Category: Papyrs

Two weeks ago we added integration with Google Mail to easily handle workflows. Today we’re launching two new features for our Google Apps users: integration with Google Docs & Google Calendar!

Google Calendar Integration

First, Google Calendar support:

Google Calendar events on a Papyrs Page.

You can create as many Google Calendars as you need. You can create Calendars for upcoming milestones, meetings, travel schedule, and so forth. Then you can simply drag a Media Widget on a Papyrs page and pick the Google Calendar of your choosing. People you share the Papyrs page with will then be able to view the events on the calendar.

The old Google Calendar widget (which doesn’t work so well) is still available. It’s now called “Classic Calendar Widget”.

Tip: Papyrs + Thymer

As many of you know already, you can place your Thymer tasks and deadlines on a Google Calendar using iCal (read more). So the next logical step is to put Thymer deadlines and milestones on a Papyrs page. So now you can. Next to each Thymer calendar event you’ll find a small link directly back to the Thymer task. Pretty handy!

Google Docs Integration

Google has some great applications. An online word processor (Google Docs), an online presentation builder (Google Spreadsheets) and so on. And if you want to effectively work together with your colleagues it helps if you can keep related Google Files on a page. With the new Google Docs integration in Papyrs, files from Google Docs can now be added easily to a Papyrs page, just like any other attachment. Simply add an attachment and use the Google Apps tab, where you can browse or search for your Google documents you want to attach:

Browse Google Docs files.

You click on the files and you finally get a list on your page that looks like this:

Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations attached to a Papyrs Page.

This makes it easy to create pages to get an overview, organize, and discuss all relevant documents, whether you stored them on your PC, in Google Docs, or already have them on Papyrs. You can take advantage of these features as a Google Apps user or you can attach Google documents from your personal GMail account. Both works, so use whatever suits you best.

Reorder attachments

You can now change the order of attachments with drag and drop. Only a small change, but apparently something quite a few of you wanted!

Note for Google Apps users

The features outlined above won’t work until you grant Papyrs access to your Google Apps account. To grant Papyrs access navigate to
https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/YOURDOMAIN.COM/Dashboard
and then click on the Papyrs logo on the bottom of the page. Then, under Data access you’ll see an option to grant access to Papyrs.

If you have trouble getting these features to work, just drop us a line at team@stunf.com and we’ll figure out what’s wrong.

Also, Google Apps for Business is free for up to 10 users (Google Apps signup).

Little stuff

• The Papyrs logo (or the Logo of your organization) in the upper left corner of every page is now clickable. It takes you back to your homepage.
• Image Galleries now work better on mobile devices.
• Attachment links are now clickable in the notification emails we send out.

More to come…?

We improved the integration of Papyrs with Google Apps by popular demand. So if you’d like to see even more Google Apps integration, let us know. Or maybe you have other ideas for Papyrs. Feature suggestions or perhaps you found a bug. Just shoot us an email.

We’ve been working hard on a lot of things we can’t reveal just yet. Some big, some small. More soon!

Today we’re announcing more integration for Papyrs with Google Apps! (available for Papyrs for Google Apps users).

If you’re someone who needs to spend a lot of time in your Google Mail Inbox, you probably already use the Notifications in Papyrs to stay up to date of new page changes and form submissions.

Some updates might require you to take some action, especially when someone submits a new request that needs to be reviewed. To reduce the time you have to spend switching between apps, we’re now introducing a Papyrs Widget for Google Mail to help with that!

Everytime a form is submitted with a status field, and you’re an administrator for the form page, a widget automatically appears below your mail. Just by pressing a button, you can change the status of the form directly from your Inbox!

As an example, consider a form page in your Papyrs intranet for requesting Paid Time Off. When someone in your team submits a request, a widget is automatically shown below the notification email in Google Mail:

If we want to change status (e.g. we want to Approve the request), just select the new status and click Change Status. That’s it, the status of the form request will be updated, without having to leave your Inbox!

Here’s another example, for a form to submit new Client Project Proposals:

We hope you like the new feature, which is now available to all Papyrs for Google Apps users!

Note: if your Google Apps domain is already using Papyrs, your domain administrator needs to approve access to this new Papyrs feature on the Google Apps Control Panel first (http://www.google.com/a/<domain>).

We’ll be back with more news about further Google Apps integration, and other features, soon!

Want to read more about workflows? You can find more information in our documentation about Form Workflow options.

Custom Widgets

We added this feature by popular request. Papyrs supports a lot of widgets out of the box but sometimes you want to add something to a page that suits your personal needs completely. This is where Custom Widgets come in. With Custom Widgets you can add pretty much any 3rd party widget to Papyrs. Social media widgets (for example: Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn), RSS news, polls, maps, and much more. The list is endless!

For most custom widgets, you can simply copy-paste the embed code from the 3rd party’s website into the Custom Widget in Papyrs. If you happen to know how to use some HTML code yourself, you can also use a Custom Widget to customize a Papyrs page even more, and add elements that look exactly the way you want to. Custom widgets can use any HTML or Javascript code, so custom widgets give you complete flexibility. This flexibility does not compromise the security of Papyrs, as we’ve made sure that custom widgets can be safely contained within a page.

So how do you add a custom widget? It’s easy:

Add a custom widget in 3 easy steps.

Below are some ideas of what you can use Custom Widgets for.

Examples

An RSS widget shows the news from the NYTimes (powered by webrss.com)

A poll widget from widgetbox.com

A basic table

Add a LinkedIn profile or company widget to a page

That’s it

We’ve also made a lot of changes behind the scenes and made Papyrs a bit faster. More news next week!