Shelf Product Update — September 2017
In my previous Product Update, I mentioned some exciting features coming your way through September and October. Please read along to learn more about the first batch of those changes.
We had two pieces of recurring feedback from you; make it easier for us to invite additional users and allow us to define our own badges to better categorize information. With the updates that made their way to your Shelf during September, we’re pleased to say we’ve addressed both.
In Shelf, Badges are a way to categorize your information. By setting Badges, you can more easily find related content that has been classified in the same category. Badges have their own filter section in the Shelf Hatrack and you can combine this filter with others, like content type and even free text search to narrow down the relevant results.
Custom Badges
With our recent release, we enabled account administrators to customize the set of Badges that are available to all users of the account. This way, you can build your own categories that best match how your team or organization classifies information. Of course, you can always use tags for further specificity. Tags are very flexible while Badges allow you to encourage predefined categorization.
Every account has a number of predefined Badges available. Now, you have the freedom to edit, delete, or customize your own set of Badges, including those that have been predefined for you. Please note that the total number of Badges is limited to 20. To administer your account’s Badges, navigate to the Admin Panel and then Badge Settings.
New Web Clipper Versions
Alongside the ability to customize your organization’s Badges, we’ve released new versions of the Shelf Collaborative Web Clipper, both for Chrome and Firefox. These new versions now support the custom Badge selections. Additionally, we refreshed the UI for a more appealing look and feel.
If you enabled automatic updates for your extensions, you should already have the latest versions. Otherwise, you can get them directly from the Chrome Store, or Firefox Addon Hub, respectively, or trigger a manual update from your browser’s extension settings.
Improved Invite Users Workflow
The true power of Shelf is displayed when you’re working with a whole team or even across multiple teams.
To make it easier for you to invite a number of people at the same time, we’ve reworked the workflow and made it more convenient to add new users, overall. For example, you can now copy/paste up to 50 email addresses of people you’d like to add to your Shelf at one time.
There are 3 simple steps to add users to Shelf. In the first step, add the emails you’d like to invite.
In a next step, you can set the default role you’d like those users to have.
The final step offers you a chance to review your choices and make individual adjustments to role and email address as needed. Simple as that.
Notifications for Imports and Uploads
Each user can receive notifications for certain actions taken by other users on Shelf, for example, when you are added to a new group, when someone comments on a Gem that you added, or when new content is added to a group that you’re a member of.
In terms of the addition of new content, we’ve added notifications for when someone uploads a large number of Gems via file or folder from their desktop, or imports them from a connected cloud account such as Dropbox or Google Drive. The notification lets you know how many Gems were added and by clicking on it, you are directed to the folder that contains the content.
Apart from receiving in-app notifications, you can also change your profile settings to receive notifications via email if you like.
Bookmark Import Enhancements
Did you know you can import a whole set of bookmarks directly into your Shelf?
You might have saved dozens, or even hundreds, or thousands of links in your browser. There is an easy way to quickly add them to your Shelf so you can organize and find them along with your other important content. You’ll find this option with the Import Cloud Accounts function.
This past month, we’ve made this process much smoother and faster so you can more easily curate the many links you have previously stored as bookmarks. Check it out, and import your browser’s bookmarks into your Shelf!
Other Improvements
There are countless smaller improvements being made to Shelf continuously. For this update, I’d like to highlight at least three of them.
We’ve extended our Optical Character Recognition engine (OCR) to include BMP files, meaning going forward you will be able to search for text that was recognized from a Bitmap image as well.
The Dashboard on the Homepage of your Shelf is now more responsive as we’ve optimized some of the algorithms that obtain items like your favorite Gems, last viewed Gems, etc.
Significant performance improvements were applied to the generation of preview images, as well. Especially when you import a large number of files, you will notice an almost instantaneous preview images now.
Throughout the next weeks and months, we will continue our journey towards making it easier for you to organize, curate, and share your most important content
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch, and let us know how you’re using Shelf and what improvements you’d like to see us implement for you.
Thanks, as always!
Originally published at blog.shelf.io on October 16, 2017.
