Obie 1.0 Changelog for Slack

New things released and bad things fixed

Here’s what’s new:

• We’re outta beta, gata!
• Our onboarding experience is better. It’s not perfect, but it is, at the very least, better. And by better we mean simpler.
• Ever wish Obie could search GitHub or Box? Wish: Received.
• Good news for our friends who use Jira or Trello: Early access to these integrations starts…NOW! Chat with us to learn more.
• We added a brand new way to view engagement and trends of your team’s use of Obie. What is it, you ask? A customized report delivered straight to you in Slack. We’re testing it with select teams. Talk to us to try out the new reporting.
• AND a whole new way to visualize engagement and trends on the dashboard. Also testing this new addition with select teams. Be one of the first to take it for a test drive by reaching out.
• Marvellous changes to Responses on the dashboard: A way to verify added responses, a way to see requests, a way to add unlimited responses, a way to sort all of the above.

• Just in case you missed what we sneakily added above: Yes, we have removed the limit on the number of responses you can manage. Previously, users were limited to managing ten responses on the Free plan. Now you can add, edit, delete as many responses as your heart desires. Go for it.
• We said goodbye to some bloat features. Essentially, some features that you never used are no longer there. RIP to the marketplace, user profiles, team member information, and forms.
• Small, but pleasant: we now display four results, with the opportunity to see up to a maximum of twelve by clicking on a next button. Previously, you could only see five, and you told us that wasn’t enough. We also added file type icons so you know what you’re getting before you even click on the link. Oh, and we added a ‘View Folder’ button to all Google Drive results, and a ‘View Book’ button to all Obie Page results, just in case you want a sense of where that result is living.

• You can kiss goodbye to editing responses using the message box (or you could if you knew that’s how it was done) because editing is now done using dialogs. Much, much more intuitive.
• A new way to get an answer when there isn’t one by asking Obie to nudge a colleague. Simply tap ‘Submit Request’ to enjoy.
• You can now search Obie using plain simple keywords, instead of prefacing every question with who, what, where, etc. etc. If you want to.
• OH! Hi. I was just wondering… um… OK, fine: You can now get suggested answers to questions asked in channels, without having to @mention Obie. Awkward no replies begone.
• We updated our security and privacy policies to ensure we’re GDPR compliant. Because privacy is important.
• The redesigned website is, we think, gosh-darned delightful.
• A deep re-visit of our NLP, tweaking things and tidying up and generally making it better in myriad abstruse ways.

Here’s what we fixed:

• A performance problem where Obie would get stuck in a crash loop. There are a lot of things we want you to be able to do with Obie. All of them, it turns out, involve you being able to access Obie. Apologies.
• When attempting to access Obie Pages, some users experienced slow load times (yes, again). Which was no bueno. Sorry about that, some users.
• Basically, on long responses displayed on the dashboard, in just the right scenario, the text would start to appear behind the resize toggler, making it difficult to see the text and the toggler. Now, it’ll never do that. We put it back in its rightful place.
• Attempting to copy and paste text onto a Page from an outside source now actually copies and pastes.
• It pains us to say that Obie wasn’t always remembering your upvote history, wouldn’t respond to questions starting with who’s, what’s etc, and you couldn’t actually search the answer of a question you stored with Obie…just the question. This was maddening, we are very sorry for it, and very happy to have fixed it.
• Our error pages. They were just full of errors. Now they’re gone… the errors, not the error pages, because those are not errors.

That’s all she wrote, folks. Obie 1.0 is live in the Slack App Directory. Send us a note or tweet to let us know what you think. We love bugs, so send those our way, too.