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Show HN: Share company announcements in your coworkers' new tab

sametab.com

71 pointsanacleto32 comments

Homepage. You've re-invented the homepage.

I've worked in companies where the default homepage was the announcements feed on the Intranet. Didn't make people actually read them though!

Basically, yeah.

The hard part is not getting information in front of people, it’s keeping it brief and well-managed enough so that people read it.

the problem is that people dont want to read these announcements. they mostly dont care. over 50% of working professionals are not satisfied with their jobs. why should they care about reading stupid company "announcements"?

The problem with most company home pages is they're designed by people who think MSN or Yahoo's design is good.

A homepage which you will see every time you open a new tab, instead of once a day.

I think it's pretty useful and will make the chance of people actually reading them a lot higher, right?

wait homepage is something you see on every new tab, isn't it?

Depends on your browser. Safari for example never shows you the 'homepage' unless you specifically navigate to it.

That's not true. You can set a new tab to open on your homepage. It's in the general tab of the preferences (the very first tab you see). "New tabs open with" {favorites, top sites, homepage, empty page, same page}.

That’s what I said - unless you specifically set it up to navigate to home on a new tab.

Pedantically, specifically navigating to a page (e.g. by clicking the home button) is different from specifically setting it up so it automatically navigates for you.

In this context that difference (config option vs manual action for each new tab) is important.

Nope, for Chrome you have to use an extension, and Firefox needs an extension or some about:config changes.

You can set the new tab page url with the ADMX templates and set the homepage button to be the newTab page - https://getadmx.com/?Category=Chrome&Policy=Google.Policies....

When did that change for chrome? I remember being able to set a url for new tabs right in settings.

Firefox > Preferences > New Windows and Tabs

"Choose what you want to see when you open your homepage, new windows, and tabs"

You then have the choice of what the default is for new windows (and 'homepage' which I assume means clicks on the Home icon in the toolbar, which I always remove...) and for what appears in new tabs. No about:config needed!

But it requires configuring a plugin in the browser. And every single browser has a possibility to show a webpage of your choice, or a blank page, on every new tab (?)

Edit: wait what browsers don't do this anymore? I can set my firefox to show the page I want for a new window but for a new tab I just get to choose between the default and blank. When did this break? I'm sure this worked last time I tried (which was probably pre 2000)

I'm not sure whether it was the desire of browser manufacturers to claim it as prime ad space, or a longstanding problem with exploitative third party apps resetting the homepage, but they've all phased it out.

This reminds me of the time my former company set a policy on everyone's computers locking the home page to the (largely useless and slow-to-load) intranet site. I then wrote a Safari extension [1] out of spite that posted to the site every time I opened a new tab. (If they want engagement, I'll give it to them!)

[1] https://github.com/philwebster/EngageMe

There is an extra danger with this (we built this at my previous company, and then deleted it), where users end up not seeing the messages anymore, but when they go to internet cafes / planes / public areas they leak very critical information (typically quarterly goals and how we're doing).

Leads to really bad media leaks.

Sounds like a smart way to replace emails with no replies and avoid useless overhead in having your employees using/learning a new product.

Last week we had some fun building a lightweight (mostly to see how chrome extensions work) tool to let companies send company announcements in all their coworkers' new tab.

If this sounds a little odd, here's how it works:

1. Install the Chrome extension [0], open a new tab and you'll see sample content. Hit the signup button and create a new account.

2. Now that you have an account, configure your company's page and invite your coworkers (they have to signup with their work email).

3. You're ready to create and publish announcements from the admin area. Everyone in your company will see them when opening a new tab.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sametab/glmeidaaam...

A lot of people ignore their work announcements because "they dont really care" about their jobs/companies (except for the paycheck to cover health/mortgage).. Why should an employee be fully engaged at work when she/he is just a "disposable" part of a machine and can be let go at any time (and should be ok with it because this is how it always was done)?

Ummm they really think company wide emails (that are often pushed to personal cell phones) are not enough? Now lets see it in the browser tab as well? Really? Whats next? Automatically engraved announcements on coworkers foreheads?

The problem is NOT that people "dont have an opportunity to see the announcements" - the problem is that people are not really interested in their jobs. Make job interesting to an employee and truly care about an employee (prove it by action) then people will be more engaged at work!

"Of the country’s approximately 100 million full-time employees, 51 percent aren’t engaged at work -- meaning they feel no real connection to their jobs, and thus they tend to do the bare minimum...Another 16 percent are “actively disengaged” ... feel their needs aren’t being met at work etc."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-so-many-americans-hate-thei...

Even if 10% of employees like their jobs, that's still a market of 10 million people. If somehow this extension could reach them all and bring 1 cent a month per user to it's creator, that's still 1M$ a year for what's probably a week-end project. Not too bad.

And if it end up reaching 1% of this market that's still 10k$ a year.

So, hey, good job doing this !

That's a great idea!

Some feedback: It would be great if this could be used as a widget on top of an existing new tab page. I really like https://tabliss.io, which shows the time, weather, and a nice photo from unsplash. If I was working somewhere that used this for company announcements, I would prefer to continue using tabliss, and show company announcements as a small widget on the bottom right.

But yeah, I like using the new tab page as a dashboard for this kind of thing. Email and slack notifications are too disruptive, and this is more like a notice board where you can casually glance at it when you have some time.

EDIT: Tabliss supports custom CSS and JS, so I could add this myself. Or could even contribute an official widget, because it's open source: https://github.com/joelshepherd/tabliss

EDIT 2: This is unrelated, but I just saw that Tabliss added a "literature clock" widget. That's really cool! Here's my new tab: https://imgur.com/gallery/99hL1Ei

It mentions "they have to signup with their work email", so there's some notion of the page data being private.

I'm curious how well protected it really is.

Also, is the first email from domain X to sign up the default admin for that domain? How do you resolve disputes?

Hi,

Antonio from Sametab. You need to signup w/ Google or validate your working email before being able to read the announcements. This security rule is enforced into the database (it's Firebase Firestore).

> I'm curious how well protected it really is.

Feel free to ask questions!

> Also, is the first email from domain X to sign up the default admin for that domain?

The first one becomes the admin. We already implemented a RBAC system for managing users' permissions. You'll be able assign admin permissions from the webapp soon.

> How do you resolve disputes?

Drop us an email and we will re-assign the permissions!

Are you able to defend against this type of thing?: https://medium.com/intigriti/how-i-hacked-hundreds-of-compan...

Interesting article, thanks for the link! If a company uses its main domain in the same way gitlab does, SSO is the only way to avoid security flaws. We do not support SSO now, but implementing it is feasible. Feel free to send us an email if you have a company IdP and you want to use Sametab.

I can maybe see some companies having actual use for them, and the discipline to only include emergency/super important info.

I can't see that being more than 10% of the companies, and the rest will just post really useless garbage.

Cute idea, though I did spot a minor spelling mistake "openening" should probably be "opening".

Fixed, thank you.

or slack channel, or email.

Yea I prefer email for these things, so I can filter it appropriately (e.g. only show when I am interested) and refer to past announcements. You cannot do either of those, especially the second, easily with a browser tab thing or homepage.

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