When creating Hubs, users may currently feel limited by the inability to remove or conceal two modules: Navigation and Pages. This improvement offers the option to hide these modules if they do not serve a purpose, resulting in more streamlined and clutter-free Hubs.

Hubs: Hide Navigation and Pages module

Gives users the ability to express reactions in both one-to-one and group chats.

Reactions in Messages

This flexible module allows for the introduction of various features, including:
1. Hub-specific links (as opposed to the Quicklinks module, which only includes global links)
2. Attachments
3. Microsoft 365 file links

By incorporating these capabilities, you can enhance your Hubs and provide employees with a diverse selection of resources.

Hubs Module: Resources (Links and Documents)

Experience the advanced translations powered by DeepL. With our latest improvement, you can choose between formal or informal tones for your translations. This works for a selected group of languages, including German.

Language tones for translations

ahead Learning empowers organizations to cultivate 
a culture of continuous learning across your employee’s journey, from onboarding to upskilling.  

With a personalized, mobile-friendly experience, ahead Learning simplifies course creation and delivery, progress tracking, and assessment, making it easy to build lasting learning habits. 

ahead Learning

Add a search box to Communities for easy post searching.

Search within a Community

Enable the ability to edit community posts after they have been published.

Edit Community posts

Enhance user experience by implementing people cards that include contact information and easy access to employee profiles. For instance, within the HR Hub, showcase profile cards of the HR team to help employees identify responsible individuals and conveniently connect with them.

Hubs Module: People

We're introducing a new navigation feature to improve usability and engagement within the app.

Both are fully customizable, allowing you to highlight key areas of your intranet and make the app more convenient and user-friendly than ever.

Seamless Navigation for enhanced user experience

Introducing a new module for Hubs - the Rich Text module. This versatile feature is similar to the Rich Text building block found on Pages, allowing you to create formatted text with ease. Plus, it's now available on the Homepage for even more convenience.

New Rich Text module for Hubs

Introducing a user management tool in ahead that empowers admins to effortlessly manage users, distribute credentials, and ensure secure access with intuitive login mechanisms. 

Simplify User Management (Identity & Authentication)

Allows members of Communities to include Polls and Quizzes in their posts.

Polls & Quizzes in Communities

The ahead app fails to display a red notification bubble on iOS devices to indicate unread notifications. This feature aims to rectify this issue and improve the user experience.

Unread notifications bubble on app icon for iOS users

Hubs support the the new ahead Content module. It's the same as the ahead Content building block in news and pages, but as a Hub module.

It allows you to easily reference ahead Content in your Hubs. You can link ahead News, Pages, Events, Stories, Communities and Compass elements.

New 'ahead Content' module for Hubs

Introducing a new building block for news and pages that enables you to display the contents of a SharePoint library or folder directly to your readers. It seamlessly syncs with SharePoint, ensuring that any updates—such as new folders, deleted files, or other changes—are automatically reflected in the view.

This feature provides a quick and convenient way for your team to access important resources in SharePoint, improving efficiency and collaboration.

New Building Block: SharePoint folder viewer

Your homepage is what we call a Hub — a customizable space that can be tailored with a wide range of modules, arranged to suit your needs.

With this new feature, we’re extending the same flexible building experience to items within your navigation structure. Navigation groups and points will now be Hubs, allowing you to enrich them with modules.

For example, if you create an HR Hub, the new customization tool enables you to include not just pages but also additional modules, such as an Events module filtered for HR-specific events, a featured community, links to valuable resources like tools or documents, and much more.

Introduce customization tool for Hubs

In addition to the current feature of selecting a suggested image from a video frame, users can now enjoy even more options: 
- Crop suggested images for a more personalized thumbnail
- Upload custom thumbnails for a unique touch

Improved thumbnail tool for videos in pages

Select either the 2/3+1/3 column layout or switch to a new 1/3+2/3 column layout. Available for the desktop homepage.

Switch columns in Homepage layout

Currently, it is not possible to create pages within top-level navigation groups. This improvement aims to streamline the process of building navigation structures and populating them with pages, by supporting pages in top-level navigation groups.

Accessing Navigation groups and creating pages within them

Introducing a new feature that allows elements from your Company Compass to be included in news and pages, using the ahead content building block. This improvement now enables referencing of all types of content, including News, Pages, Stories, Events, Communities, and Compass elements.

Include Compass elements in ahead content building block

Introducing a new module on the homepage to conveniently access essential links, applications, and resources for your team.

Quicklinks Module in Homepage

In addition to targeting Quicklinks with your main property, you can now leverage the Advanced Targeting feature for even greater precision and control. To take advantage of this enhancement, ensure the Advanced Targeting premium feature is enabled. 

Advanced targeting for Quicklinks

Today, News and Stories can be connected to Compass elements and easily viewed in a timeline format. This enhancement allows the 3 most recent connections to be showcased on each Compass element page, giving users a sneak peek into the timeline.

Compass Timeline improvement

With Ask ahead, you can now have conversations where you ask questions, follow up with more questions, or switch to a new topic anytime.

Have conversations with Ask ahead

Previously, Stories were targeted using a main property linked to Azure Entra, which could become unreliable if the values weren’t properly maintained.

Now, organizations using predefined target audiences can also leverage them to target Stories. Simply switch to this new option in Company Settings.

Using predefined groups to target Stories

These updates aim to enhance your messaging experience and make communication easier and more convenient.

1. Read indicators in group chats: Keeping track of who has read your message in a group chat is now possible. You will be able to see how many people have read your message and view a list of those individuals.

2. Deleting chats: De-cluttering your chat list is now effortless. You can delete 1-to-1 or group chats (if you are an admin) with ease.

3. Leaving group chats: We understand that sometimes you may want to leave a group chat. With our latest update, members can now leave group chats without hassle.

4. Sending voice messages: For mobile users, sending voice messages has never been more convenient. Simply record your message and hit send.

Messages improvements: deleting chats, voice messages and more.

Introduces the capability to showcase several Activity Feed modules on the homepage. This feature allows admins to organize and refine the content displayed in each feed. For example, they can create separate feeds for social media posts and ahead internal activities.

Multiple Activity feeds

This update introduces the exciting ability to assign channels to events. With this new feature, users can easily filter events by channel and view them in dedicated modules directly on the homepage. This provides a more organized and streamlined experience for managing and accessing events.

Organize Events with channels and display them in homepage modules

Users are currently limited to selecting only four reactions. We are expanding the available selection to offer more options.

Extend set of Reactions

Introducing the new feature to easily search for elements within the Compass using Quicksearch.

Search Compass elements

Editors are able to upload videos in various languages, with each one corresponding to its respective translation.

Multilingual support for the Video building block

Having appealing thumbnail images is crucial in captivating readers. To streamline the process, we are introducing suggested images to reduce the need for unnecessary uploads by editors. Additionally, we have implemented a more versatile cropping tool for effortless adjustment of image sizes.

Improve thumbnail customization tool

Enrich your people's profiles by adding a new organigram section to each profile, showcasing the individual's manager and direct reports. This allows easy access for any user to view the organizational hierarchy of a colleague. 
For those who prefer not to display this information or lack the necessary data, the org chart feature can be disabled upon request.

Org Chart

Include Communities in the search index so that users can easily search for community titles and descriptions. Both public and gated communities will be displayed in the results, while only private communities that the user is a member of will be shown. Communities can also be referenced in the ahead content building blocks for News and Pages.

Add Communities to Search and ahead content building block

Increase the current 1-minute duration restriction for videos uploaded to Stories.

Support longer Videos in Stories (up to 1GB)

Further personalize your people's ahead experience by adding a favicon and page title to display on desktop and mobile browsers. 

Customize Favicon and page title

Enhance the functionality by allowing users to easily reposition hero news by adjusting its placement to the left or right.

Rearrange Hero News

At present, videos on News and Pages can only be embedded from external systems like YouTube or MS Stream. However, with this new feature, editors will have the ability to directly upload their own videos, giving them more autonomy and control over their content.

Upload Videos to News & Pages

Editors can choose a specific end date for news to be displayed on the Digital Signage solution.

Add end date for news in Digital Signage feed

Replace the text editor with Lexical. Lexical is a text editor framework that offers improved accessibility and performance, resulting in a streamlined and unified writing experience for news, pages, and communities.

Replace text editor with Lexical

This feature enables organizations to easily customize the modules displayed on their homepage, according to their specific layout. In doing so, intranet owners can effectively prioritize the most relevant information for their goals, whether that be highlighting news, boosting user engagement, or increasing productivity.

ahead Vibes: Managing Modules on the Homepage

The Hero News Module is a powerful tool that allows intranet administrators to showcase important updates at the top of the home page, complete with attention-grabbing images. By strategically placing this module, administrators can easily catch the attention of users.

vibes Module: Hero News

Events is a new ahead page type, which allows you to create events and display these events on the homepage.

Handling Company Events, Calendar...

Now, in addition to links, images and files, users can also add videos to community posts. With the ability to upload videos directly from their device, community members can easily share multimedia content. Visitors can simply play the video within the community using an embedded video player for a seamless viewing experience.

