The most popular Workspace 365 updates of 2020

In 2020, people’s reliance on the digital workspace heavily increased. That’s why this year, we’ve worked hard on developing and improving Workspace 365, to take the focus away from IT as much as possible, and back on people’s work. We did this with product improvements, new features and new Micro Apps, over the course of 15 updates.

With every new update that brought these new features and improvements, your opinion was heavily taken into account. 76% of the requested features were developed, to ensure that we are doing everything we enable you to optimally do your work.

So which features and improvements did you like the most? Let’s take a look.

Windows Virtual Desktop in Workspace 365

We are not surprised that this was the most popular update (and feature as well) of 2020! Because we’re pretty happy with it as well. In one of the first updates of the year, we introduced Windows Virtual Desktop in the adaptive workspace.

WVD enables application- and desktop virtualisation, without having to maintain any servers yourself – these are all in the cloud, in Azure. As we saw many organisations thinking about moving from their traditional remote desktop or Citrix to Windows Virtual Desktop, it was a logical step to integrate it into the workspace. We are happy to see that apparently, many of you agreed.

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Comments & categories for Announcements, find apps based on settings

This update added an important interactive element to the adaptive workspace: comments on announcements. This enabled people to instantly interact with company announcements, adding another intranet element. It also made it easier to find and organise announcements, with the introduction of Announcement Categories.

Speaking of things that are easier to find: this update also introduced the possibility to filter applications in the app store based on their settings, such as Conditional Access and scheduled maintenance.

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Vilans KICK Micro App, Shared Space permissions and web content pages

An important one for Dutch care organisations, as we created a new Micro App to easily search and access healthcare protocols: Vilans KICK. Another important new feature was the ability to set permissions on shared spaces, giving admins a higher level of control over who can access certain shared spaces and therefore, certain information.

But those weren’t the only great features this update had to offer. This update had another great addition to the workspace, opening up a wide range of integration possibilities with the option to add web content as a complete page in your workspace. This enables you to show countless of applications on an entire workspace page, allowing you to view and work with them more easily. For example, you could integrate an entire intranet page, a content calender or a statistical dashboard.

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The Birthdays live tile

A small update, but a fun one! From May 2020, you could view all your colleagues’ birthdays in the new Birthdays live tile! This gave you the ability to stay more connected to and engaged with your colleagues, and send them a congratulations (and a great excuse to eat some cake).

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Apps as workspace tabs and pin your Activity feed

This update took working with your applications to the next level, and was a great addition to the web content pages feature from update 3.13. From this update forward, you could add entire applications as a tab to your workspace. This gave you quick and easily access to your most important and most-used apps, such as the Document or Email App. However, it also gave you a lot of flexibility in determining what’s important to you, since these tabs were highly customisable with web content.

We also started working on making the Activity Feed a more prominent part of your workspace, by giving you the ability to pin it, to make it permanently visible. It was the start of many Activity Feed improvements and additions, such as in other updates featured in this list!

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YouTube tile, Autotask Micro App, Announcement Permissions & grid

We were on fire in the middle of a heatwave with this one, launching many great new features and improvements.

For one, it brought one of the aforementioned improvements to the Activity Feed, enabling you to join your online meeting straight from the feed with one click. But that was not the only social feature. Besides the new grid view of the Announcement live tile, we also presented the Announcement permissions, giving more people the ability to create, edit and manage announcements. This was a great addition for, for example, team leads and department managers, who could now also communicate without having to go through the Communications department.

Furthermore, we added the Autotask Micro App to improve your IT services, and simplified the way you add YouTube videos, enabling you to do so by simply copying and pasting the link.

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Address Book live tile, personal space permissions, carousel announcements & improved Documents tile

Both the wishes of IT- and Communication managers were addressed in update 3.12, introducing new features everyone else in the organisation could benefit from as well.

With one intranet features improved, with the carousel view of the Announcements live tile, and one added, the Address Book live tile, communication to and among colleagues was improved.

With permissions on personal spaces, IT managers got more control over the workspace, by being able to determine who does or doesn’t have access to a personal space. It also became possible to set a shared space as a default first view, and order all the spaces based on their relevance or importance.

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Global Search and Activity Feed API

Two big features, giving you quick and easily access to your information. We were proud to introduce Global Search in your adaptive workspace, allowing you now to instantly search for your emails, files, people and more. One small bar – one big time-saving difference.

Another huge feature was the Activity Feed API. This now enables you to integrate notifications and information from thousands of applications into your workspace. Think for example of Microsoft Teams messages, new emails, incoming Support tickets, leave requests and much, much more. This enables a smarter and more task-based way of working, saving you loads of time searching for information and tasks on a daily basis.

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What’s coming up in 2021?

Well, for a large part, that’s up to you. Your experience and opinion are important to us. Because we want to develop and improve the workspace in order to perfectly suit your needs and workday, so that you’re optimally supported. So what do you need? Let us know by submitting a feature request on our Support Portal, or voting on considered items and Micro Apps on our Roadmap.