• Let your text become rich! – not only in content but also in format. Rich-text formatting is now available in the session planner, so you can apply bold, italic, underline and bullet point formatting in any section of your session blocks.
  
• Get to know in a glance if any of your sessions has been changed while you were away. If you work collaboratively on session plans, and your collaborators edit your session or make a comment while you are away, then an activity indicator ● will be shown on your homepage on the session card. Combine it with sorting sessions by ‘Modified date’, and you never miss an update of your sessions.
  

We also came up with a set of improvements in the library:

• Commenting in library: Have you used a facilitation method from a library and you have feedback for it? By making comments on the library content you can start a conversation, share your feedback and build a living knowledge base of facilitation methods and practice.
  
• Difficulty indicator: when you want to use a method you found in the library, wouldn’t it be good to know how difficult is this method to use from the author’s perspective? Now a 3-level indicator helps you to understand whether a particular method can be easily applied, or requires advanced skills to deliver.
• New field in library to store background information: add historical development, references or any other bits of information that is not delivery-related. This enables you to keep the instructions field focused on the delivery-related information. Importantly, instructions are included on the session printout while background information is not.

Go ahead and check them out at www.sessionlab.com!

In the past weeks we’ve been busy improving the ‘behind the scenes’ part of SessionLab. As a result we got a faster and a more reliable platform than ever before. Of course, we included some new features as well that we know you’ve been looking forward to:

• Mark your client for each session: Now you have a dedicated field to enter a client of a specific session. This can help you filter your sessions and find the ones assigned to specific clients more easily.
• Less crowded dashboard: If you have a lot of sessions on the dashboard, now you will only see the 10 most recent in each group (your own sessions, the ones shared with you and your team’s sessions). The rest you can retrieve by clicking Load more.
• Find and sort sessions: A new toolbar lets you quickly find a session by it’s name, description, tags, collaborators or the new client field. Whatever you enter will filter all the sessions on the dashboard, showing only the ones that match the criteria. You can also sort by session date, last modified time or alphabetically by name.
• More paper size options: Besides the standard A4 size paper printout, now you can also choose US Letter or Legal paper size for your PDF printouts.

Go ahead and check them out at www.sessionlab.com!

These are the first improvements in the line of many that we’re planning to help you organise your sessions better. Therefore, your feedback is more than welcome so please leave a comment.

Stay tuned for our next announcement. Hint: we are working on rebranding SessionLab so soon you can get to know the new name for the app!

• Your Private and Team Libraries of facilitation resources: Do you have some favourite methods or exercises that you often (re)use in your sessions? Now you can add them to your dedicated Private Library in SessionLab, so you can quickly find them next time you want to use them! If you work in a team, a new Team Library can be handy to have a shared knowledge base of facilitation methods within your team!
• Add resources to library from your sessions: Next time you feel you have just created a block in one of your session worthy to be saved for later, just select Add to library… and you can store it as resource in your Private, Team’s or Public Library.
• Share your session plans with clients without a SessionLab account: If you want to show your session plan to someone without forcing them to create a SessionLab account (or sending a printout in PDF), you can now do it by creating and sharing a link to your session. By default your sessions are still private and you can enable the shareable link from the Collaborators sidebar for each session.

Go ahead and check it all out at www.sessionlab.com!

We’re looking forward to further improving both the public and private libraries of SessionLab to make them even more useful knowledge base for your session preparations. We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas!

Here are the detailed descriptions of the new goodies:

• Real-time collaboration and editor rights: When you invite a collaborator for your workshop or training plan now you can work together at the same time on your plan. To do that you can give the new editor role to your collaborators which will allow them to edit all the plan details. The viewer role still remains for cases when you want to give only view and commenting rights to collaborators.  Furthermore, you can see the changes anybody makes instantaneously as well as visual indicators showing who is currently online and which blocks of the plan are they working on.
• See past changes: To help you have an overview of what changes were done to your plan we added the activity log to the planner sidebar. This is especially useful when someone was working on the plan while you were away.
• Bigger text size and more options on printouts: Was the text on the printout of your plan too small to be useful during the delivery of your session? Or maybe you wanted the list of materials (part of extra block information we added in the last update) in your plan? New printout options come to the rescue. Switch between 3 different font sizes, select what information you want to see in the table or chose if you want to include extra information below the table.

Go ahead and check it all out at www.sessionlab.com!

In the meantime we are working on new features to support needs assessment and evaluations for your session plans. We’d love to hear you feedback on these features so hit the comments below.