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!

What do you think of when you see the term “intranet“?

In a recent discussion with some company about the state of “intranets”, we came to the conclusion that the word intranet is kind of confusing. Apparently we were both thinking about something completely different, not in the problem it should solve, but rather what it looks like and how it works.

Wikipedia describes an intranet as:

An intranet is a computer network that uses Internet Protocol technology to share information, operational systems, or computing services within an organization. The term is used in contrast to internet, a network between organizations, and instead refers to a network within an organization. Sometimes, the term refers only to the organization’s internal website, but may be a more extensive part of the organization’s information technology infrastructure, and may be composed of multiple local area networks. The objective is to organize each individual’s desktop with minimal cost, time and effort to be more productive, cost efficient, timely, and competitive.

Reading the part about a “computer network that uses Internet Protocol technology“, I see some images of a typical 90’s terminal with a dial-up modem connecting to the company’s server. It doesn’t really sound like the typical “web 2.0” collaboration software or social intranets apps to me. But maybe my own definition is wrong? The last part of Wikipedia’s definition, on a company website, comes closer to what I think a modern interpretation of the word would be. But still, a web site also sounds kind of static in this age of interactive web apps.

Because of recent the revolution of web apps and cloud technology, an intranet no longer needs to be physically hosted inside a company’s office building. Next to reducing IT costs (hosting, maintenance, hardware, etc.), it allowed for a lot of new innovation on the software side, as your data is always accessible and available from anywhere. And with the increasing popularity of cloud platforms like Google Apps, it looks like even the large enterprises (the traditional “laggards” when it comes to the adoption of new technology) are catching on to this idea.

So now the intranets, that used to be an internal network, can be called a “hosted intranet”, and is software in the cloud. It’s accessible from anywhere, but still “internal”, because your data is still private. But then what about the term extranet? If that’s the part of an intranet that’s “external”, isn’t the entire “hosted intranet” an extranet? Personally I see an extranet in the context of hosted intranets as the part of the hosted intranet site that’s accessible by people outside the company, or even public. Then again, when I read that sentence over, I’m not surprised people find the terms confusing!

Then there’s the whole website vs web app discussion. An intranet, whether in the cloud or not, is no longer just a website, or is it? All those “social” features like an activity stream, 3rd party web widgets, people profiles, and so on, they’re very much part of the modern intranet. So much so perhaps, that when people search for something like “a social network for our company”, they don’t expect to find just that, but also all the traditional intranet features with it (like pages, forms and workflows).

Another big difference between traditional intranets and the new generation of web applications, is the latter’s heavy focus on design and user interaction. A lot of the old generation enterprise software had to be installed, configured and updated by IT consultants, whereas all today’s (web) apps have user-friendly interfaces that can be used by everybody. That might be another reason why people wouldn’t search for an “intranet” when they look for a modern equivalent. So what would they call it? We’ve heard things like company wiki, online collaboration software, but even things like “portal” (which to me doesn’t sound much more modern than intranet though :), or “project management software” (even though they were referring to all the intranet’s functionality).

Maybe it’s time to invent a new term. How do you call your “intranet”?