Workplace 3.2

New features

Workplace’s main new features include personalised news feeds, personalised alerts, calendars, Skype for Business integration and classifieds.

Personalised news feeds

Workplace now comes with the option to personalise your homepage news feed so that only articles which are relevant to you are shown. Personalisation segments (e.g. Primary Team, Location, Employment Type) can be set up in any way the organisation requires. Segments can also be 'locked' so that staff are required to see some types of news.

This feature includes fixes to pre-release versions of Workplace provided to some customers.

Alerts

Workplace system administrators can now set up alerts to show users when they see the homepage after logging in. Workplace provides four 'severity' levels, with corresponding (themeable) colours and icons. Like news items, alerts can also be targeted using personalisation segments. For example, you can notify everyone in the Perth office that the lifts are out of order, without alerting staff in Melbourne.

Calendars

If you provide Squiz with your feed of events in JSON format, Workplace can display your calendar. The calendar view is fully responsive and can be configured with different event categories. Each event link also provides an iCal download so you can add the event to your personal calendar.

This feature includes fixes to pre-release versions of Workplace provided to some customers.

Skype for Business presence indicators

Workplace now provides integration support for Skype for Business. If you configure an appropriate Skype API key and endpoints, Workplace will display Skype presence information for staff (on the Staff profile page and in contact cards). Shortcuts to start Skype conversations or calls with people you find in Workplace are also available on contact cards.

This feature includes fixes to pre-release versions of Workplace provided to some customers.

Classifieds

A surprising number of organisations list classifieds as one of the most-used features of their intranet.

Workplace now provides classifieds functionality out-of-the-box. Staff members can list items for sale, upload photos, and mark items as sold all within Workplace.

This feature includes fixes to pre-release versions of Workplace provided to some customers.

Improvements and enhancements

Contact cards

In most areas of Workplace, when you click a user’s avatar, rather than being taken directly to that user’s profile page, you now see a pop-up contact card showing the user’s contact details.

This includes the user’s Skype presence information for Workplace installations with Skype for Business integration.

Search results on the 'Social' tab

This search result tab now shows more context along with an improved appearance. The Social tab presents results from comments on the home page, any news item or other page, as well as community discussions.

Comments are now editable

Comments you’ve made will appear with a pencil ✎ icon to indicate that the post can be edited.

Usability improvements

  • Search filters now expand to show you the filters you’ve applied as new results are loaded.

  • The search results web page has been renamed to 'Pages' (originally from 'Web'), to clarify that the results are from Workplace are not from an external website.

  • Staff profile field limits are no longer restricted to 100 characters.

  • Document type-ahead results have been improved. You no longer need to know the exact first few letters of the document you’re looking for.

Accessibility enhancements

The following enhancements have been implemented to support screen readers:

  • The option selectors used in the My Account > Content Preferences and Business Tools Manager pages.

  • Action buttons at the lower-right of comments.

Layout improvements

  • Attaching a file with an exceptionally long file name no longer causes text to run outside the upload dialog box.

  • Attaching a non-image file with an exceptionally long file name to a comment no longer causes layout issues.

Bug fixes

  • The 'Mark as read' button is no longer shown for Yammer notifications, since Yammer does not support this capability.

  • The cryptic '!padrenull' text no longer appears when you resize the browser on the news listing page.

  • Adding double quotes to the name of a page no longer presents issues with the left-hand navigation.

  • Colours in the Link Tiles content template are no longer fixed to default Workplace colours.

  • Fixed an issue where following (and unfollowing) people was not functioning correctly in Workplace installations that implemented Yammer.

  • The 'Edit' button on content pages should now respect permissions more carefully and only show for people who have permission to edit.