New People Directory and other updates

Today we’re announcing a new updated design for the People Directory and all related user setting screens.

The new design makes it easier to browse through all the people in your organization and quickly look up their details. Administrators can also invite and change settings for people directly from the new People Directory. Groups have also been updated and are now displayed more prominently with an optional icon.

New People Directory

The default view for the People Directory can also be customized, allowing you to view the directory with large icons, or in a table, with just the columns you like (from phone numbers to birthdays).

Clicking on a user instantly shows profile details and relevant settings for Administrators:

The permission settings screen has also been updated, which allows Administrators to quickly change permissions for everyone in a group:

group-edit

The following screenshot shows the new design for people profiles:

screenshot-profile-page-small

The Navigation widget has also been updated to include options for listing users and groups, making it easier to directly link to profiles for people responsible for a project or page, for example:

We also made a bunch of other small changes, from speed improvements to simplifying settings.

We hope you like these new updates. Over the coming months we’re we planning to release more design updates and customization options, so stay stuned!

Papyrs Integration with Active Directory and Sharepoint via LDAP

Today we’re announcing new functionality for Papyrs: integration with Active Directory and Sharepoint with Single Sign-On (SSO), based on LDAP. After a trial period with a small number of customers we’re now going to offer LDAP integration to all Large Plan subscriptions and above. Many organizations already have an internal network and from today on Papyrs can integrate seamlessly with the Windows network already in place.

Papyrs integration consists of four parts:

  1. Easily add people from your existing network to join Papyrs.
  2. Synchronize contact information from your existing windows network to Papyrs.
  3. Active Directory Authentication — users can log in to Papyrs with their existing username and password.
  4. Single Sign-On — automatically log on to Papyrs from computers in a Windows Domain, using their Windows username and password.

This has a number of great benefits:

  • Adding a large number of 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 internet 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.

How does it work?

Papyrs connects to the LDAP server every night to update the list of users in the Windows network. Administrators of a Papyrs account can add those users to Papyrs (or allow users to invite themselves to the Papyrs group) and contact information for these new users is pulled from the Active Directory. When users log in to Papyrs the Active Directory server is contacted to verify the user is permitted to log in, and if so access to Papyrs is granted. If needed, Papyrs can work with multiple active directory servers.

Sharepoint / Active Directory Settings Overview

For more details (and more screenshots) take a look the Papyrs for Windows Networks documentation.

Papyrs and Google Apps

Papyrs already integrates with Google Apps and offers Google Apps Single Sign-On as well. This works in combination with the new LDAP integration. Read more about the benefits of combining Papyrs with Google Apps.

Questions?

No matter how easy we try to make it, integration between different networks is always pretty complex. There are many buzzwords involved that sometimes raise more questions than they answer. So if you have any questions or if you’re not sure if Active Directory integration makes sense in your situation just contact us Papyrs Contact Form or at team@stunf.com.

That’s it for today. More updates coming soon!

New Feature – Email Digests

Next to the Activity Stream, Email notifications is a handy features to keep up to date of the activity in your intranet. When you’re subscribed to email updates for a page, you’ll automatically receive an email when it is updated, or when a new comment or form is submitted. When you’re subscribed to many pages though, the amount of notification emails can sometimes become quite overwhelming. If you like to receive notification updates, but find you’re getting too many emails, this new feature is for you.

Today we’re releasing a new feature: email digests. Once you turn on email digests, rather than receiving a new email for every update, you’ll receive a daily summary of all notifications. Like before, you can subscribe to just the pages you’re interested in, and all updates for those pages will be included in the digest email.

You can turn the daily digest emails on or off under Settings > Notifications > Enable daily digest emails.

Digest Email

To keep the digest emails shorter, the full details of changes to a page are not shown. You can still quickly access the changes with the direct view changes link, showing you the changes like before:

Changes between page updates

Hope you like this new feature, more coming soon!

Papyrs & Google Apps

This is just a quick announcement for new users. If you’re already using Papyrs, nothing is changing.

Google has recently updated their Marketplace for Google Apps, and we’re happy to announce Papyrs is amongst the first apps to be available in the new store.

google-apps-marketplace

If your organization is using Google Apps and wants to give Papyrs a try, you can access the Marketplace in the Admin Console, and install Papyrs from there. You can also read more about all the integration between Google Apps and Papyrs. Not using Google Apps? Of course you can also sign up without.

Just like before, Google Apps users can access Papyrs directly from Google’s navigation bar:

google-apps-marketplace-link

Launching Form Updates & Apps

Today we’re relasing a big update to forms. The form results page has been completely redesigned, and now allows you to view your form records in different views. By default, records are shown in a table, like before. The table view has been updated and the columns can now be resized. Using the new view settings (View & Reports > Change view defaults), you can also hide the columns you don’t need. Next to the table and list view, we’ve also added two new record views: thumbnail and calendar view.

Example - View contact records as thumbnails

Creating reports and filtering form records also became easier: in the filter panel (View & Reports > Show filters), you can now select filters and immediately see the matching records, without having to create a new report first.

Filter data and create reports

We’ve also added pagination, to make it easier to browse forms with many records.

Finally, we’ve also introduced a new option to turn forms into more complete web apps, which we call Apps mode. When Apps mode is enabled, a new page is automatically created when a new form is submitted, using the form page as a template. This way each record can be viewed on a separate page. Like any other page, you can then add additional widgets such as related documents or a discussion to each page in the app. This is especially useful if you want to organize information with a certain structure, but need the flexibility to add related information later on. For example, you could create a form to create contacts, described by a number of fields (a name, an address, and so on). With app mode enabled, when a new contact form is submitted, a new contact page is created, based on the form template. You can then add related information, files, discussions and other widgets to the contact page. You can find more information and a demo video at Papyrs Apps.

Papyrs Apps