Yearly wrap-ups are all around us … so we decided to make one for you, too.
Even though everything seemed to slow down this year, things really sped up at Slido. The new reality motivated us to develop a number of remote-friendly features and we worked hard to bring you some of the most awaited integrations.
Here’s a recap of our most important updates from the beginning of the year until now.
1. Custom colors for Participant mode
To help you better match Slido to your company or event design, we added the option to set up your own colors for the Participant mode. This is especially useful when embedding Slido into your website or using it with your live video.
2. Quiz question generator
When you need some ideas for a quiz or for trivia questions, simply hit the magic dice button (as many times as you like) to generate a random quiz question. There are thousands of questions available and it’s free to use for everyone.
3. External links
If you’ve ever wanted to share your slides, agenda or other resources with your participants, you can do so now. Just add them as external links and your attendees will be able to access them via the menu in the Participant mode.
Tip: You can use this feature to keep your feedback survey available while running other polls live.
4. New security features
This year, we enhanced Slido’s security with several updates. We’re proud to share that as of February 2020, Slido is fully compliant with ISO 27001.
We’ve also added Member SSO and SCIM provisioning for our enterprise customers. And if you want to restrict access to your event to certain email addresses or domains, you can use our new email verification feature.
5. Image polls
One of the biggest updates to polls was introducing images. This feature allows you to add your own image to any poll or quiz question and engage your participants in novel ways.
Learn more about the feature here or get inspired by 7 ways to use image polls during your meetings.
6. Merge polls and split surveys
The hassle of turning your polls into surveys and vice versa is over. In a few clicks, you can now merge individual polls into a survey or split your survey into individual polls.
7. slido.new and poll.new shortcuts
In WFH times, the ability to engage your team instantly became even more critical. With our slido.new and poll.new URL shortcuts, you can start your Slido session right away, without going through the admin setup. Ideal for quick decision-making or impromptu Q&A.
8. New interaction panel
Along with the new shortcuts, we also gave a facelift to the control panel in the Present mode. It allows you to manage everything from one screen, whether you want to run a quick poll, hide the results or switch to Q&A.
Read more about how to use it and learn some handy keyboard shortcuts along the way.
9. Improved Account Analytics
If you have additional users in your account, you can now easily monitor their usage of Slido in the improved Account Analytics. The new charts show how many of your users actively use Slido, what features they use, and how much they use them.
You can also export this data in your desired time range and evaluate the overall usage of your license.
10. Improved word cloud
This year, we also enhanced the word cloud experience. It automatically filters profanities in English and allows you to set the character limit per entry.
What’s more, once your participants start typing a word, the word cloud will suggest entries that were already posted by others to make voting faster and avoid any misspelled duplicates.
11. The open text results in the Participant mode
We know that some of you don’t always display the Present mode during your meetings. That’s why we made the open text results visible on the participants’ devices, just like for other types of polls.
12. Question sentiment in exports
To give you more insights from your Q&A, we started analyzing the tone and language of the submitted questions. Once you export the list of questions from your Q&A, you will see a new column, “Sentiment”. This applies only to questions in English.
13. Moderator’s announcements
Did you ever want to communicate a break, change in program or some technical instructions to your audience? Now you can – with moderator’s announcements.
This feature allows you to push notifications to the top of the Q&A tab in the Participant mode. We also support links as part of announcements, so feel free to use this feature to share various URLs with your audience.
14. Restricted sign-ups for large accounts
If you want to have a centralized Slido license for all your employees’ accounts, you can restrict sign-ups for your company domain. Users under a restricted domain will not be able to create their own accounts or be invited to accounts outside of the main one, excluding Guest access.
This feature is available for Enterprise and Institution licenses with at least 10 additional users.
15. Event templates
Whether you’re new to Slido or simply looking for new ways to use it, you can now create your event from a template. Once you choose the one you like, Slido will automatically populate your event with predefined polls or ideas and you can start engaging your participants right away.
16. Dark mode
Thanks to our Microsoft Teams integration, we introduced an update that many of you will be excited about – dark mode for the Participant view!
The dark/light mode will be applied automatically based on your participants’ device settings. They can also turn it off and on in the menu and Slido will remember their choice for future events.
17. Google Meet integration (Private Beta)
One of the integrations we worked on in 2020 is Google Meet. It allows you to run Slido directly in your Google Meet meeting using an integrated sidebar. You can request early access here and learn more about how it works in this guide.
18. PowerPoint integrationBETA
This year, we released our most requested feature to date: PowerPoint integration. It’s available in Beta for Windows users and allows you to add polls, quizzes or Q&A directly to your slides.
Join thousands of users who have already used it successfully in their meetings and won’t go back to switching between their slide decks and Slido. You’ll be up and running in minutes.
19. Microsoft Teams integration
And finally, our most recent news for all Microsoft Teams users: you can run and manage Slido directly in your Teams meetings. To get started, you first need to invite at least one participant to your meeting. Learn more in this video or read the full guide here.
20. Slido to become a part of Cisco
Last week, we announced Cisco’s intent to acquire Slido, and we couldn’t be more excited to join forces with this communications pioneer.
While we’ll become part of Cisco and integrate into the Webex platform, Slido will continue to exist as a standalone tool. We’ll keep working on our existing and new integrations with other platforms to bring an inclusive and interactive meeting experience to all.
That’s all for now! But if you made it here, we have a little sneak peek for you.
What’s coming
Our team is currently working on a new poll type – ranking! If you want to be among the first ones to try the early beta version, you can already turn it on via Slido Labs. Just be aware of these limitations.
And later in 2021, we plan to work on the long-awaited integration with Zoom.
We hope you enjoyed this look back at our product news and we can’t wait to bring you even better Slido in the year(s) to come. Stay tuned!
Have feedback or a feature request? Let us know via Slido Labs in your event settings or email us at feedback@slido.com.