Upload Videos in Communities

Display participant names in polls and quizzes, useful for event registrations or prize acknowledgments. 

Identified Polls & Quizzes

ahead Vibes provides our customers with greater control and versatility when it comes to their intranet. They will be able to tailor their homepage to their exact needs and preferences. 
ahead Vibes provides several different features to help customers personalise their intranet pages. These include customisable page layouts, modules and easy-to-use tabbed navigation. Through these features, customers can create the exact look and feel they want. 

ahead Vibes

We have now divided events into two separate timelines to enhance user experience: Upcoming and past events.

Improved order in All events page

Add settings to the Stories module for choosing how many items to show, display options, and more. 

ahead Vibes: Customize Stories module

This story will let users search and filter people in the people directory and in the people invite modal in communities.

People Search: Make Listsfields available as Filter in People Directory and People Invite Modal

Improving user profiles by incorporating barcodes for voucher codes and employee card numbers, making it convenient to redeem benefits at internal and partner stores.

Personal Space: New Section: QR- or Bar-Code

Insert structured data in news and pages using simple tables.

New building block 'Tables'

Let users comment and reply with GIFs and images, not just text.

GIFs and images in comments

We add the new concept of predefined lists to the People Profile as a new field type. This lists gives Intranet Admins the flexibility to enhance the user profile with list fields. User can then add their values f.e. "Skills" out of a list.

This fields are then also available in the people directory and in communities to search people based on this values.

People Profile: New fieldtype 'Predefined Lists'

Support same capabilities as in target audiences combobox in news settings.

People Directory: Allow multiselect and search in filter dropdown

Filter people in directory based on their ahead role: user / editor / admin

People Directory: Filter by ahead role

MS Teams has more than 270M daily active users. These desk-users spend most of their time collaborating in MS Teams. The updated ahead Teams app will make it easier to access information directly leaving MS Teams.

MS Teams APP 2.0

This story comes as a part of the ahead Vibes where we introduced more flexibility for the design and layout.

For better communication it also let's you introduce the main contacts for the ahead tenant management.

Company settings - reorganization

"Ask Ahead" is an AI-driven feature that enables users to pose questions about specific documents, such as employee handbooks, guidelines, safety instructions, and more. This feature significantly reduces search time by delivering precise answers, eliminating the need for users to comb through the document themselves.

Ask ahead: Q&A Bot

Todays user profile in ahead is very static and strongly tied to AAD. This does not provide enough flexibility to the different needs of our customers. Since we introduced the APS (ahead people store) we have more control over the user profile. We know that people love to learn more about other people. By extending the user profile with additional information it is likely to increase user engagement.

Enhanced User Profile

Targeted Stories provide Story creators with the opportunity to accurately address their intended audience, thus ensuring that their content remains relevant and engaging.

Targeted Stories

Editors can set a date for when news will automatically be archived or removed from the newsfeed.

Schedule news auto-archiving date

Besides the search, users are used to an employee directory where they can browse to see who else is working in the company, a specific location or departement.

People Directory / who is who

Currently, the "Ask ahead" and "Search" experiences are separate. By bringing them together into a unified experience, we aim to enhance information discovery and deliver more accurate, relevant results. 

Combine Ask ahead and Search

Targeted (Segregated) Navigation

Easily customize module appearance by adjusting settings such as the number of displayed items, layout, and other visual aspects. These settings enable you to deliver a personalized experience to users.

ahead Vibes: Tailor Settings & Skins of Modules

It's possible that you have more than one AAD (Azure Active Directory) tenant. ahead now supports multi-tenancy so you can give access to ahead to users coming from different AAD tenants.

Multi-Tenant Support for AAD

User Profile Data is more and more important for customers. In ahead they use this data for:

API where customers can import data from an external source into the ahead user profile. This would involve:

API for User Profile Data Import

ahead users have no possibilities to interact with other ahead users that share the same interest. Examples:

ahead communities with a high user engagement because it's simple and fun to use

Communities

ahead now supports guest accounts for your Azure Active Directory, providing access to a broader range of users such as alumni, external collaborators, partners, and more.

Our new feature is available to two types of guest accounts: those with a Guest Account connected to a Microsoft Identity and those with a Guest Account not connected to a Microsoft Identity.

Enable Guest Users to login to ahead

The "All News" Page received a nice improvement and allows to filter by channels and publish date.

The newsfeed provides limited content, some users would customize it

Create the option to store the ahead data (pages, images, people profiles, documents) in Switzerland.

