The latest version of Claromentis, Seven Sisters (v8.9), arrives at an unprecedented time, where many of us will be working from home full-time in an effort to stay safe, adhere to social distancing measures, and slow down the COVID-19 pandemic.
By total coincidence (because we had been working on it already) the flagship feature in our latest product release – Announcements – ended up becoming absolutely vital in helping us to communicate in the current crisis.
Our new Announcements feature is designed to push important updates companywide quickly, and monitors the number of people who have read and accepted the announcement. And during the past few weeks, our teams have used this feature almost every day to communicate the latest updates about the pandemic, such as changes to remote working policies, advice on how to stay safe, and important information from management.
We hope that our customers will find our new Announcements feature as helpful as we have during this time. As always, customers who upgrade will receive the latest features of our software, which this time around includes Announcements, as part of their support package.
Here are the full details about our new Announcements app, updates on what else is new, and why we named our latest release after East Sussex landmark Seven Sisters:
New app: Announcements
Previously tucked away in our core News application, Announcements has been reborn as its own dedicated app. Announcements allows you to push urgent updates and company news to individuals, teams, or your entire business directly within your intranet.
Add “read and accept” workflows
With Announcements, you can build in acknowledgement workflows that require people to check a box to confirm that they’ve read and accepted the announcement. Afterwards, you can monitor “view” and “acceptance” rates for each announcement, helping you feel reassured that staff have understood the message and are safe.
Set up “read and accept” workflows in the new Announcements app
Push announcements to email
You can push announcements to staff emails to increase coverage of time-sensitive or emergency updates. Communicating announcements via multiple channels ensures that urgent information isn’t missed.
Choose different announcement layouts
Choose from a banner, modal, or overlay when you create your announcement. Depending on the layout you select, staff will be unable to perform actions on the intranet until they have read and confirmed the announcement.
Announcement in “banner” layout
Announcement in “overlay” layout
Announcement in “modal” layout
Monitor “view” and “acceptance” rates
The Announcements dashboard gives you statistics on how many people have viewed and accepted your announcements. This is vital during times of crisis when you need verification that staff have read and acknowledged essential communications.
The best of the rest
Thank You
We’ve improved our Thank You app so that it has even more features to help you recognise and give kudos to your staff.
Our Thank You app now has its own dedicated dashboard which displays all recent thank you notes.
We’ve also added a new section called “Core Values”, where you can add your company values and link them to any thank you notes that you give. You can then see how many times a core value was selected on the Thank You dashboard, providing insights into which areas of your company values are on target, and which may need improving.
Thank You dashboard with our brand new Core Values feature
People API
Our core People application now comes with a comprehensive API, which allows your dev team to create, read, update, and delete Users, Roles, Groups, and Extranets. See our developer documentation for more information.
Twitter homepage component
You can now easily add a Twitter feed directly to your intranet homepage using our new, dedicated Twitter component.
The story behind Claromentis Seven Sisters (v8.9)
As is tradition now, we name every major release of our software after natural landmarks in East Sussex, the hometown of Claromentis HQ. We chose to name version 8.9 after Seven Sisters, a collection of seven connected chalk cliffs that are found across the coast of East Sussex. We felt that this name was perfect, given that our focus this version is on keeping staff connected.
Photo of Seven Sisters by Ivan Bandura (Head of Design at Claromentis) on Unsplash
More information
Download our official release notes to get full details on Claromentis Seven Sisters v8.9. Want to try out our new features for yourself? Simply sign up for a free trial or book a personal demo to get a VIP tour of our digital workplace.
