Your September Release Preview

With the announcements made at ICE this morning, there is a lot to cover for September and beyond. Let’s start with what is coming in the September update.

Branded Email Notifications

Igloo continues to deliver a digital destination that will appeal to users and drive engagement across devices and platforms. Today, Igloo introduced a suite of redesigned email notifications, allowing organizations to extend their digital identity across platforms.

This update will allow you to customize your Igloo workplace email notifications with your own logo and brand color. Check out the video for a preview!

Until you add your own branding through the site Control Panel, your email notifications will have a neutral gray color, with the name of your digital workplace written in a standard font. 

We’ve documented the step-by-step instructions on how to upload your logo and set your color in the Customer Care Knowledge Base. Spoiler alert: it’s as easy as clicking the gear, then “Appearance”. If you know your brand’s HEX value, and have your Workplace logo handy, you can even do it from mobile!

Advanced Search Redesign

Search in the enterprise is of critical importance. The average worker spends about a day a week looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues.

One of the first steps in Igloo’s commitment to improving content findability is a redesign of the advanced search page. In the first phase, coming this week, we've created a new interaction model for filtering (by content type, space or label) and designed a new layout for presenting results that is contextually relevant to the content you see.

Custom Analytics and Reporting

Igloo also announced plans to modernize how users report on content. In addition to their existing web, user and content analytics, Igloo announced the availability of Data Feeds, a new custom reporting and analytics capability that will allow customers to build tailored reports with their favorite business intelligence or spreadsheet tools, such as Microsoft Power BI, Excel, or Tableau. This capability is made available through Data Feeds, which follows the industry standard oData protocol. Customers in the Professional and Enterprise product tiers will have access to this capability.

New Compact Blog View

Igloo also announced its near-term vision for visual blog layouts that help customers create elegant and eye-catching displays for their content on the browser. The September update contains the first step towards that goal with the introduction of a new compact view and a reimagined configuration UX.

SharePoint and OneDrive for Business Integrations

With the September update, you will no longer need to manually configure the OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online integrations. Both widgets will soon automatically detect the settings of the current user, making it far easier for admins to create seamless experiences between Igloo and Microsoft Office 365.

Mobile 2.0

Introducing text-based notification filtering

With a high volume of notifications in your feed, it can be overwhelming to locate a specific post or comment. Our new text-based filter allows you to immediately isolate specific cards within your notification feed, reducing the time needed to find the extract content you're looking for. The cards in your Feed have also been re-designed to make it easier to separate and identify individual cards. 

Improved communication with consolidated notifications

Your main notification feed has been updated to improve conversations between you and your colleagues. Comments are now consolidated to the parent article and those cards will be moved to the top of the feed when there is recent activity. This brings focus and context to the conversations that are most relevant to you while also reducing the number of cards that appear in your feed. We’ve also made file attachments viewable in content and comments. 

ICE '17 Roadmap Announcements

Announcements at ICE '17 revealed some amazing things coming through Q4 and beyond. Here are the highlights.

Microsoft and Igloo form a Strategic Partnership to bring customers US Hosting, Deeper Office 365 Integration, and more

Igloo and Microsoft officially announced today an expanded partnership that will leverage Microsoft Azure for data center hosting, business intelligence, stronger Office 365 integrations, as well as shared go-to-market initiatives.

As part of our commitment to Office 365 integration, Igloo announced plans to support federated search for Sharepoint 2013 (on-premise), SharePoint Online repositories, and all leading file repositories such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Salesforce. Igloo also announced plans to support Office 365 Group calendars, and Microsoft Teams.

Adding to our already robust Canadian hosting options, the expanded partnership will add the capability of US hosting on Microsoft’s open, flexible, and secure cloud computing platform, Azure. Igloo’s digital workplace solutions on Azure US will soon be available for net-new workplaces, with optional migration plans for current workplaces to be announced in a future phase.

The Future of Search

Igloo has been working on modernizing how users interact with their information in the form of discovering content. Igloo announced plans to build out a more robust search model that will provide intelligent search recommendations with support for OpenAI, custom scoring and smarter relevancy, as well as search analytics.

Users will also see results returned faster. The new robust offering will provide federated search capabilities, meaning Igloo customers can perform a single search against multiple third-party repositories from within their digital workplace.

Starting in Q4 with the federated search widget, Igloo will begin introducing federated search capabilities for our existing technology partners: Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive.