Release Note

Get updates on Cards with Follow a Card

Related products: Card Creation Analytics User Experience
Get updates on Cards with Follow a Card

Hello, I hope your week is off to a good start!

One of our most-requested features is the ability to subscribe to a Card and get updates when information in that Card changes. At last count, we had 94 upvotes for this idea, so I hope today’s release makes a bunch of your days 😉

Starting today, users can follow any Guru Card and automatically receive updates when the information on that Card changes.

Readers will feel more secure in knowing when information, processes, and other company knowledge they care about changes. They will have control over how many Cards they follow, so they can manage information overload according to their own appetite for notifications.

Authors and leaders have a new way to understand what content is most important to their readers through "Card Follow" stats. This functionality gives them a little peace of mind that their team can keep up to date without authors and leaders having to do extra work.

These subject matter experts (SMEs) can also encourage employees to follow specific Cards, relieving SMEs of some of the burden of manually reminding people to read updated Cards. It also reduces the noise of re-sharing the same Cards over and over again in Slack and Teams.

 

Follow a Card and see who is following it.

Here’s how it works:

  • When you open a Card in the Guru web app or browser extension, you’ll see a “Follow” button at the upper right hand corner of the Card.
  • Click the “Follow” button, and when the Card is updated, you’ll receive a notification in your channel of choice (Slack, Teams, or email).
  • You can un-follow a Card at any time.

Card editors have the ability to select whether or not they want to notify followers of updates made to their Cards. We know that not every edit is worthy of sending out a notification, so we made sure subject matter experts can safely adjust their Cards for typos and format changes without worrying about overloading Card followers with noise.

Alongside adding the ability to follow a Card, we’ve also made valuable information found in the Details area of a Card more accessible: now the name and picture of the last person to modify the Card and the timestamp of that update are available in the top utility bar. No more clicking to the Details tab to gain access to this helpful context! We’ve also moved the link to comments over to the right, next to the Follow button to make room for exciting future updates (no spoilers!).

To learn more, check out the new Follow a Card article in Help Center.

We’ve been using this feature at Guru for a few weeks now, and our most-followed Card recaps all of our product releases from 2022. We’d love to hear what Cards your team is following! Let us know how you’re using the follow a Card feature in the comments below.

Happy Halloween! 🎃

Woohooo! This is super exciting and will make it much easier for our users to keep up-to-date on ever-changing information. Thank you Guru team!

@Mackenzie Jackson, we’re glad to hear that, thanks for sharing your reaction! 😀 

will this ever work with synced cards from Confluence for example? 

Hi @Jenn Luna, 

We decided not to support following for synced cards at this time for a few reasons, the main one is that there isn’t a good equivalent of the “notify followers” option that exists when cards are updated from within Guru or Slack. Without that followers could get unhelpful notifications regarding trivial changes to those cards. 

If you’re really keen to have following on synced cards it’d be great if you could create a feedback post so we can track interest. If you do that I’d love to know what knowledge is contained in the synced cards (basically why you want people to be able to follow them) and what logic you’d like to see for sending “updated” notifications to followers of synced cards.  

Thanks!

Hi there.

This is a great new feature, so thank you very much!

Not sure if this is user error or not, but we have been testing it out to make sure people get the email notification when significant changes are made to a card, but it doesn’t seem to be happening? Do you have any ideas as to why this may be?

Hi @Angela McCarthy!

I don’t see any followed cards for your team, perhaps I don’t have the right information to look up your team, you confirm that there are followed cards using Card Manager. If there are followed cards, so long as editors are leaving the box checked to send notifications when editing and they aren’t expecting to get notifications for their own edits, and your team is receiving other types of notifications, you should be able to use this. If all of those are true but you’re still not seeing notifications I recommend reaching out to our support team either through the link under the ? Help button in the header of the web app or by sending an email to support@getguru.com.

Hi Laura

Thanks for the reply.

