Shelf Product Update — October 2018
The major theme for the updates to Shelf throughout October is an improved user experience for some of the most used workflows, including of course searching and viewing of content.
Retaining of Search Context
One of the key benefits of using Shelf as your knowledge management solution is the ability to search across various types of content. Whether that’s inside of documents such as PDFs, Word, Excel or Powerpoint, Shelf’s wiki pages, image files or any other type of content you added to Shelf you’ll be able to find the information you are looking for with pinpoint accuracy.
When opening specific content for the search results, depending on your user’s profile settings the Gem Page gets opened in a new or the same browser tab. To avoid quickly having many tabs open, chose the option to open content in the same browser tab.
Now, you can do so and still maintain your search results on navigating back and forth. Your search term and applied contextual filters, such as tags or content types, will be maintained so you can easily open and browse various relevant search results from the same browser tab.
Other Search-related Changes
You may have noticed that we renamed the option to open the individual results inside of a Document or Wiki Page to More Results (formerly Details). When you open More Results, it puts you in a position to preview the specific matches inside of a document and then directly navigate to that location when opening the content. That same navigation remains available on the Gem Page itself when viewing the content, so you can quickly jump around to various sections of your content that are relevant to your specific search query.
Also, there is a slight change to when you’re using the context menu or Quick Actionbar for a Library or Folder to open its content. Now, when selecting Open, you’ll navigate into the folder or library and see it’s content. When you want to open the respective Gem Page, chose View Library or View Folder.
The All-New Library Dashboard
Speaking of libraries: Shelf now features a dashboard for each of your content libraries. When you select View Library, you will be presented with a dashboard that provides quick access to the content that was most recently viewed, updated or added.
The list of library members is presented in a new way, giving you an easy way to assess who is available to collaborate on the library’s content. We also performed some subtle polishing of the Manage Library Members dialog along the way.
Streamlined Access for View-only Users
Lastly, we removed a few content creation and editing options for such users that are restricted to view-only capabilities. Their experience is now more streamlined and productive with less disabled options visible on the user interface.
With that, I’d like to conclude our product update for October. All changes are already live on your Shelf instance.
Thank you for being a user of Shelf and please don’t hesitate to send us your feedback.
Originally published at blog.shelf.io on November 8, 2018.
