A New Day 
It’s been a tough year. A global health crisis, political turmoil, a long, cold winter… we could all be forgiven for simply wanting to, “turn the page.” At Brightidea, we are looking forward to warmer and brighter days ahead. Our Spring Release is bursting with long-overdue features and enhancements that will energize and delight you. We focused on, “must-have,” integrations, usability, and simplicity, all the things needed, to make it easier than ever to spread and enable Idea Management throughout your organization.
Introducing: Brightidea ↔ MS Teams Integration 
This probably sounds cliché at this point, but remote work and remote work tools are now a part of our daily lives. To accommodate this new way of working, we wanted to bring our software directly into the places where you are meeting, ideating, and innovating and allow you to capture ideas on the fly directly from MS Teams.
While we have long been integrated with Slack since 2017, we know that Teams adoption has skyrocketed in the past few years and was accelerated even more so with remote work trends leading to over 115 million daily active Teams users. With all the ideas generated during your Teams interactions, we needed to make sure you had a simple way to capture those ideas natively with as little effort as possible.
With the Brightidea ↔ MS Teams integration you can:
- Post Ideas to Brightidea directly from your Teams, 1:1 messages, and chats, or even submit ideas on behalf of your teammates.
- Capture attachments directly from your Teams conversations and add them to your idea submissions.
- Ideas posted to Brightidea have native links back to your Teams conversations so that you can easily reference your original points of inspiration.
- Create dedicated Teams for ideas submitted to your Brightidea initiatives and stay up t date on the latest ideas.
Next time you hear a great idea come up during a Teams call, don’t forget to submit it to your Idea Box or applicable innovation initiative!
Learn more about the Brightidea ↔ MS Teams Integration in our Knowledge Base Article.
Welcome Message Editor 
Nothing makes things feel fresh and exciting like a dazzling first impression. Creating a striking visual to engage participants is a great way to inspire creativity and get everyone excited about your initiative. We’ve seen customers do some pretty amazing things to design custom welcome messages in the past to dazzle their participants, but this is a new day…
We’ve listened and learned from some of our most creative users and built a new and exciting Welcome Message Editor that will allow all admins to more easily create those striking and inspiring first impressions.
With this enhancement you can:
- Simply double-click on the Welcome Message Section to open the editor.
- Make changes in line to the Welcome Message Section.
- Select from dazzling default themes built on our app design themes.
- Leverage free stock photos from Unsplash.
- Adjust image brightness for readability via readability slider.
Need step-by-step instructions for editing your Welcome Messages? Check out our helpful Knowledge Base Article.
Share Button
We have always known that participation and adoption of innovation initiatives is paramount to our customer’s success. So with this new day, we wanted to also take a fresh and prominent approach to sharing initiatives with others. We realize that the ability to collaborate and share initiatives needs be front and center and not buried behind settings or admin consoles.
We are thrilled to announce the new Share Button feature, seen below, that is prominently available at the top of all new initiatives created which brings front and center a simple and intuitive interface meant to drive rapid promotion of your new initiatives.
With the new Share Button feature you can rapidly:
- Invite new participants to join your initiatives.
- Grant pipeline admin permissions to users.
- Add Idea Box managers.
Once you invite users via the new Share Button feature, they will receive an e-mail notification inviting them to the initiative. With this added ease of use, we are eager to see increases in participation and adoption across all of your new initiatives.
If you are ready to start using the new Share Button feature, but need some instructions on how it works, you can access our Knowledge Base Article.
Holistic Pipeline Export
It’s also a new day for our admins out there looking to export data for more holistic views of their innovation initiatives. We have added the ability for admins to export the entire initiative’s data via a Holistic Pipeline Export. No longer will admins have to run multiple exports from multiple steps or different reporting tools to access all the data available.
This enhanced capability with Holistic Pipeline Export should save admins valuable time and effort and increase efficiency. We want to get you back to doing the activities that drive innovation forward instead of spending time running repetitive reports and exports to access the data you need. We hope this is a ray of sunshine for our admins that will brighten your day.
Ready to start exporting your data? Head on over to our Knowledge Base Article to learn more and start exporting today!
Webhooks: Endless Integration Points with the Rules Engine
A new day has dawned and the app ecosystem is a central piece of the business landscape. Providing customers the ability to integrate Brightidea with the rest of their applications is something we encourage and want to empower. In order to further the adoption of idea management with other business units, we know that we must be flexible and capable of integrating Brightidea into everyone’s favorite apps and productivity tools.
We are excited to announce new foundational functionality that will allow you to integrate Brightidea with thousands of other applications via Webhooks. We have added the ability via our Brightidea Rules Engine for anyone to place push and pull requests directly to and from Brightidea. With this functionality, you can now push data from Brightidea directly to other applications and platforms that allow for incoming/outgoing webhooks.
Zapier has entered the chat…
This is truly a new day for Brightidea and the idea management ecosystem. As you uncover the best ideas from Brightidea, you can now add a rule that will push those winning ideas instantly into your PM software (think JIRA and Asana) or other planning tools. With the thousands of apps and software available via the Zapier connection hub, the limits are truly only your imagination.
We are committed to the idea management ecosystem, and we view this as only the foundation of where we will begin to build out many more native integration points in the future. This feature also ushers in a new concept of managing ideas as programmable objects across platforms. We know you are anxious to undertake this work today, and we wanted to give everyone access to Webhooks so that we are empowering you to integrate with your favorite apps and platforms and manage your ideas as programmable objects.
Can’t wait to start leveraging Webhooks in Rules Engine and connect with your favorite apps? Access instructions for Webhooks in Rules Engine via our Knowledge Base Article.
Have an idea for a new native integration we should be considering? Please submit your ideas to Customer IdeaSpace for future integrations!
But we aren’t done yet… 
We still have a few more features that are in full bloom to share with you! 🌹
Color-Coded Stages are now available in the end-user steps view. Easily delete and deactivate users directly from People Pillar. Quarterly Business Impact has been added to both the business impact tab on ideas and in reporting. More personalized content for users’ feeds in User Home via machine learning tools.
A New Day for Innovation Leaders
Innovation teams have done their job by introducing new methods and tools to their organizations. Through their hard work, they have sown the seeds that now allow for line-of-business managers to adopt idea management directly. In this new future, every team maintains its own, “prioritized backlog,” of ideas and projects. Strategic planning is a breeze when you can see your options side by side and drill down on the relevant context of development, evaluations, and conversations.
Awake from the slumber! Shake off the past and engage employees on an entirely new level. It’s a new day. Get out there and make the most of it with the most advanced innovation platform on the planet. We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with!
Stay bright! ☀️
