What Just Shipped: ShortPoint's August Release

We’re excited to share the latest updates that have just gone live in ShortPoint’s August release! This release is all about design flexibility and performance improvements to help you create even better SharePoint experiences.

1. Text Control with Textshow Design Element
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   The biggie in this release was the addition of text alignment to the Textshow Design Element. Now you can control how your content looks with options to align text left, center or right within the element. Whether you’re creating clean layouts, highlighting important information or designing call-to-action sections, this gives you the precision you need to make your content look exactly how you want it to. Check out our guide to learn how to use the text alignment feature.
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2. Performance Improvements Under the Hood
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   While you were designing, we were working behind the scenes to make ShortPoint faster and more efficient. This release included some technical tidbits, including removal of unused polyfills and updates to several UI components. These improvements reduced the overall application size and now use native browser functionality, so you’ll see noticeable performance improvements. The result? A smoother, more responsive experience as you build and manage your SharePoint sites so you can focus on what matters most – creating awesome user experiences.
   

New Articles:

• How to Embed an Entire LinkedIn Feed to a SharePoint Page Using the Code Design Element
• How to Keep the ShortPoint Footer at the Bottom of the Page
• How to Display Dynamic Greetings on Your SharePoint Page Using the Code Design Element
• How to Dynamically Display a SharePoint Group Member Count on Your SharePoint Page
• Known Issue: White Left Navigation Panel and Missing Edit Button in SharePoint 2019
• How to Create a Central News Page in SharePoint
• How to Filter News by Department in SharePoint
• How to Set Up Expiration Dates For SharePoint News
• How to Showcase SharePoint News by Department Using ShortPoint Connect
• How to Use the Text Alignment Feature for the Textshow Design Element
• How to Add a Search Box to Your SharePoint Page Using the Code Design Element

Updated Articles:

• How to Show New Items at the Top of a Connected SharePoint List
• How to Customize the Look of the Events Design Element using Custom CSS
• How to Display All Day Events in ShortPoint
• How to Display Recurring Events in ShortPoint
• How to Launch Slack Using ShortPoint Design Elements

When creating a modern intranet, you often need to break free from the traditional SharePoint look and feel. To get a sleek website-like look that doesn’t scream “SharePoint,” many organizations choose to hide the SharePoint header using ShortPoint’s Focus Mode. This powerful feature allows you to hide the SharePoint and Office 365 ribbon and suite bar and have a clean canvas to build a custom branded experience that matches your organization’s visual identity.

But hiding the SharePoint header presents one big challenge: you lose access to the built-in SharePoint search that usually resides in the main navigation bar. Since search is a critical component of any intranet, removing this feature can severely impact user experience and productivity. The search box is often the most used element on any SharePoint site, helping employees find documents, people, and information across the entire organization.

The solution lies in ShortPoint’s Code Design Element, which allows you to place a fully functional search box anywhere on your SharePoint page while maintaining the native SharePoint search capabilities. This means you can add a search box that behaves exactly like SharePoint’s built-in search, but place it exactly where it makes sense for your users and design.

Moving your search functionality to custom locations provides several advantages in building modern intranet pages. You can place the search box in your hero section for immediate visibility, integrate it into your custom navigation design, or place multiple search boxes in different page sections for context-specific searching. This allows you to create more intuitive user journeys, make search more prominent than the standard SharePoint placement, and maintain branding throughout the entire user experience. You can also customize the search box to match your design system and ensure search is accessible even when users are deep within your content hierarchy.

Is your intranet engagement on the down low? Maybe it’s because your employees can’t find what they’re looking for! Think about it, when’s the last time you stuck around on a website with a clunky design and a not-so-friendly interface? Most likely, never.

The World Acceptance Corporation faced the same problem. As their presence and product offerings expand, one thing became crystal clear: their team needed lightning-fast access to all the essential company info—everything from customer data to HR resources and competitor insights.

“Employees couldn’t take care of their own needs, since it was missing a good interface to even find and view pages,“ Jonathan Jones, the Director of Talent, recalled while discussing their SharePoint intranet. “It didn’t look attractive, because it’s so difficult to design beyond basic templates in SharePoint. Plus, we had other sites that were built outside of SharePoint, like our HR site. So if an employee searched for an HR term on our intranet, it wouldn’t recognize the content that existed in the portal.”

To solve this problem, Jonathan had to face a humongous task: rebuilding their SharePoint intranet. But here's where things got even trickier. Jonathan's team was stretched thin. He only had one full-time person and one part-time teammate available for a massive intranet rebuild. And here's the kicker: none of them were SharePoint experts!

Jonathan's first instinct? Bring in a specialist to design and manage the new site. But that would cost a whopping $100,000 per year. Certainly, it’s a number that would make any CFO's eyes water!

"Our leadership team gave me strict instructions to keep our costs as low as possible. So there was no budget for hiring developers who could produce code to deliver the high level of design we needed,” Jonathan further explained.

Then, something amazing happened! While researching solutions, Jonathan discovered ShortPoint, an all-in-one design platform for SharePoint that promised to deliver everything his team needed. No coding required, no developer support necessary. It seemed almost too good to be true!

Within just a couple of weeks, Jonathan and his small but mighty team were ShortPoint pros! He played it safe by having IT handle the installation, but once that was done, his HR team took the reins and ran with it. The whole process was surprisingly smooth. "We quickly found that even without a lot of SharePoint knowledge, we were able to do this internally on our team and pretty much run it on our own,” he exclaimed.

The results? Absolutely game-changing! "Everyone knows designing is tough in SharePoint," he says. "Doing anything outside of the normal templates takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. Using ShortPoint has saved—and continues to save us— literally hours upon hours every week because we can really simply create the designs we want. We've already saved 100+ hours as a team!"

But the real magic happened when employees started using the new intranet. "Our usage is increasing daily, as well as repeat visitors, which is a great measure of the site's success because people keep coming back," says Jonathan. "I feel like it's really made a difference in an area that every corporation struggles with, which is communication. Because ShortPoint gives us the ability to have a cleaner front-end interface and cleaner pages, and organize our information better, we're able to finally give employees information the way they want it. Employees are finding information faster, which reduces the burden on leaders, who now have fewer manual enquiries to deal with."

The cherry on top? ShortPoint didn't just help World Acceptance Corporation transform its outdated intranet into a sleek, modern platform; it also made it effortless to integrate all its HR content into one unified portal. This was huge for the business. It eliminated extra costs and finally solved that annoying problem where searches came up empty. Talk about a win-win!

Want to get the same amazing results? Check out How World Acceptance Corporation rebuilt their Intranet and saved $100k a year for more information.

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

See you next month, ShortPoint hero!