Shelf Product Update — January 2018
As we’re one month into 2018, it’s time to summarize some of the new features of Shelf and improvements we’ve made to existing ones over the past weeks. I’m particularly excited about our super-powerful in-document search as well the ability to connect Gems with each other for increased visibility and access.
As always, these improvements are available to current users without the need to upgrade your Shelf.
Connect and View Related Content
You may recall that in November we added automatic recommendations to view related content. Open any Gem and recommended content is displayed on the right side based on what our algorithm automatically identifies for you.
Now your team has the ability to specifically connect related content as an additional way to curate information and knowledge across your organization. Connections differ from recommendations in that they’re manually created. Because of this careful selection and vetting process, they can be viewed as carrying more weight than recommendations.
Like recommendations, connected content is also displayed on the right side of each Gem page. You can manage the connections from the sidebar on the Gem page, as well as from the context menu and the actionbar on the Home Dashboard or search result.
The connections feature is flexible and useful to businesses regardless of size or industry. Some of the specific opportunities in which we see connections being most useful are for linking your contacts to organizations, connecting Wiki pages with minutes to a screencast, or connecting infographics to research documents.
Connecting content is a powerful content curation tool as it enables you and your team to create rich intertwined maps of knowledge that will surely boost productivity at your workplace.
Wiki Page Enhancements
We have seen a strong adoption and usage of our Wiki pages since we introduced the feature to create rich content directly inside of your Shelf.
Therefore, we continue to enhance the functionalities of the Wiki pages to meet your needs in creating collaborative documentation that exists seamlessly in the same informational structure as other types of content, such as documents, links, videos, contacts and others.
On the Shelf Wiki pages you now have a ability to perform a lot of the rich text editing operations that you are used to from a full-blown word processor, including creating tables, structuring your content, and inserting links. For larger text changes, you may want to opt to switching to full-screen mode that lets you focus on creating content without distractions.
In-Document Search
Shelf’s in-document search has always been one of the most praised features, and it has seen another very powerful boost recently. Shelf is now able to index very large documents with many 1,000s of pages of content, and you’ll be able to search for specific terms even very deep down those documents with the lightning fast performance you’ve already grown accustomed to.
At the same time, we significantly improved the time it takes to index new documents you import or upload. Now all your imported documents are completely searchable near real-time, even when you upload tens of thousands simultaneously. While, admittedly, we can’t fix the speed of your Internet connection, once the files are on Shelf they’re immediately searchable. Try it!
Updates to the Collaborative Web Clipper
Both our Web Clipper for Chrome and for Firefox were updated with many smaller bug fixes and compatibility improvements to make clipping web content faster and more convenient.
We’ve also added some improvements regarding where to store those web clippings. Now the suggested saving location defaults to what you selected previously. Meaning that when you want to save a number of videos to the same folder, you won’t need to select that folder anew each time. And for those cases where your existing information structure isn’t sufficient, you can now create new folders directly from within the Shelf Web Clipper, saving you from having to return to the main platform just to create a new folder.
Depending on your browser settings, the latest versions of the Shelf Web Clipper will be automatically installed. In case you disabled that functionality, please check the Chrome Store or Firefox Add-ons to install the latest versions.
Other Changes
There are many additional smaller improvements and bug fixes that we released over the last weeks. I’d like to point out a couple of those below before concluding this post.
Easier Access to the Shelf Kbase
Take a look at the header of the Shelf application. There are some options on the top right side that help you whenever you have any questions on how Shelf works. You can open a Chat to directly get in touch with us so we can help answer your questions or resolve any issues you may encounter.
Additionally, you now have the option to quickly access our Knowledge Base that includes a number of articles to address questions around a lot of the features that Shelf offers.
Better Commenting
Did you know you can have a discussion with your teammates around particular pieces of content directly in Shelf? On the Gem page, there is a section that allows you to add comments and ask questions. We’ve updated this section for better collaboration, so I’d like to encourage you to check it out and let us know what you think.
As always, let me thank you for your continued support of Shelf and the feedback you’re sending which helps us tremendously in understanding what’s most valuable to you and your organization. I’m very excited looking at the pipeline of what’s in store for Shelf in 2018. Our goal remains to build the best knowledge base and content sharing platform for your organization.
Stay tuned, there is so much more to come.
Originally published at blog.shelf.io on February 13, 2018.
