Workplace 3.7 release notes

Squiz is proud to announce the release of Workplace 3.7. This release introduces its main new features - community events, community news, new WYSIWYG editor and new comments moderation experience, as well as various improvements, deprecations and bug fixes.

New features

Community events

The community events feature gives Workplace users the ability to coordinate physical and virtual meetings in public or private communities. Workplace users can use this feature to:

  • Create community events in the new community calendar using an intuitive interface

  • Share events with other public and private communities that the user is an administrator of

  • Edit and archive community events more easily

  • See upcoming events across every tab of the communities feature

Community news

The community news feature empowers community administrators to keep members up to date with the latest updates and achievements. Workplace users can use this feature to:

  • Create news articles in public and private communities using a familiar and fun interface

  • Search for articles by their title

  • Edit and archive news articles

New WYSIWYG editing experience for creating new content

Creating content is now significantly easier and faster with a new WYSIWYG text editing experience.

When creating news, events, announcements, comments and a range of other content, Workplace users can now:

  • Embed images and videos into the page.

  • Use text formatting hotkeys, such as Ctrl+B for bold.

  • Much more control over formatting options including paragraph indentation, resizing images, and embedded videos.

New comments moderation experience

The comments moderation experience has been revamped and is much easier to remove undesirable or inappropriate comments across Workplace.

  • The moderate comments feature is easily accessible from the user avatar menu for Community and Workplace system administrators.

  • Workplace users are now able to moderate comments for the communities they administer, without seeing irrelevant comments from across Workplace.

  • Flagged comments are able to be reviewed and removed, or their flag(s) cleared.

  • Community and Workplace administrators (as well as page owners containing moderated comments) can enter a reason to the original poster of the comment to provide context as to why the comment was removed and the next steps to take.

  • Previously removed comments provide these administrators with an audit trail of removed comments and the reasons provided.

Improvements

  • Workplace’s underlying content management system (CMS) Matrix, has been upgraded to version 5.5.6.4.

  • Workplace’s underlying search engine Funnelback, has been upgraded to version 15.24.30.

  • The commenting user experience has been redesigned to simplify its usage, improve visibility of @mentions, and make it easier to reply to conversations.

  • Workplace community administrators are now able to remove members from private communities without needing to access Workplace admin mode (i.e. appending /_admin to the end of Workplace’s base URL).

  • Navigating between a community’s discussions is now seamless and occurs on a single tab. When navigating between discussions, users are no longer taken to separately loaded discussion pages.

  • The global navigation section can now be configured to remain visible even whenever users scroll up and down pages throughout Workplace.

  • The default colours, logo and fonts have been updated along with other products on the Squiz Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

  • The option to use external URLs has been added to the "Image with call to action" content container template.

  • The default tab in the social feed on the homepage is now configurable. Workplace system administrators can choose to make any of the social feed tabs (My Collaboration, My Communities, Bookmarked Discussions, Latest Activity) open by default for all Workplace users.

  • Workplace users are now able to crop and resize the image when uploading a new avatar.

  • Events are now easier to filter and the calendar is easier to navigate.

  • The calendar now loads significantly faster for large numbers of events.

  • Usernames are now case-insensitive, simplifying the configuration of the staff directory and org chart.

  • The org chart loads significantly faster for large numbers of users.

  • Dates and times are now localised for a user’s timezone on all pages (including events) for when pages are created and last updated, as well as on comments when they posted.

  • Post dates and times on comments are also now localised.

  • The lower part of the global navigation section has been replaced with a drop down menu, improving usability when navigating between menus.

Terminology change

Based on customer feedback, the term community managers (in Workplace 3.6 and earlier) has changed to community administrators (in Workplace 3.7 and later).

Deprecations

  • Internet Explorer 11 and Edge Legacy web browsers are no longer supported in Workplace 3.7 and later.

  • User help videos (selectively available across Workplace) have been removed. You can access updated help documentation and videos from the Help button via the user avatar menu.

  • The positionTitle field of staff directory data (uploaded from CSV or populated via an LDAP connection) can no longer be used to configure the org/team chart content container template.

Bug fixes

  • The org/team chart content container templates now appear correctly when the positionId field (of staff directory data) is used.

  • Email notifications no longer fail to be sent to users whose usernames contain a single quote.

  • The My Communities tab now correctly displays the communities that are currently being followed.

  • The Favourites Manager page now updates with a 'loading' indicator when favourites are reordered.

  • Fixed a rare issue where an empty user card would appear in the org/team charts for a user configured with no details other than their username. Instead, such users now appear with their username in their org/team chart card.

  • Documents are no longer hidden from search results when the All Contents tab of the global search results page.

  • News search results now display symbols correctly in breadcrumbs (as opposed to percent-encoded text - e.g. %25 and %2E).

  • Fixed a bug where the count of items for each tab of the news and events page was not consistent when navigating between tabs.