While ahead's new modular Homepage sets the tone, this upcoming feature allows for the creation of additional Vibes tailored to diverse needs: Social, Productivity, or Knowledge Vibes are some use cases. These customizable Vibes serve as dedicated landing pages accessible via navigation or alternative routes. Crafted to suit specific purposes, each additional Vibe can be personalized with a range of modules, offering unparalleled flexibility and utility. 

ahead Vibes: Create additional Vibes

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

Introducing a unified user experience that combines the traditional search with Ask ahead, our AI-powered accurate answer finding. This powerful combination streamlines the search process, helping users find precisely what they need - whether it's the right answer, page, or file.

Merge Ask ahead and Search

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

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

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

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

Support longer Videos in Stories (up to 1GB)

Introducing a read status indicator for messages sent in group chats. This highly requested feature was previously only available in 1 to 1 chats, but now has been expanded to include group chats. With this enhancement, users can easily see who has read their messages and who hasn't. A handy list will also be provided, displaying the individuals who have yet to read the message.

Read status in group messages

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

Support voice/audio in ahead Messages (Premium feature)

Voice messages

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

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

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

Edit Community posts

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

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

Extend set of Reactions

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

Customize the titles of the modules on the homepage to suit your preferences.

Customize homepage module titles

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identified Polls & Quizzes

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

ahead Vibes: Customize Stories module

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

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

GIFs and images in comments

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

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

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

Schedule news auto-archiving date

Targeted (Segregated) Navigation

Ensuring a seamless navigation experience can greatly enhance user engagement and satisfaction with our app. By introducing the familiar concept of a bottom navigation, our app will become even more convenient and intuitive for users, similar to popular consumer apps.

Mobile App: Navigation Drawer

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

Make the Ask ahead AI feature better by letting users ask follow-up questions and get even better results.

Use follow-up questions in Ask ahead

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

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

Insert structured data in news and pages using simple tables.

New building block 'Tables'

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

In sales and customer-oboarding one of the big hurdles is the user management in AAD. There are several aspects which makes these task quite complex for some organisations.

Simplify User Management (Identity & Authentication)

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

Learn what we’re working on now and our plans for the future 🎯 Your feedback helps us build the best ahead possible 💎 Share your pain points, ideas, requests... We consider each one of them 🙏 Thank you!

Product Feedback & Roadmap

ahead Feedback & Roadmap

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To follow up with you with updates or further clarifications.

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This gives us a perception of how important is this problem/idea for you, so we can prioritize accordingly.