The Future of Obie
Welcome to the all new Obie experience!
Over the last 2 years our team has poured their heart and soul into making knowledge more accessible for organizations of all shapes and sizes. When we started this, Obie was one of a very small handful of apps on Slack. We have since grown to be one of the most installed apps across the platform and beyond:
- Over 300k questions asked
- More than 7,000 installs
- Almost 2,000 Google Drive’s integrated
- Countless hours saved looking for knowledge at work
In doing so, we have had to learn to get focused on what the direction of Obie must be in order to support our customers at the level we know you deserve.
Today, we are officially releasing the new Obie experience and saying goodbye to our free tier. Making this change will allow us to focus on building a more robust product for Obie customers that helps make knowledge and documentation more accessible at work. It’s important to ensure we are building both a successful product and a successful business. After much consideration, we believe this is the best route to take to strike that balance.
More importantly, I wanted to break the silence on (what used to be) somewhat regular product updates. Our wonderful friend, Carolyn Chong used to write these but today, you’re stuck with me.
Here are the major updates since the .. last update 😅 tl;dr
- A complete re-imagination, redesign and in a lot of places, rebuilt web experience for Obie.
- Books > Chapters > Pages. Yes, you read that right. Quite possibly the most requested knowledge base feature is now available for your organization needs.
- Integration Settings is now Configure. Configure is no longer a setting, it’s a power house of a feature that allows you to manage 3rd party integrations (i.e. Confluence) and point specific folders and spaces to specific channels in Slack.
- Obie Responses are now FAQs. To say we are bad at naming conventions here would be an understatement. We felt FAQs was a much better representation of what the feature means for Obie users. Oh, and we redesigned it, too.
- Content Verification (beta) is a new feature we built to make sure knowledge stays up to date and relevant. Obie will intelligently notify content owners when their knowledge is getting stale and also visually display whether or not information is trustworthy to users when they ask Obie questions.
- We built a robust analytics dashboard called Insights so that you can keep up with what documentation and knowledge is used most often, or not. You can track how many questions your team is asking and see how many Requests for new knowledge there are. Oh, and you can also send these insights via Slack with our reporting feature.
- We got rid of the concept of publishing Books and made all Books visible by default. Which makes sense, because you have to assign Books for them to be accessible anyways—duh! You can now archive a Book, though.
- We added guest access so you can control how single-channel and multi-channel guests operate with Obie.
- Remember the whole thing about us naming features? Yeah, we renamed Request Response to Ask a Channel. Of course, that’s not all—we completely changed the way Obie crowdsources knowledge from your team in Slack.
- We are proud to integrate with ReadMe so Obie can now search your product documentation in Slack if you use this wonderful tool.
- We also added a major Jira Service Desk integration that brings ticket deflection and resolution all within Slack.
- ALSO, official support for our Trello integration that allows you to search across your boards. Plus, Taco needed a friend.
- We completely redesigned the user management functionality within Obie which was previously found under Team.
- We also got rid of a couple things that weren’t aligned with the vast majority of Obie customers: Quizzes and Jira issues search.
We’ve fixed a lot of stuff since the last update but here are some noteworthy mentions:
- The FAQs editor was funky to type in. This was annoying. We’re sorry—it’s fixed now.
- Obie was asking you to authorize too many times when trying to access results from Slack. Very annoying, but luckily now rectified. We appreciate your patience.
- Various search improvements. Specifically, better handling of punctuation, ranking and result matching as well.
Bells and whistles on there way out next:
- Rebuilt Page editor for the Obie knowledge base
- Chrome extension
- Salesforce integration
- Massive search improvements
- and so much more..
We’re dying to hear your feedback, so please don’t hesitate to chat with us, check out the new help guide or follow along on our product roadmap for more details and updates.
