PBworks Official Blog

One of the most popular features of our business products is the ability to view a preview of your files and documents online from within PBworks, without having to download and open them.

We’ve just added two key enhancements to our file preview functionality, which should make our product even better for our Apple users.

HTML5 Preview

Two important web technologies are Adobe’s Flash and HTML5.  You may be familiar with Flash because of its use for playing videos on websites like YouTube; HTML5 is an open standard that provides similar capabilities.

One of the key limitations of Flash is that Apple’s iOS devices like iPhones and iPads don’t support it.  Because the first version of our file preview functionality relied on Flash, it wasn’t accessible on iOS devices, which is a shame, because file preview is especially powerful on mobile devices, which are unlikely to be able to read Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.  PBworks’ file previews make these documents readable without downloading.

Yesterday, we launched an HTML5 version of our file preview.  This means that you can new preview and read documents on your iPhones and iPads, just like you did on your computer before.  You can log into PBworks using the same URL, login, and password.  Go ahead, try it out!

Keynote Preview

Another software applications which should be familiar to Apple users is Keynote, Apple’s presentation software (the Microsoft equivalent is PowerPoint).  While Keynote is popular with some Mac users for its ability to create beautiful presentations, it poses compatibility issues because Keynote files can’t be opened by non-Mac computers.

Our Keynote Preview feature extends PBworks’ file preview capabilities to Keynote presentations, which means that you can now share Keynote presentations with non-Mac users.

Note that the Keynote Preview feature requires you to change your Keynote settings so that a preview is generated when you create your presentation.  You can also make this work for existing presentations by using Keynote’s “Duplicate…” command.  Once you set up your copy of Keynote to create previews, this should happen automatically for all new files.

For more information on our file preview functionality, or for more detailed instructions and screenshots, please visit our user manual.

Last night, we released a number of features we’ve been working on for the past few weeks.  We hope that these new features will give you even more ways to customize and get value from PBworks.

1. Workspace Enhancements:

We’ve added a host of new features to improve the visual experience of working with PBworks workspaces.

a. Collections
We’re changing the name of “Network Folders” to “Collections.”  This is designed to eliminate the confusion that tended to arise from referring to both groups of workspaces and the folders within workspaces as “folders.”  You’ll also be able to select a logo for each collection, which will further enhance the visual appeal of the Workspaces tab.

For example, if Nike is one of your clients, and you’re working on several projects for Nike, you can gather all the project workspaces in a single Nike collection and add the Nike swoosh as the collection’s logo.

b. Larger logos
As you may have noticed, we’ve enhanced the pop-up cards that appear when you hover over things in PBworks like users, workspaces, and yes, collections.  These cards include essential information about the thing in question, and the cards for workspaces and collections can now include a much larger (up to 360 x 360 pixel) logo for added visual appeal.  This has been a popular request by customers who use PBworks on a client-facing basis–being able to see the clients’ logos more clearly is a key visual improvement.

The current workspace logos that you’ve uploaded will remain in place at the top of your workspaces, but to take advantage of the new larger logos, you’ll need to upload full-sized logos.

c. Workspace logo plugin
Once you’ve uploaded a larger workspace logo, you can take advantage of it with the new workspace logo plugin.  Much like our network logo plugin, the workspace logo plugin lets you add the workspace logo to any wiki page.  This has several advantages over simply uploading a logo and inserting it.  First, the workspace logo is a part of the workspace creation process.  When you create a new workspace, you’ll be given an opportunity to upload the logo during the creation process, rather than having to do so afterwards.  Second, the workspace logo plugin allows to you make the workspace logo part of your workspace templates.  For example, a template for customer projects could include this plugin, which would automatically add the customer’s logo to the front page of the workspace.

Again, to take advantage of this new plugin on existing workspaces, you’ll need to upload a full-sized (up to 360 x 360 pixel) logo.

d. Default workspace logos
Tired of our classic blank workspace logo?  Internal wags have taken to calling it “the PBworks flag,” since it includes three horizontal stripes, like seemingly half of the world’s nations (e.g. Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, and so on).  Our Creative Director was tired of it as well, which is why we’re replacing it with a new set of more attractive-looking default workspace logos.

