Update 3.12: Address Book live tile, personal space permissions, carousel announcements & improved Documents tile

In this update we have several amazing features for you! If we sound excited – it’s because we are: we have great features for IT managers, Communication managers as well as everyone else in your organisation. First of all, we’re introducing the Address Book live tile, to quickly access all your contacts. We’ve also made it possible to set permissions on personal spaces, reorder them or hide them all together. Additionally, we’ve made some great improvements to the Document live tile and made it possible to share Document App folders through the browser URL. Last but not least, we proudly introduce the carousel view of the Announcement live tile. Curious? Keep on reading!

Save 20 minutes a week with the Address Book live tile

Do you know who is responsible for HR in your organisation? With the new Address Book live tile, you can instantly search through all your contacts straight from your dashboard! You can search for function, name, email address, organisation and more. This way, you can find out who is responsible for HR within seconds.

Within the live tile, you can view and search both your personal and organisation contacts. When you click on them, the contacts sidebar will open with all the contact’s information and contact options, so you can immediately get in touch with them.

This tile also makes it a lot easier to search through your contacts, as for one, you can keep scrolling through more and more contacts by clicking the ‘load more’ button at the bottom of the tile.

Announcement carousel for a better user-experience

A lot of communication managers requested the following great improvement to the Announcement live tile. You can now choose to show your announcement with a carousel layout.

The Announcement live tile will show one big announcement at a time. People can use the navigation arrows or dots in the tile to navigate through their announcements. This adds a great visual element to your workspace, makes the announcements stand out more and gives each announcement more individual attention.

More control with permissions on personal spaces

From this update forward, admins get more control over the workspace, as it will be possible to set permissions on personal spaces. This way, you can determine who in your organisation has access to a personal space, and who doesn’t.

This is especially useful if you have large groups of employees who need the same important applications and information, and need to see them first thing when they login. When that’s all they need and you don’t want them to edit anything in the workspace, the admin can choose to not give these groups permissions to the personal space – so they don’t see it. A shared space becomes the (first) one they see by default.

When some groups do need a personal space, but the information in the shared space is more important, admins can now also choose to reorder the spaces based on their relevance. So, these people will still have a personal space, but it won’t be the first space they see.

Choose which folders appear in the Document live tile

This update, we’ve also improved several aspects of the Document live tile. First of all, we’ve made it possible to add specific folders to the Document live. This allows people to very quickly access files and folders they very frequently use. For instance, healthcare organisations could use this feature to give quick and easy access to protocols or communication managers can give instant access to folders with branded files.

Prioritise your Document tabs

Additionally, you can now choose which tab of the Document live tile you want to see first. So, if you use your bookmarked documents more frequently than your recently edited documents, you can choose to view your bookmarked documents first. The same goes for any folder you choose to show in your Document live tile – if you want a certain folder to show first instead of your recently edited documents, this is now possible!

Only see documents you’ve edited yourself

Speaking of your recently edited documents: we made an improvement there too! Before, the tile would show all documents that were recently edited, that you were the owner of. So if you created a document and someone else would edit it, it would show up in your Recent Documents as well. With this update, we’ve changed that. Now, the Document live tile will only show the recent documents you’ve edited yourself.

Share folder URLs in the Document App

The final addition we’d like to mention is that you can now share the URL of shared folders in the Document App. This makes it easier to share folders when the other person doesn’t have access to for instance the parent document library.

To understand how this works, you need to understand the (permissions) hierarchy of the Document App. You have the site collection, which is a collection of all document libraries of for instance your company. These Document libraries are for instance for departments, like Marketing. Within that library, you have files and folders. Someone from a different department, such as Sales, may not have access to the Marketing document library. However, the Marketing person could give the Sales person access to a folder within that library. Since the Sales person can’t see the path to that folder (because they can’t see that specific document library at all), that specific folder appears in their “Shared with me” folder.

Now, the Marketing person can also share the URL of that folder in the Document App, through which the other person can easily reach that folder. This makes it easier for people to share folders and files, without having to give the other person access to the entire document library.

What else is new?

The features above are the highlights of this update. But there’s more, such as:

• We improved the design and experience of the sidebars in the Document Management System and Email app.
• Interacting with SharePoint bookmarks is now faster in some scenarios.

Are you curious about all new features, fixes and improvements of this update? Check out the announcements.

Open the announcements

View these new features in your Workspace 365 environment. Don’t have your own Workspace 365 environment or didn’t receive the update yet? Then try our free demo. Do you want to receive release notifications? Go to the Support Portal to set this up.

Ps. Don’t see the update yet? Then you’ll receive it shortly from your IT service provider or contact us to activate these new features.