New features
1. Create custom celebrations and rally your team on a shared Wish Board Birthdays and work anniversaries were the only celebrations you could run out of the box. September opens the door to any occasion — farewells, promotions, product launches, cultural festivals — with a Wish Board where everyone contributes wishes in one place.- Create any event: Set a name, date, participants, and cover — one-off or recurring — from the Celebrations page.
- Shared Wish Board: Colleagues post messages, GIFs, and reactions on a single board tied to the event.
- Discoverable in one hub: Custom events sit alongside birthdays and work anniversaries in Celebrations, filterable by month and event type.
2. Manage jury panels without disrupting live nominations Editing a jury award while nominations were already open was risky — panel changes could quietly invalidate in-flight ratings. Panel management is now a first-class flow with the guardrails admins were asking for.
- Scoped panel view: Moderators only see the levels they own; owners see everything.
- Confirm before overwriting: Roster or scope changes on a live award prompt a confirmation before write, so open nominations aren’t affected by mistake.
- Cleaner Open Nominations tabs: Tabs with no pending work stay hidden, the bulk-action bar shows a pluralised count, and the default panel is highlighted with its rule.
- Copied awards stay editable: A cloned award lets you remove any panel before the first save.
3. Cancel a pending nomination before it’s approved Nominators can now cancel a nomination that’s still awaiting approval — no more asking an admin to intervene when a nomination was submitted in error or against the wrong recipient. The nomination is withdrawn cleanly, and any budget hold is released. Learn more in Nominations.
4. Schedule data reports and manage recipients at scale Custom report scheduling shipped in August. September extends the same experience to Data Reports and cleans up how recipients are managed.
- Schedule Data Reports: Route new data reports through the schedule flow with the same frequency, recipient, and delivery options as custom reports.
- Exclude specific users: Add exclusion rules server-side so the excluded set stays in sync as your audience changes.
- Better recipient search: Preselected recipients don’t reappear in search, chips show the recipient’s email, and inactive users are filtered out of the picker.
- Edit without losing state: Reopening a scheduled report preloads recipients correctly and locks the Schedule button until the recipient sync completes.
5. Lock the Redemption Shop to the user’s tagged location Global catalogs previously let any employee browse and redeem in any country, which caused fulfilment and tax complications for organisations that assign employees to specific locations.
- Platform-level toggle: Admins enable “Store location lock” from Platform Settings; the read-only state also shows on the Program Settings card as Restricted / Unrestricted.
- Locked shop experience: When enabled, the shop’s country control collapses to the user’s tagged country — flag and ISO shown, no picker.
- Aware of empty collections: If the lock leaves a collection with no available rewards, the claim screen tells the user why instead of showing an empty list.
6. Redesigned branding and platform settings Branding, bot customisation, custom banners, catalog preferences, and auto top-up settings have moved into a single, refreshed Platform Settings experience. The layout, preview blocks, and edit modals are consistent across every setting, so admins spend less time hunting for controls.
- Auto top-up: Configure wallet top-up thresholds and amounts from Platform Settings.
- Brand assets: Manage logos, favicons, and colours from one page with live previews.
- Bot customisation: Personalise the platform’s assistant name and avatar in the same flow.
- Custom banners: Manage anniversary and Wish Board banners as first-class assets.
7. Bulk-update site countries from Site Management Admins managing many sites can now select multiple sites and update their country in one action, instead of editing each site individually. A Select All shortcut is included for large lists. Learn more in Business information.
Updates
8. Nominator’s reporting chain now available as a certificate signatory Certificate templates only offered the nominee’s reporting chain plus a flat “Nominator”. Admins can now pick any level of the nominator’s chain (HRBP, L+1, L+2, department head, cost centre head, BU head) as the primary signatory, and configured relationship fields yield an entry for both nominee and nominator. Existing templates continue to work unchanged. Learn more in Add certificates to awards.9. Citation and question privacy are visible while nominating Award nomination surfaces on the web and in MS Teams now show a Public / Private chip next to the citation and questions steps, so nominators know upfront which parts of their submission will be visible on the feed.
10. @mention indicator in the award message composer The award composer now surfaces the @mention affordance directly in the message field, making it discoverable that you can tag colleagues in an appreciation. Learn more in Appreciate colleagues.
11. Spotlight audience: exclude with “is not one of” The Spotlight audience builder now offers an is not one of operator on every dimension — static fields, UDF, and URF — so you can target “everyone in Sales except the London office” without inverting your logic.
12. Reopen and edit inactive Custom Pulse surveys Admins can now reopen an inactive Custom Pulse survey and edit driver, sub-driver, question options, and feedback configuration. Questions removed on the reopened run show a “Not in this run” chip, so history stays legible. Learn more in Custom pulse surveys.
13. Edit an active general survey without recreating it Title, description, banner, and audience can be edited on an active general survey. Previously any change required closing and cloning the survey.
14. Filter survey reports by department head and manager Custom Pulse and Mood-o-Meter survey reports now accept department head and manager as filter dimensions, both in the report view and in the exported PDF, so you can slice sentiment by leadership span.
15. Cleaner budget-automation picker and Diwali gifts menu
- Budget automation picker now shows each award’s internal description alongside its name, making the right pick obvious when many awards share similar public names.
- Diwali gifts are managed as a regular gift-menu row instead of a hardcoded set, so admins can enable, disable, or reorder them the same way as any other gift catalog.
Bug fixes
- Award nomination approvals: Approve was stuck disabled for budget-owner approvers on private range-based awards. Approvers can now action these nominations without opening the award detail.
- Custom Pulse edits: Cancelling or closing a Custom Pulse edit no longer routes into a 404, and dimension counts stay accurate after a question is edited.
- Custom Pulse PPT export: The export tab no longer closes before the PowerPoint download starts.
- Survey landing page: The client logo is no longer duplicated on the survey landing page for organisations that had already set a header logo.
- Survey banner cropper: The crop tool no longer clips image edges when repositioning the banner.
- Wishes and celebrations: Fixed alignment on the celebrations filter bar, avatar alignment on the Wish Board header, and a stale card width on the leaderboard feed card.
- Condition-based gift sends: Fixed an error that blocked certain condition-based automated gifts from firing.
- BU-wise budget utilization download: Removed a duplicate
.csv.csvextension on the exported file. - SuccessFactors setup: Removed a non-functional “Additional Filters” field from the SuccessFactors integration form to avoid confusion.
- Feed and navigation loading: Fixed an issue where the feed, navigation, and celebrations could render blank after login.