HiHello has been a pioneer in creating beautiful and modern digital business cards and has led the way with our industry-leading digital business card platform for individuals and businesses. Yesterday, we launched the next-generation templates feature on the HiHello digital business card platform that makes it possible for large companies with thousands and tens of thousands of employees to automate the creation of digital business cards for their company.
As Marc Andreessen from a16z posted in 2011, software is eating the world. Well, software is also eating the world of business cards. The way we do business has changed. While we still interact with people in person, our business and professional interactions are increasingly via email and video conferencing (on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet). In every interaction, employees need a way to show who they are, what company they work for, and for that brand and professionalism to appear consistently.
In working with several large enterprise companies, the HiHello team heard loud and clear what enterprises need. In particular, they want to automate the provisioning and de-provisioning of cards and users. They want all the data to come from a single source of truth, typically from their directory systems like Microsoft Entra ID (formally known as Azure Active Directory), Okta, or Google Workspace. No manual updating should be required, but the system should be flexible enough to handle overriding information from directory sources, as the data in corporate directories isn’t always entirely accurate. Most importantly, companies want to lock down branding and specific fields that employees cannot edit but allow for flexibility on others.
I’m pleased to report that with HiHello’s new template feature, we’ve delivered on all of the above. All current and future HiHello Business and HiHello Enterprise customers now have access to this new template experience. Account owners and administrators can set up templates and lock down company branding and specific fields at a granular level. These templates can be connected to external directory sources to provision new cards and users as they get added and also automatically deactivate cards and remove users as they are removed from the company directory. Furthermore, companies will also be able to update information coming from a directory if it isn’t accurate or in a form they would like to present on a card.
With these new templates, companies can control their brand updates in one place and update thousands of cards with one simple change to a template. It is a feature worthy of Spiderman's saying, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Building this next generation of control for companies is a milestone for HiHello, as it affirms HiHello as the leading platform for enterprise companies. We’re excited to have worked with some of our largest customers to provide early access to this feature and learn and improve it with their feedback.
I would also like to take a moment to thank the entire HiHello team for all the effort that went into this major release. We’re excited for current and future HiHello Business and Enterprise customers to use this core feature of our platform.