Data Residency CH

You can see top performing posts by views, coverage (related to targeting), reactions and comments. The newest feature will (anonymously) gather read times from your visitors and will give valuable insights whether your content is being read. In the context of this feature, all users will now see the estimated read time on unviewed news as well as the news itself.

Insights into your news performance

Maybe you want to write a news that highlights some of the new content in the navigation? Or you gather all stories on a news in the aftermath of the big christmas party? This is now possible with the ahead building block content.

You can either pick from the latest content or search for older content and select which items should be shown on the page. Once you are viewing the content, clicking on the preview card of course takes you to the place. Simple, straightforward and therefore good.

ahead content building block

Editors can now auto-translate their content. If you're an editor and writing ahead content in multiple languages, you may find this feature a real time-saver. Once you've written your content in your primary language, add additional languages via auto-translation*.

Auto-translate content for editors

In certain situations, it is essential that news are accessible only to their intended audience, as opposed to being available to all employees in the 'all news' area.

Private news

Add the corporate identity (logo, colors and font) to the emails to increase recognition and trust.

Branded emails

Not too long ago we introduced a toggle that allows you to preview the page and how it looks like before hitting the "Publish" button. Now you will be shown how the page will look like in a feed, including the image.

The preview will show you everything that readers will see when they meet your content for the first time.

Sometimes, you might not be happy how the default miniature looks like, e.g. when the interesting part of an image is not in the middle, or you want to focus on a different detail. In comes "Customize thumbnail".

Customize thumbnails for news and pages

As an editor (or super-editor, depending how your ahead permissions set-up looks like) you can mark content as must-read. That allows:

Ideal use cases are very important content, and content that requires complicance with regard to mandatory reading, e.g. safety measures or price lists.

Must Read: mandatory reading for your users

Extend your organization’s communication channel with the ahead app for Microsoft Teams. Keep employees always informed by integrating ahead with the tools they already use.

Get notifications in Microsoft Teams to keep up to date with the latest ahead News in your company. Stay focused and receive only news that are relevant to you.

Amplify ahead News by sharing them in Microsoft Teams. Now you can easily share content in Microsoft Teams chats: one-to-one, one-to-many and channels. Use the ahead app message extension included in the message compose box. Search for the title of the news you want to share, which will be displayed in a card. Or just paste a link to a news.

ahead for Microsoft Teams is linked to the ahead app, where users can further read, react and comment. Now you can easily share content between ahead and Microsoft Teams to maximize your communications across desk and non-desk workforces.

MS Teams app

Within ahead it is now possible to pin news. Pinned news are taken out of the usual flow of news and get promoted to a new special section on top of the news feed. lead images are shown bigger, and some chrome makes sure that the news stand out and above the rest.

Editors can decide, either during the news creation or once the news is already published, for how long it should be pinned.

Once pinned, the news will be promoted to the top and some visual highlights will draw the attention to them.

Pin news

If you'd like to get someone's attention in a comment or in a Story now you can do it with the new @mentions feature.

Type the @ symbol followed by their name and they'll get a notification.

Get someone's attention with @mentions

Think about ghost writing what you will, it is a part of everyday publishing life. Now it is easier than ever to publish e.g. "CEO News" under the name of your CEO while somebody else has written the news.

Publish content on behalf of someone else

Advanced Targeting is a premium feature that 

 (AAD) and allows you to create target audiences based on user properties.

. Set up rules and users who match these rules will be included in the target audience. The new audience can be saved for quicker access in the future.

Users will receive content that is more relevant for them, rather than less relevant content targeted to a broader audience. Thanks to that, their homepages will be clutter-free and informative.

Advanced Targeting

Previously, navigation points were sorted alphabetically. Admins can now easily rearrange the navigaton points in the way that suits them best.

Reorganize the navigation structure

What Stories are generating more engagement from users? Which ones are being visited the most? Which ones are not really getting much attention? Stories Insights provide a better perspective as to how Stories can be a good format to foster employee engagement and round off your internal communication strategy.

Insights for Stories

When using auto-translate, users will not be provided with translations generated by DeepL. Now you can understand each other even better across language boundaries!

Automatic translation provided by DeepL

Now users can upload attachments to 1-to-1 or group conversations. Attachments can be images or documents.

: Keep in mind that Messages is a premium feature and needs to be enabled so users can use it.

Users can now delete their own messages too. This deletes the message for everyone in the conversation.

Improvements in Messages: Attachments and delete

Add an extra layer of review before content (News, Pages) goes live. Team members can check and approve submissions to make sure everything meets the right standards. 

Product Feedback & Roadmap