Now, whenever you create a new workspace and you don’t bother to upload your own logo, we’ll randomly select one of 25 attractive designs for you.  We’ll even go back and select new default logos for existing workspaces that don’t have logos uploaded.  This will make it easier to distinguish between different workspaces, and eliminate the “wall of flags” look that affected many of our customers.  Naturally, you’ll still be able to upload a new workspace logo at any time (and you can even upload a copy of the old PBworks flag if you miss it!).

If you’ve been using the workspace color schemes to distinguish between workspaces, don’t worry, we’ve still got you covered.  The workspace cards that appear when you mouse over a workspace in the list now reflect the color schemes you’ve previously selected!

2. Workspace Properties Export

We’ve been surprised by the different uses our customers have found for our workspace properties.  These include things as diverse as the project leader and expected deal size.  As a result, one of the most popular feature requests from our customers has been for a way to generate reports based on workspace properties.  We’ve taking a significant step towards that goal with our new workspace properties export feature.

Now, network administrators can go to the Admin tab and pull a CSV export of all workspaces and their properties.  This report includes key facts and figures like the collection a workspace belongs to, the total storage consumed, and the value of all workspace properties.  You can then use Excel or your other favorite visualization tool to convert this data into graphs and charts.

Need to be able to tell your CEO the total value of potential deals, or provide a list of all “Hot” prospects?  As long as that information is encoded in a workspace property, now you can.

3. Support Designation

The final improvement we’ve launched is another popular request from our bigger customers.  While we’re happy to handle the end-user support for your PBworks network, many larger organizations would prefer that help inquiries go directly to their IT staff.  The new Support Designation feature lets you funnel all support requests to a support page or email address of your choosing.  Plus, we’ll still record the key information (operating system, browser version) in those emails so that if you’re stumped, you can still forward the issue on to our support team and let us resolve it.

We hope that you take the time to explore and take advantage of this latest set of improvements.  As always, feel free to send us your feedback and suggestions.  As you can see, we’re dedicated to improving the PBworks experience for you and your users.

One of the features in PBworks that customers love the most is the search.  We’ve continued to improve it over the years, adding the ability to search within files, and more recently, adding search facets so that you can filter results by things like file type, or who last edited an item.

Yesterday night, we launched our latest search enhancement, the ability to sort your search results.

You can sort search results in one of three ways:

1. Relevance: This is how the search currently works, and is the default
2. Name: This alphabetizes the search results (numbers come before letters; blank spaces come in front of numbers)
3. Date: This lets you bring the most recent search results to the top, while pushing the earliest results to the bottom. This is especially handy for finding something you were working on recently, but was getting lost in other search results.

Search results sorting works with search faceting, so you can sort results after filtering, or vice versa.

Check it out, and let us know what you think!

Search results sorting is now active on all business packages.

One of the features in PBworks’ business product that comes in handy for me is the “Recent Activity” section of the Dashboard.  Not only does this provide a list of everyone’s recent edits, uploads, updates, and comments, it also provides a quick shortcut to the wiki pages, files, and workspaces I’ve recently visited.

Under the headings “Recent Workspaces,” “Recent Pages,” and “Recent Uploads,” the Recent Items feature allows me to quickly return to whatever I was just working on.

Think of it as the “Last Channel” feature on your TV remote–one of the buttons I use most often in my daily life.

We’ve realized, however, that it’s inconvenient to house “Recent Items” on the “Recent Activity” section of the Dashboard.  While this information makes sense in the context of recent activity, it doesn’t make sense to force our users to go back to the Dashboard whenever they need to return to a recently visited item.  It’s especially annoying if, like me, you already use the Dashboard to keep track or your tasks, or for status updates.

Fortunately, PBworks already has a solution for this issue.  The Livebar, which sits at the top of the screen, already provides a shortcut to My Tasks, and My Starred Items.  Now we’re adding a shortcut to “Recent Items.”

This means that from any screen, you can access your recently viewed items and navigate to them. Here’s how it looks:

The new “Recent Items” shortcut in the LiveBar lets you see up to your eight most recently viewed workspaces or wiki pages, as well as your eight most recently uploaded files.  You can hover over any item to see a preview, and click on any item to navigate there.

And just as with the Tasks and Starred Items links in the Livebar, you can click “View All Activity” to navigate to the corresponding page in the Dashboard.

For more details, visit our User Manual.