustments where needed).
4. Save! (or hit cancel if you’ve changed your mind)

2. Google Analytics

You can now link Papyrs to Google Analytics. This way you can track which pages are visited most frequently, from where and using which devices and so on. To use this you’ll have to get a (free) Google Analytics account. How does it work? Easy, you go to Settings > Account and there you’ll see a new category “Analytics”. Insert your Google Analytics ID — it looks like UA-XXXXX-X in the field and you’re good to go. But make sure that when you sign up for Google Analytics you set the “Website URL” to your Papyrs domain (yoursite.papyrs.com).

It can take up to 24 hours for Papyrs activity data to show up in Google Analytics.

3. Centralized Google Apps Search

In a previous blog post we wrote about Papyrs Google Apps integration. You could already log in with your Google Apps ID, attach files from Google Drive to Papyrs Pages (both from your personal Google Drive and from a Google Apps drive) and so on. Now we improved Google Apps integration even more, with centralized Google Apps Search. After connecting Papyrs to Google Apps (Settings > Account > Google Docs/Calendar) Papyrs will automatically search through your entire Google Drive. Papyrs will search for Files, Documents, Spreadsheets, Drawings, Charts and so on. Just type in the search box and you’ll get all results:

Here in the picture you see that the first result is a Google Spreadsheet (you can tell by the green Google Spreadsheets icon), then a couple of Papyrs pages and attachments. Then at the bottom some more Google Drive documents and Spreadsheets are listed. Of course the results you see depend entirely on the permissions you have. If you have personal documents stored on Google Drive they will show up when you search for them, but not when one of your colleague searches for them. It’s all very convenient!

4. Rename Page Categories

Administrators can now rename page categories directly from the Pages overview. Just navigate to a category and click the rename link.

5. Page Navigation Widget

This is a small change. When you have a lot of page categories and lots and lots of pages (and some of our customers do) then you don’t want them all to clutter up your page. So now you set your Navigation Widget to show these categories collapsed by default. It’s only a small feature, but a frequently requested one!

Thanks for reading

Oh, and in case you missed it — make sure to also check out Papyrs’ page layout features we launched a few months ago.

More updates coming soon!