Shelf Product Update — February 2018
Here is a brief overview of what’s been added to your Shelf over the last few weeks of this year’s winter season. We’ve continued making Shelf the most powerful content curation platform for your organization. The latest addition to the set of Shelf features is the ability to pin content as an easy and impactful way to guide users and highlight specific pieces of content.
Pinned Content
Shelf is now featuring a sophisticated pinning functionality that is both powerful and easy to use at the same time.
Within your Shelf, there are three levels you can pin content to: the Home Dashboard, a Library, and a Folder. Content can be pinned to a single level or multiple ones simultaneously. You can pin content by selecting it and either using the context menu or the action bar that appears towards the top of the page.
Home Dashboard
The highest level to which you can pin content is the Home Dashboard. Pinning content to the Dashboard ensures it’s visible on the Frontpage for every user to see. This is great for important guidelines, announcements and more. Since it’s such a visible location and accessible to the whole organization, this option is limited to the Admins of a Shelf account.
Libraries
The next level to which you can pin content is the Library (or Group). Shelf has three types of libraries: the Organization Library is accessible to all users of an account, certain users have private libraries that are not visible and accessible by other users, and finally there are Group Libraries in which select group members can organize and share specific content, typically centered around a specific topic or specific to a certain team.
Users that have a Private Library can pin their private content to it. Content from the Private Library cannot be pinned to the Dashboard, since it wouldn’t be visible to anyone else.
Admins can pin content to the Organization Library. Such pinned content is visible to all users of the account. It’s different from pinning to the Home Dashboard since it’s only visible when opening the Organization Library itself.
Finally, content can be pinned to any Group Library by Admins of that group. Remember, you can grant regular Collaborators administrative privileges for a Group Library so that they can help curate and administer that specific library.
Folders
The most specific option for pinning content is pinning it to a folder. This ensures that when the content of a folder is viewed, the pinned content will always end up on top and thus become highly visible.
Design Changes
Notification Redesign
Our design team is always striving to make Shelf both practical and efficient but also an aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable experience. That led us to making some design changes for the various notifications you receive throughout your Shelf, be it to let you confirm important actions before they take place or simply to inform you about the completion of actions you’ve taken.
Gem Page Improvements
Many of you have made use of the recently added feature to connect various Gems with each other and create a mapped network of related content. We made some subtle design changes to the sidebar of the Gem page so that you’re now able to see more information at a glance regarding the connected and recommended content.
I’ll leave it at that for this Shelf Product Update. As I’m typing these lines, we’re working toward putting the final polish on more changes that will be coming to your Shelf soon. Needless to say, I’m already excited for the next update that will include a new Gem type and more.
Thank you for using Shelf and for all the suggestions on how to make Shelf even better. The whole team here truly appreciates this!
Originally published at blog.shelf.io on March 6, 2018.