I got a colleague to follow a couple of cards yesterday and then made “significant” amendments, making sure the box was checked, and he hasn’t received any updates. I understand it wouldn’t work for me as the author/editor so maybe as we are getting other notifications, I will ask the help desk as you suggest.

Thanks again.

This is an awesome feature and checks a lot of boxes for us. One question - are there any analytics for this? Can I pull up a list of all cards I’m following, rather than checking each one? Knowing my team, we may get a little “follow happy” with certain cards and it would be great to have insight into the whole list for easy un-following. 

@Angela McCarthy - perfect, hopefully it’s an easy answer, if not we’ll dig into it on the technical side. 

 

Hi @Leah Colatosti, I’m glad to hear your team is happy about this improvement! You’ve caught something we didn’t tackle in this release but are already working on - the ability to see all of your followed Cards in one place. I’ll reach out to you by email soon in case you’re willing to talk with us about this. We’re aiming to do interviews after Thanksgiving through early December to learn more about teams are using the existing functionality and to learn how our idea for providing a specific place to view your followed Cards feels. If you’re interested in getting a general sense of what Cards are followed across your team, you can use the new “Times Followed” filter in Card Manager. You can also see Follower information for a particular Card by clicking “Details” in the Card header.

If anyone else is willing to lend us their thoughts about following and how you want to manage your followed Cards, please “Like” this message and I’ll keep you in mind for when @Kate Staaf and I are ready to talk in-depth! 

@Laura Desmond-Black Yes I’d be happy to discuss our use case for Following. It actually solves a big workflow issue for us so it was a great addition! 

Thank you for this, it is awesome! I will be testing it out.

@Laura Desmond-Black - Does “following” a card count towards User Activity/Active Events counts when running Guru Analytics Usage By User? 

Hi @Linda Moore!

We haven’t updated anything in analytics to account for following as an activity users can take so no, it’s not part of the data that contributes to that. Would you like it to be? Are there any other ways you’d like to see following be included in analytics?

@Laura Desmond-Black Thanks for the information! At this time I do not have a preference on where to find that data but wanted to be sure as I am running my own “power user” activity contest for view users next month and need to explain what contributes to Usage by User counts to I can easily run one report in the Analytics report.

I am going off topic in this thread, but is there an up to date card(s) in the help center that lists out what counts for Adoption and/or Usage by User counts?  With recent product additions and separate reporting I could use a refresher. Thank you. 

@Linda Moore, 

Sounds good on the analytics part, we’ll keep an eye out for more feedback in this area. 

The actions that contribute to “usage” in the “Usage by User” report are:

  • Commenting on a Card
  • Viewing a Card
  • Verifying a Card
  • Copying a Card link
  • Creating a Card
  • Deleting a Card
  • Updating a Card
  • Copying a Card
  • Favoriting a Card
  • Unfavoriting a Card
  • Viewing a Board
  • Creating a Board
  • Updating a Board
  • Deleting a Board
  • Viewing a file in a Card
  • Copying a link to a file from a Card
  • Asking a question
  • Answering a question
  • Archiving/deleting a question
  • Performing a search
  • Copying a trackable link from a Card
  • Copying a Synced Card link

I wasn’t able to find this in Help Center, I’ll put in a request for an update :)

Hi @Laura Desmond-Black! Recently, we conducted a survey about how our users (mostly Customer Care agents) use Guru and one of the topics that came out from this feedback was that agents would like to be notified of changes to the content.

Although the Follow feature can partly cover this, in our scenario, agents would have to follow approx. a thousand cards in order to be notified when something in the process changes.

I was wondering if instead of forcing people to follow cards, we could select when to notify (just as with notifying “followers”) certain usr groups (just like in Announcements)?

If the change to the process is significant, we send an announcement but occasionally, the update to the process is considered minor, however, agents still need to know about it in order to follow the process properly.

We don’t want to be sending announcements about every change we do, since we’re updating the content constantly, but it would be great if there was other way of updating the users.

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