Feature
ThoughtFarmer 6.5 adds photo drag-resizing.
ThoughtFarmer is out with a new version of its social intranet, featuring an updated employee directory profile. Tastily, this new version 6.5 is called Avocado.
The Vancouver-based company said that a key design principle of its product is showing content in its social context, so content meaning can be amplified by seeing who created, edited, annotated, liked or is following it. Employees’ names and photos are linked back to their profiles, so, with profiles being an integral part of the content chain, they were in line to get a refresh in Avocado.
Reporting Relationships
Profile layouts have been modified to make scanning easier, and profile photos can now be dragged and resized to crop them right on the page. Reporting relationships can be quickly updated, such as dragging and dropping names to indicate established manager and direct reports, and dotted-line reports can be designated by selecting multiple individuals you “also report to.”
Other revisions in Avocado include ones in Like, Favorite, Folders and Location-based security. In addition to liking content on a page, the thumbs-up icon can now be added to comments as well, and users can click on a like count to see who has so declared their interest.
ThoughtFarmer had previously allowed users who have added a page as a favorite to receive email notifications about updates, edits or comments on that page. Now, users can see who has marked a page as a favorite. Additionally, as ThoughtFarmer begins to position itself as an internal alternative to Dropbox, folders have been added in Avocado to assist in organizing files.
Location-Based Security
Another new feature in 6.5 is intended for a relatively small set of use cases. It adds location-based security to the existing role, or user-based security. Users inside an office, for instance, can have access to sensitive information, while those down at the corner restaurant might not. ThoughtFarmer said this can allow country-specific policies, such as for HR, or can provide additional levels of protection against unauthorized external access.
In January, ThoughtFarmer released version 6.0, which included the ability to archive user-generated content from such sources as blogs, wikis or activity feeds. It also added the ability to upload files via drag and drop, or to launch a preview window by clicking on a file.
In addition to building on the growing interest in social intranets, the company claims to have invented the term as the result of a client assignment to link a geographically-dispersed workforce with a knowledge repository.
