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Workplace 3.6 release notes

Squiz is proud to announce the release of Workplace 3.6. This release introduces its main new features - news item creation, as well as easier access to Workplace documentation, various improvements and bug fixes.

New features

News article, event and announcement creation wizard

The news item creation experience for news article, announcements and events has been streamlined and made easier to use through a new wizard.

Create news item wizard

Workplace users can specify location and other category options to target specific groups of Workplace users as the 'audience' of their news items, based on these user’s configured content preference options. These targeted Workplace users will see the news item appear on their Workplace home page and News and Events page.

The introduction of this wizard led to some feature rationalisation, and removal of the following news item features that were no longer being actively used:

  • 'Links' items.

  • 'Alert' news items. Note that these are different from alert popups, which are configured by Workplace system administrators.

  • The 'Contact' field from all types of news item - i.e. news articles, events and announcements.

Any existing links and alert news items created prior to upgrading to Workplace 3.6 will continue to be accessible after the upgrade.

Easier access to Workplace documentation

Workplace’s documentation was moved out of its embedded location within Workplace itself and made available on the Internet through Squiz’s documentation site (https://docs.squiz.net), in time for the release of Workplace 3.4.

The documentation on this site is now versioned in line with Squiz’s product versions.

A Help link is now available in Workplace 3.6 (from your user avatar menu), and leads out to its corresponding version of the Workplace documentation.

Improvements

Upgrades to Workplace’s content management and search platforms

The underlying platforms that run Workplace 3.6 have been upgraded to a minimum version of Matrix 5.5.6.1 and Funnelback 15.24, respectively.

Page load times reduced by up to half

When navigating around the Workplace interface and a page is (re-)loaded, only the relevant sections of the page are reloaded, which in turn reduces the overall page reload time.

Notifications can be marked as unread

As Workplace user can now mark notifications in its drop-down as unread, which in turn, updates the number of unread notifications indicated at the top of this drop-down in Workplace’s global navigation menu.

Colour-coded category/personalisation options on news items

When viewing a news item, the category/personalisation options which the creator specified (during the SELECT AN AUDIENCE stage in Workplace 3.6) appear as labels along the top of the news item. These labels have now been colour-coded along their edges so that all options belonging to a given category have the same colour, and each category’s colour is different.

Other feature improvements

  • The user experience for creating a new discussion within a community has been brought in line with the news item creation process.

  • Org chart data can now be sourced from JSON data source files in addition to CSV files.

Accessibility improvements

  • The open and close status of the notifications drop-down is now recognised and announced by screen readers.

  • Visually hidden elements (due to differing resolutions on different devices) has better compatibility with screen readers.

  • The Tab key functionality to navigate to different elements of a Workplace page has been reworked so that tabbing to different elements progresses in order down the page, either from the top of the page, or its currently selected element. This improvement is designed for all devices, including desktop computers and mobile devices.

  • When accessing relevant pages within a community, page titles in browser tabs now display the community’s name, rather than the generic heading of "Community Overview".

Bug fixes

  • Special characters can now be used within #hashtags, which can be used in Workplace’s commenting and other content editing boxes.

  • News items can now be created with the & character in their News/Announcement headlines, as well as Event names.

  • The community and discussion Create buttons are now presented correctly in Mozilla Firefox.

  • If a parent comment is deleted, all of its replies are removed and no longer remain until the page has been refreshed.

  • The calendar no longer displays errors when all category options are cleared.