Shelf Product Update — April 2018
In April we introduced a significantly enhanced text search. Furthermore, we improved both Group and User Management, added more insights to the Account Overview, and introduced Just-in-time user provisioning to Enterprise SSO.
Even Better Findability
One of the great things about Shelf is how easy it is to find the content you’re looking for. With the recently introduced updates, it’s now even more comfortable — and faster.
One of the crucial aspects of any search is, of course, the time it takes to see relevant results. With our April updates, we boosted the performance for in-document text searches by 400%. You can now expect to see the results on your screen within a split second!
In addition to that, you’ll see a noticeably snappier performance all around the platform, whether it’s navigating through your Library Tree or applying any of the various filtering options. It’s all about getting you to what you’re looking for as fast as possible and in 3 clicks or less.
Performance being an important aspect, the accuracy and relevance of the search results are arguably even more important. That’s why we took a hard look at how we can make the text search even more powerful. With over 80% of all searches containing two words or more, optimizing for term searches was at the top of our list. In the updated Shelf, you’ll now always see exact term matches on top of the returned results, followed by more broader matches of individual words of your search.
At times, you may be sure about the specific term that you’re looking for. By surrounding your search with quotation marks, you can filter out the noise and make sure only Gems containing the exact search term will be displayed as results.
Enterprise SSO
In my previous Product Update, I already talked a bit about how Shelf is supporting SAML-based Enterprise SSO as a way to manage users on Shelf. In this update, I’d like to share more of why using a single-sign on solution might make sense for your company and how you can benefit from this.
The main benefits of utilizing an SSO solution are:
- Accessibility and efficiency: Users can access numerous applications with a single user account
- Simplicity: Users only need to manage one set of login credentials
- Security: User credentials are not distributed, and administrators can manage and control authentication policies from a single place.
Shelf supports SSO both via SAML and OpenID Connect (OIDC). Most major providers are directly supported, including Azure AD, Okta, and OneLogin. Shelf also supports other Identity Providers as long as these IdPs are utilizing either SAML or OIDC protocols.
The Shelf SSO includes Just-in-time User Provisioning. With this type of user provisioning, you don’t need to manage users in Shelf any longer. As long as your SSO Identity Provider authorizes a user, they can directly access your Shelf. For first-time users, Shelf automatically creates a user profile without any additional work needed on your end.
Analytics
The Shelf Admin Panel enables Admins to manage users, customize the setup and configuration of their account and maintain billing information.
The first page an Admin sees when opening the Admin Panel is the Account Overview. We’ve recently added more information to this overview, so you can now gain a quick insight into how your Shelf is gets utilized concerning the number of users, storage space, the type of content being created, and more.
Manage Groups and Users
Speaking of the Admin Panel, we’ve also improved the way Admins can manage users and groups. Both of those options have seen a redesign, and it’s now more comfortable to add new users to your Shelf, change their user roles to control the actions they have access to. You can quickly filter and sort the users that require attention.
Wiki Pages and Gem Page Actions
The Shelf Wiki Pages provide a powerful way to create content directly inside of Shelf. Apart from the features you’d expect from a good Wiki editor, such as headings, style formatting, hyperlinks and table support, we added full-featured support for adding images. Images can be added both by uploading them directly or by specifying a web link to the image you’d like to insert.
Apart from image support, we’ve polished the Wiki editor all around with a particular focus on providing the best possible support for users of Internet Explorer 11.
On the Gem Page, you may notice another accessibility improvement. In the Gem action menu, you now have direct access to changing an attachment or moving a Gem to a different location. Both of these actions remain active in the Edit Details option as well.
That’s a wrap for this month’s Shelf Product Update. The team and I are very excited about these new product features and even more excited what is in the works for release over the next weeks and months.
Stay tuned for more news about Shelf, and as always I’d like to thank you for supporting us as you do. Any feedback you may have is more than welcome; please be in touch!
Originally published at blog.shelf.io on May 12, 2018.
