We’re happy to announce that a new major release of Synigo Pulse is on its way! This release not only has cool features and an improved look and feel, it also lays the foundation for future innovations. To name a few, the ability to build widgets yourself, push and target notifications, choose specific design views and chat with your workplace.

Derk van Lochem, founder and solution architect at Synigo, explains why, what and when.

The new Pulse is nearly a complete redesign of our system. You can imagine this was a lot of work and took a lot brainstorming. We started at the end of 2018 as a side track, still upgrading and maintaining our current platform. Why would you redesign the platform? We have two reasons:

1. Be a better partner
2. Be future proof

Be a better partner

We try to deliver the features requested by you as early and as good as possible. We can speed up this process significantly with our platform. We can build, test and deploy parts of Synigo Pulse without affecting other parts. For example, we could add a new Power Bi widget without affecting other widgets. This way our releases will be more concise, giving us the benefits of releasing smaller, more frequent and with less issues. The technical term behind this is a Microservice based architecture.

We support if this then that scenarios. Derk van Lochem

We have had many requests about providing you with more social capabilities and notify users when changes occur. These features look really easy at first glance, but they have a tremendous impact on server loads and traffic. The new platform has “event driven” capabilities that allow us to implement “If this then that” scenarios. Actually, our native social commenting feature already uses parts of this event driven system; “when commenting to an article, the writer receives a notification”.

Be future proof

When planning for our future development, we keep two things in mind constantly:

1. Are we able to process all of the traffic generated by our users?
2. Can we quickly respond to disruptive changes and even more: can we be disruptive ourselves!

As a customer you couldn’t be bothered less about the first point, so I won’t go into much detail here. With our current setup, we can easily handle 100 times the loads we are processing now. The new Pulse implementation can handle almost unlimited times the loads we’re processing now.

In regard to the second point, with the new Pulse we have the flexibility to implement functionality not only in, but also related to your portal. A good example of this is the soon to be released native app. You will have the flexibility to configure this app just the way you want to without making drastic changes to the content in your CMS.

Ok but what’s actually changing in this release?

That was a lot of “abstract” talking about why we do the things we do, but what’s actually changing? Some of the changes are…

1. The portal will get a facelift, the fonts are slightly bigger, making it more readable, the widgets are more responsive (sizing on different window sizes) giving it a better look and feel…
2. The news part of your portal has had a complete redesign, with new layouts, for example a Hero view for the news widget and news overview page.
3. News articles can be liked, commented and the number of views is tracked and displayed.
4. We’ve added @mentioning and emojis to our social widgets.
5. Lots of small improvements, such as displaying the sites favicon (the icon you see in the tab of your browser) instead of the star icon.
6. The portal itself and the app will be more interactive. Changes to your environment (a new news message, notice, or a new email or appointment will be directly reflected in your portal).

We keep in mind that users always come first! We’re not creating any breaking changes and you’ll need to opt-in for many of the major changes, such as the new News overviews. This way we hope to give you the time to create your own strategy to enroll the new features to your users.

At last, when is this coming?

We are aiming to release the preview of this new release early June. We will let you take your time to look at these new features and we’ll take our time to answer any of your questions. If all is well, we’ll release this at the end of Q4 2019

Derk van Lochem is founder and solution architect at Synigo.