Portal: Feedback & Roadmap

Product Feedback & Roadmap

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!
💡 Idea
🧪 Considering
📐 Next
🛠️ Now
🚀 Released
New Rich Text module for Hubs
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 'ahead Content' module for Hubs
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 Building Block: SharePoint folder viewer
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.
Introduce customization tool for Hubs
Switch columns in Homepage layout
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.
Accessing Navigation groups and creating pages within them
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.
Include Compass elements in ahead content building block
Quicklinks Module in Homepage
Introducing a new module on the homepage to conveniently access essential links, applications, and resources for your team.
Advanced targeting for Quicklinks
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.
Compass Timeline improvement
Have conversations with Ask ahead
🔗 Release Note
With Ask ahead, you can now have conversations where you ask questions, follow up with more questions, or switch to a new topic anytime.
Using predefined groups to target Stories
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.
Messages improvements: deleting chats, voice messages and more.
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.
Multiple Activity feeds
🔗 Release Note
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.
Organize Events with channels and display them in homepage modules
🔗 Release Note
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.
Extend set of Reactions
1
Search Compass elements
🔗 Release Note
Introducing the new feature to easily search for elements within the Compass using Quicksearch.
Multilingual support for the Video building block
Editors are able to upload videos in various languages, with each one corresponding to its respective translation.
Improve thumbnail customization tool
🔗 Release Note
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.
Org Chart
1
Add Communities to Search and ahead content building block
🔗 Release Note
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.
Support longer Videos in Stories (up to 1GB)
🔗 Release Note
Increase the current 1-minute duration restriction for videos uploaded to Stories.
Customize Favicon and page title
🔗 Release Note
Further personalize your people's ahead experience by adding a favicon and page title to display on desktop and mobile browsers.
Rearrange Hero News
Enhance the functionality by allowing users to easily reposition hero news by adjusting its placement to the left or right.
Upload Videos to News & Pages
🔗 Release Note
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.
Add end date for news in Digital Signage feed
Editors can choose a specific end date for news to be displayed on the Digital Signage solution.
Replace text editor with Lexical
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.
2
ahead Vibes: Managing Modules on the Homepage
vibes Module: Hero News
Handling Company Events, Calendar...
1
ahead Vibes
Improved order in All events page
People Search: Make Listsfields available as Filter in People Directory and People Invite Modal
Personal Space: New Section: QR- or Bar-Code
People Profile: New fieldtype 'Predefined Lists'
1
People Directory: Allow multiselect and search in filter dropdown
Select multiple values from the dropdown
Search for values in the dropdown
Support same capabilities as in target audiences combobox in news settings.
People Directory: Filter by ahead role
Filter people in directory based on their ahead role: user / editor / admin
MS Teams APP 2.0
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.
4
Company settings - reorganization
Ask ahead: Q&A Bot
Enhanced User Profile
1
Targeted Stories
1
People Directory / who is who
1
Targeted (Segregated) Navigation
1
Multi-Tenant Support for AAD
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.
1
API for User Profile Data Import
User Profile Data is more and more important for customers. In ahead they use this data for:
People Search
Advanced Targeting
Targeted Design and Quicklinks

API where customers can import data from an external source into the ahead user profile. This would involve:
Defining custom fields in the user profile by customer
API to import fields through an API

Out of Scope
Job that calls the ahead API in a specified Intervall to update the data. (This would be something the customer have to do with a partner (f.e. isolutions)
1
Communities
1
Enable Guest Users to login to ahead
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.
Note: ahead customers who wish to enable guest users will need to have a custom domain in place.

More Info
The newsfeed provides limited content, some users would customize it
Data Residency CH
Create the option to store the ahead data (pages, images, people profiles, documents) in Switzerland.
Insights into your news performance
ahead content building block
Auto-translate content for editors
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*.
*) Requires premium-feature auto-translation to be activated.
Private news
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.
2
Branded emails
Customize thumbnails for news and pages
Must Read: mandatory reading for your users
MS Teams app
Pin news
Get someone's attention with @mentions
Publish content on behalf of someone else
Advanced Targeting
Reorganize the navigation structure
Insights for Stories
Automatic translation provided by DeepL
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!
Improvements in Messages: Attachments and delete
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Publish content on behalf of someone else
Publish content on behalf of someone else
Publish content on behalf of someone else
🚀 Released

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.

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