What we shipped for you in 2016
Improved discoverability, docs, tools, APIs and more
As we start to wind down for the holiday break, the Developer Platform team here at Intercom are taking a look back at what we’ve shipped this year.
It was a productive one, with a focus on improving our developer tools and documentation, as well as adding useful new additions to our APIs and webhooks to make building on Intercom even easier.
We also announced our Developer Program, and new ways for Intercom’s customers to discover the integrations that you build. Here’s a round up of the highlights…
📃 More documentation, tools and inspiration
At the start of 2016 we launched our Developer Home to house our API reference docs. Over the year we’ve added a ton of new content, including new tutorials, sample projects, an interactive JavaScript example, and Docker images for some of our SDKs.
We also consolidated all our content for SDKs, mobile, plugins and JavaScript in one place so it’s much easier to find what you need.
In addition, we launched our new developer blog (which you’re reading right now!) and @intercomdevs to share more tips, news and stories from developers who’ve built on the platform.
In 2017 we’ll continue to improve the content and tools we provide you, and are working on making it easier for you to find everything you need in one place.
🚀 Useful additions and improvements to APIs and webhooks
We continuously work on improving our APIs and web hooks, but here are some key additions from this year:
- Two new SDKs, for Elixir and .NET, bringing our total number of SDKs to 8
- The Scroll API to make listing large numbers of users quicker and easier
- Improvements that vastly increase the speed of our webhooks and Bulk APIs
- Ability to add and update Leads in bulk, as well as improvements to processing orders for bulk jobs
- A created_since field when listing users to help you restrict your calls to recently-created users
- The ability to export tags with conversations so that you can use external tools to analyze them
- A new subscription topic that triggers a webhook every time an admin initiates a 1:1 conversation with a customer
- New metrics to our status page, including webhook delivery time
🔎 Helping customers discover your integrations
Early in the year we launched our in-app Integrations Hub to help customers find and manage integrations, as well as revamping our integrations page.
More recently, we launched our Developer Program to support quality integrations with other products our customers use, providing more support to you — the developers building them — and making it easier for our customers to discover and benefit from the integrations you’ve built.
We also built 4 new much-requested integrations ourselves — Facebook, Twitter, Trello and Shopify. You can see all our listed integrations here.
🔐 Making integrations and API access more secure with OAuth
To make everything as secure and seamless as possible for users, we introduced OAuth and started the process of deprecating API Keys.
This gives customers more visibility on the permissions they’re giving to third party integrations, and makes installing them much easier — we’ve seen install completion rates improve by 4x in cases where OAuth is used instead of API Keys.
To make implementing OAuth as easy as possible, we added Intercom to several OAuth libraries and introduced Personal Access Tokens for those just using the API for their own data.
🎉 See you in 2017!
We hope you enjoyed this whistle-stop tour of this year’s updates and have found these improvements useful. We welcome your feedback — let us know by commenting, message us via Intercom or tweet us).
We’ve got plenty more to come in 2017 and can’t wait to share more improvements and new tools with you next year.
Thank you for being part of our community, we’re excited about the future.
Happy holidays! 🎄
If you’re interested in building on the Intercom platform, take a look at our Developer Hub to get started.
