Make way! Brand new widgets are coming to Unily
Over the last couple of months, our team have been hard at work designing and developing even more Widgets, to help you bring in essential information from outside of your intranet, too. These simple, yet high-performing tools are one more step closer to your intranet becoming the place where everything starts.
Unily’s Summer Update 2017 brought with it a whole new realm of possibilities to quickly create flexible and engaging intranet pages to fulfil a multitude of purposes. Every page on the site can now be made up of a combination of smart Widgets, which allow you to display and roll up content from across the intranet in a meaningful, mobile-friendly way. With this new functionality now available, we've been hard at work developing some brand new widgets to display your content in the best way possible. This blog rounds up some of the latest and greatest.
If you’re a current customer, the Widgets which are available to you right now will depend on which version of Unily you’re currently on. If you’re unsure, don’t hesitate to get in touch with your Customer Success Manager.
The My Tasks widget
Your intranet should be a productive place where work happens, and the My Tasks widget is a simple way to achieve that. The widget introduces a quick and simple way to surface employees’ Office 365 Exchange tasks within the intranet (those ones which you can see and create in your Outlook or on your mobile). Using the Microsoft Graph API, Tasks are displayed in a neat list, highlighting the subject of the task and the due date, giving your users a quick glance at what they’ve got coming up. Tasks are color-coded by Due, In-Progress and Overdue Due to help you get the full picture, quickly.
This widget is designed for users with integrated Office 365 tools.
Use case example:
Use this widget on the homepage of your intranet to give every user a personalized overview of their most important tasks, helping them to be more productive.
The Calendar widget
Unily’s Event Management system has always allowed you to create Events and then display them in a neat, configurable list. However, this widget takes events one step further with a more visual, mobile-friendly representation of upcoming events. The widget can be configured to only show events for a particular department or location, or around a particular topic, making it extremely flexible for use around your site.
The calendar widget allows you to paginate through months, selecting a date to display more information about the particular event. From there, you’ll even have the option to Add to Outlook, helping to bring these events into your personal diary.
Use Case Example: Use on a recruitment site to display all upcoming Careers Fairs, allowing users to add events to their calendar.
The Map widget
They may sound simple, but Maps are a highly-requested item for our customers. Although there’s always been the option to embed maps from Google or Bing into the intranet, this widget makes that process much easier, mobile-friendly and better looking.
The new widget allows you to specify the title of the map e.g. Seattle HQ, the co-ordinates, zoom level e.g. world-wide view or street-level view, and a pop-up message for the pin on the map. With a re-worked design, this widget will allow maps to fit seamlessly onto any page, matching the look and feel of the other widgets.
Use case example:
Use Maps to highlight your office locations on an information page, or support an event with a map specifying the location.
RSS feeds
Many news related sites or weblogs such as bbc.co.uk, offer their content in the format of an RSS feed, simplifying articles down to the bare minimum of what you really need. For some organizations, these feeds enable them to quickly get an understanding of markets and global affairs, without having to visit multiple sites or multiple pages.
RSS feeds have an important place in the intranet, helping to bring in external content alongside the internal. This not only helps to improve productivity by collating important information in a single place, it also helps your users to be more informed, with the latest news dynamically updated.
The new RSS feed widget in Unily does exactly that, allowing you to roll up any RSS feed with a service URL. You can give your feed a title and specify how many items you want to display, helping the RSS feed to fit in on any page.
Example use case:
Perfect for use on a Leadership team page whose daily decisions are informed by global affairs.
Stock
Whether it’s for your own organization, or for a view on the wider market, Stock tickers are a frequently-requested item for our customers. So, we’ve created our very own Stock Ticker widget which talks to Yahoo’s Stock Service, dynamically updating the Stock prices within your Unily intranet. The Stock Ticker can also provide data for commodities, currency and stock exchanges. Want to know the barrel price for Brent Crude Oil? Interested to see the GBP to USD rate? What’s the FTSE 100 trading at? The new Stock Ticker widget can answer all.
This new widget brings new flexibility, allowing you to select one or more stock symbols, with the added options of hiding the header bar to achieve the look and feel you want. You can also specify how many items you want to show on the widget, as well as the refresh rate e.g. 15 mins, 30 mins or more.
Use case examples:
Include on the homepage to give your employees a daily update on the market.
Weather
For global offices, sometimes a simple thing like a Weather widget can be really useful to give you an up to date idea of the weather across your organization. We’ve added a flexible new Weather widget which allows you to add one or multiple locations, forecasts for multiple days in the future, choose between Celsius or Fahrenheit and control the look and feel. Similarly to the Stock Ticker widget, you can also specify how often you want the information to be refreshed.
Use case:
Use on the homepage of your intranet or on a location page to warn users of bad weather which may affect travel.
What else?
These are just some of the new widgets which are coming to Unily. Stay tuned over the next month as we announce brand new widgets to enrich User Profiles including an Organization Chart, My Feeds, My Network and more!
Bringing this all together
The great thing about these widgets is how flexibly they can be used across your Unily intranet. They can slot into Homepages, Unily Sites such as a Global HR page or a Travel Booking page, or even work on particular templates for News Articles e.g. adding a related RSS feed next to any press releases which are shared internally.
The most important thing to remember when adding these widgets to your site is ensuring that they work in the context of what you’re trying to achieve. Take a look at this example we’ve put together which incorporates some of the widgets together to create a mobile-friendly page sharing all the essential information for a particular location of the organization.
For some of you, these widgets will already be available on your portal. If they’re not yet, speak to your Customer Success Manager to find out when they’ll be available. If you’re not a Unily customer, and you’d like to arrange a demo to see these widgets in action, contact us today.
