Most requested features: What’s new and coming soon from inriver

It’s been almost two months since I joined inriver as Chief Product Officer with a remit to ensure the inriver PIM remains fully optimized to your needs as our customers. To help you work more efficiently as you grow and thrive, I needed a full understanding of how you are using our product and the value it brings you. I also want to hear about improvements that would benefit your business.   

Some of the most useful insights I’ve had so far came in the feedback you provided to our quarterly surveys and via the inriver Community. Today I’d like to reflect on your input and outline how we’re responding. Below, you’ll find a wealth of information about what’s already been delivered and what is yet to come. 

Your top priorities 

Six key themes emerged when we asked what you would most like to see in the inriver PIM: 

• Improvements in overall user experience for usability, productivity and faster time to value
• Better user management, identity, and access control 
• Enhanced search and filtering with actionable results
• Greater support for processes and workflows to increase clarity, control and automation
• Further stability and performance improvements
• Increased flexibility for multi-channel management, handling large data sets both inbound and outbound 

What’s already been delivered? 

I’m pleased to say that a significant number of small but impactful changes have already been implemented in response to your input, including:  

User experience enhancements:  

• Query Editor: introduction of OR operator; direct link from portal home screen; one-click re-run of queries
• Long Running Jobs: ability to cancel jobs from the UI
• Toggle to hide read-only fields from details view
• Top-to-bottom listing view for inriver Enrich (similar to Plan & Release)
• Entity cards: better multi-select user experience, larger, clickable context menu
• Added filtering in work area lists
• Details tab: filtering on field name, field value, and category; clearer distinction between read-only and editable fields
• Addition of sort order and selection for Fieldsets
• Excel export: Add the FieldTypeId to the fields list; include CVL values in exported file
• Control Center: FieldTypeId parameter is now shown in the field list; users can now configure the order that the HTML templates appear on the tabs; cursor is shown on clickable headers during entity type configuration; improvements to SSO Setup/Configuration; addition of customer environment metrics

 Stability & Performance improvements: 

• Extension execution metrics are now visualized in Control Center
• Roll-out is underway of the 3DL/Elastic data layer 
• Multi-threading and performance units have been implemented

Continued Innovation 

We’ve also launched three exciting product additions:  

• Inspire: our ChatGPT-based tool for automated content enrichment. Find out more in Community or download the datasheet from our website.
• Syndicate Plus: for more efficient, automated distribute of large product data sets to retailers and marketplaces. Find out more in Community or download the datasheet from our website.
• Brand Store: a centralized, secure and scalable way to share approved data with your growing pool of partners and employees. Find out more in Community or download the datasheet from our website.

What’s still to come?  

Our product teams continue to focus on what’s important to you and there are several projects, large and small, currently in development:  

• User management: Creation and implementation of our Global Identity Service
• Process support: A major initiative to add workflow management and increased automation
• Data handling: Implementation of our Content Delivery API for inbound and outbound data flows
• Stability & performance: Better message handling and backend management of channels for improved overall performance and stability
• Inspire enhancements: Automated batch generation of product information
• Search and filtering: Ability to add FieldTypeId alongside field name in Query Editor field list; support for longer date ranges in searches

The following enhancements are in the planning phase:  

• User experience: Enhanced search experience
• Data handling: High speed data import and improved data onboarding

Your feedback is valued 

As I hope you can see, we’ve been very busy responding to your feedback. If you have any questions about any of these enhancements, please contact your Customer Success Manager or submit them via Community.

And you don’t need to wait for one of our regular customer surveys to share your feedback or ideas with me and the wider product team. You can do it at any time on our website.

Share your ideas

I look forward to seeing and hearing your continued feedback.