July 2024 Monthly Snapshot

Dear ShortPoint Community,
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Take charge and make things happen! ShortPoint is your toolbox for intranet design. If you want to create something amazing, get started with ShortPoint! Here are our updates for July:

Updates in Recent Releases
New and Updated Support Articles
Tech Tip: Embed Custom Social Media Feeds
Customer Spotlight: Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA)

Yvette Tunguia
ShortPoint Content Unit Manager

What’s New?

Performance Enhancements and Viva Engage Updates In Recent Releases

In our recent releases, we have made several valuable improvements for building and maintaining your SharePoint sites with ShortPoint. Today, we will highlight two noteworthy enhancements.

Partial Loading for Connections

We learned from our customers that connecting a Design Element to a list, library, or other data sources with large amounts of data through ShortPoint Connect sometimes resulted in slow load times for pages or other performance issues. With this feedback, we have implemented Partial Loading For ShortPoint Connections With Over 20 Results in our recent release.

Partial Loading helps keep your page running smoothly by initially displaying only 20 items. As the user scrolls, more results will smoothly load. For more details about this feature and instructions on when and how to disable it, please refer to the linked support article.

Viva Engage Design Element Update

Microsoft Viva was recently introduced as an all new employee experience platform. Its Viva experiences integrates several applications that help in connecting and facilitating collaboration across the organization. This includes Viva Engage which incorporates almost all the features of their former enterprise social networking service, Yammer.

With these changes, ShortPoint has updated the Yammer Design Element. This was previously dedicated to embedding Yammer feeds into SharePoint pages.

Customers can now use the Viva Engage Design Element to integrate their Viva Engage home feeds into their intranet page. In the support article Introducing ShortPoint Viva Engage Design Element, you will find all the information you need about the Design Element and how to use it.

These are only two of the improvements that our team delivered this month (there were several more). To keep yourself updated with all the product improvements, visit our product roadmap page.

Articles

New Articles

Updated Articles

Tech Tip: Embed Custom Social Media Feeds Using ShortPoint Code Design Element

Are you experiencing a delay when loading your SharePoint page? If so, it’s time to optimize your page performance! Optimizing page performance is essential for providing a positive user experience. Your SharePoint site viewers are more likely to stay and engage with your page’s content if it loads quickly. In contrast, slow loading time can frustrate and discourage them from using your page.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your page’s loading time, we got you covered! ShortPoint provides its users with 4 easy ways to optimize their pages:

Enable Lazy Render / Lazy Loading Options
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ShortPoint has two features that improve loading time exponentially. The first one is called Lazy Render. This feature delays the loading of Sections that are not yet visible on the screen, reducing the amount of rendering time that the ShortPoint engine has to do. The second one is called Lazy Loading Options. This feature delays the loading of images that users aren’t currently interacting with. The images will only load once a user starts engaging with them.
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Learn how to enable these features by checking out Enable Lazy Render / Lazy Loading Options on ShortPoint Elements.

Enable Caching on Connected ShortPoint Design Elements

If you have a connected Design Element on your page, ShortPoint will read the information from the connected source every time you load the page, which will affect your page loading time. Enabling caching for connected Design Elements will reduce your page load time. Good thing that ShortPoint has two cache options that you can use:

(a) Smart Cache+ (Recommended) - this will allow the element to load quickly from the cache. Then, after the page finishes loading, it will retrieve the latest data in the background and show it.
(b) Cache for a Set Period of Time - this will allow you to set the period to clear the cache. Data from the cache will be shown for the selected time, then the latest data will be retrieved after that set period expires.

Social media content captures users’ attention and adds an element of fun to your SharePoint intranets. ShortPoint offers dedicated Design Elements that seamlessly integrate content from top social media platforms into your site pages. They allow you to embed the most common type of feed or individual content..
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But what if you want to showcase a custom feed or content not included in the options? In this Tech Tip, we will introduce you to the versatile Code Design Element that allows you to display custom social media content and more on your site pages.

Some social media platforms offer flexibility in what content you can showcase and how it's displayed. They may provide a site to generate an embed code or offer several options when you choose to Share or Embed content. For example, when embedding an X post, you can choose from various display options. Viva Engage also allows you to generate embed codes for different types of feeds. Besides posting single YouTube videos, you can also embed an entire YouTube playlist.

You can bring all these different types of social media content into your SharePoint page using the ShortPoint Code Design Element. It accepts HTML code and seamlessly renders it for you. Simply copy and paste the embed codes you generated, and you are good to go!

Learn more about how to use the Code Design Element in the following support articles:

Switch to Grid Mode and access the Performance and Caching category in the Connect tab of your Design Element. To learn how to enable these caching options, check out Enable Caching on Connected ShortPoint Design Elements.

There are a few things to consider when integrating any social media content into your page. First, you must ensure that all your users have permission to view social media on your site. You may have restrictions in place when accessing social media on your systems. Secondly, you must ensure that all social media content posted is public. This lessens the possibility of having a blank space on your page because the content is inaccessible to your users. Finally, some social media platforms require users to be logged in to view your content. The added step may discourage your users from accessing it at all.

We hope you find this information useful as you build and continue to innovate on your intranet sites. We look forward to providing you with more tips and tricks in the next Snapshots to come!

Customer Spotlight

Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority

Imagine having a fully functional SharePoint intranet. It has all the forms, documents, and data your employees need to do their jobs. But what if your employees are not using it? What if instead of doing their jobs, they are wasting their time trying to find a document in an intranet that should have made their life easier? What would you have done?
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Well, Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA), a leading technology park in the Emirates of Dubai, says use ShortPoint!
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Senior Associate Manager, eServices and CX, Rami Abdulkarim of DSOA was tasked to face this issue head on. “Our existing intranet environment just wasn’t usable,” he explained, “we wanted it to enable a self-service approach to finding answers to employee questions, but it wasn’t functioning properly and usage was very low.”
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This was such a huge concern for Rami and DSOA. They anticipated that revamping their intranet, using only SharePoint’s capabilities, will require a huge amount of time and money—something they didn’t have! “It’s so complex and time consuming that I predicted it would take myself and another outsourced developer up to three months to get the work done,” says Rami.
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This all changed, however, when Rami heard about the powerful SharePoint plug-in, ShortPoint. In a snap, they were able to onboard and get a personalized one-hour training session where they learn the ropes and start the intranet revamp—full steam ahead! “In just two weeks, I’d done everything on the project alone, and all thanks to ShortPoint. It made the project so easy to handle and I could do it without disrupting what really matters—business continuity and workflow,” Rami exclaimed.

By using ShortPoint, Rami stripped astonishing time and cost savings from his business. Rami emphasized, “It reduced the time it took to rebuild our intranet from 3 months to just 2 weeks. The support is great, the team is responsive, and the cost and ROI are just fantastic.”

Today, more and more DSOA employees love using their intranet, recording a phenomenal 1,000 visits daily—a huge jump from the 20 visits they got before! “You really don’t need to spend big budgets to build your new intranet—just use ShortPoint. And with all the new integrations with Microsoft Teams and the ongoing list on the roadmap, this would be the go to solution without a doubt,” Rami added.

Want to learn more about ShortPoint and DSOA’s collaboration? Check out How DSOA saved 10 weeks and $10k+ designing their Intranet to get more insider details on the steps DSOA took to level up their intranet with ShortPoint.

See you in August

More exciting news is planned for August. Stay tuned! And if you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback, please send us a note. We love to hear from you.
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See you next month, ShortPoint hero!

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