Just two months after our latest release we are announcing some cool new features in Beezy. Today our product is even more extensible, since we focused this release on a more seamless integration with SharePoint out-of-the-box components. It will make life easier for companies that want to leverage the platform capabilities without compromising Beezy's unmatched user experience.

Connect custom SharePoint lists

A while ago we wrote on how it is a total shame that  SharePoint 2013 doesn't connect any list to its newsfeed.

We decided to take it a step further for this new release and allow community owners to decide which lists are connected to their newsfeed.

A view of the new community settings with elegant switches to connect or disconnect existing SharePoint lists

Beezy automatically detects all the SharePoint lists under that site and presents them to the user. When you create a new list, the connection is switched off by default to avoid unwanted noise appearing in the newsfeed. If the list is connected, whenever there is a new item an update gets posted in the Newsfeed to support the social collaboration around it. You can see an example here with a Task list created in a community.

The result of connecting your lists is that every new items get posted in the newsfeed.

 Beezy webparts

Customers can now make use of the Beezy functionality in their existing Team Site without any need to migrate content to a Beezy community. After activating the Beezy features in your site collection you can easily bring social collaboration to any existing SharePoint site.

Simply add a Webpart from the list of Beezy's ones

Simply drop a Microblog and a Newsfeed webparts and any standard Team site will automatically get the core social capabilities of Beezy.

The result of a few clicks is a standard SharePoint Team Site with Beezy newsfeed and microblog capabilities.

This feature is especially interesting for companies with a large legacy of team sites that want to avoid a migration. Many of our customers have team sites already deployed (i.e. for project management) and desperately needed to add a social layer in an easy way. Beezy webparts makes this perfectly possible.

Communities directory

We have revamped the design of the communities directory to offer a better visual experience. Beezy now offers a better way to discover new communities. A modern cards-based user interface allows the user to browse the most active, recently created and the complete communities directory from A to Z.

Detail of the new layout in the communities directory

Advanced community settings

We have in our immediate roadmap some features that will enhance the communities possibilities, but we definitely want to avoid complexity. This is why we have already changed the community settings page to keep it as simple as possible. We broke the page in two sections: one for basic and one for advanced settings.

Basic section will always include the minimum information needed to set up a new community in a few clicks. The advanced section is hidden by default and shows controls for more complex features like today the SharePoint lists connection or more cosmetic ones like the community images.

The advanced settings section is displayed upon click.

We hope our clients will appreciate that as we keep adding features, we go the extra mile to keep the UX clean and simple.

This is it for this new release, but we are already cooking an amazing one for the upcoming weeks - stay tuned!

You can request a demo today to see these amazing features in action on both SharePoint 2010 and 2013.