Update 3.8: Comments & categories for Announcements, find apps based on settings

Since the introduction of the Announcement live tile in update 3.5, the social benefits of it for both employees and communication managers have really become clear. This gave us a taste for more – or rather, better! We’ve already added interactional functionalities in update 3.7 with ‘likes’. Now, we’re taking it to the next level by adding a comment possibility. Furthermore, we now allow you to categorise your announcements and display more of them in one single tile. We’ve also made it easier to find applications, based on their settings. Keep on reading to find out more!

Levelling up the Announcement live tile

With the Announcement live tile, we brought a piece of social intranet to your adaptive workspace. This update, we’re making it even more social, personalised and easier to use.

Comment on Announcements

Let’s interact! In the beginning, the Announcement live tile was mostly useful for broadcasting messages. With update 3.7, we introduced ‘likes’ to stimulate interaction. Now, we are very proud to introduce the possibility to comment on announcements.

With this new functionality, people are able to post comments on published announcements. This gives people a platform to engage with the posts, voice their opinion and improve their communication. It also makes it a lot easier for them to respond to announcements, as they can do it directly under the announcement itself, instead of having to look for the right person to email or message.

These comments allow communication managers to level up on their social intranet elements and create a community in the adaptive workspace.

Announcement categories

What kind of announcements are most relevant to you? Choose which ones you’d like to see first! From this update forward, admins can create and assign categories to announcements. This way, people can easily find the information they’re looking for by filtering based on category. In personal groups, they can also determine which category they’d most like to see first, and set that one as a default. Of course, it is still possible to display all announcements in one overview.

This is especially useful for organisations who want to include their social intranet in the adaptive workspace. In a social intranet, multiple kinds of news and announcements are published. With this new feature, people can make a distinction between these different kinds of information and find specific information more easily when a larger amount of announcements are posted.

If you have multiple Announcement live tiles, for instance when you’re an admin with multiple spaces for departments or teams or shared groups, you can set a default category for every single tile. This way, you can customise tiles to cater to people’s needs.

Show more announcements in one tile

If your organisation is even half as big of a fan of the Announcement live tile as us, you probably have quite a few. So it would be convenient to be able to view more than 10 announcements in one tile. That’s why we made that happen.
Before, the Announcement live tile showed the past 10 announcements. Now, when you scroll down, you have the option to load 10 more. This enables you to easily view past announcements.

Find applications based on their settings

If you want to see on which applications you’ve set certain settings, or if you quickly want to find an application on which certain settings are applied, we’ve got a new functionality for you! To make sure people don’t have to open every application and view its settings, we’re introducing a new way to filter your applications in the App Store based on their settings. Consequently, you can search applications based on if any Maintenance, Owner Permissions or Conditional Access settings were or are applied.

This is also useful when you, for example, have multiple versions of the same application. For instance when you have an application without any settings for one group of users – let’s say Finance employees – and another version of the same application for another, like Sales employees, who need to use the same app, but for whom different settings need to be applied. The admin will then see the same app multiple times in the App Store. With the filter, they can easily see on which version(s) they’ve applied certain settings to. This makes it easier to manage applications with different settings and for different user groups.

What else is new?

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

• We’ve introduced a Recycle Bin for deleted users
• Open macro-enabled PowerPoint presentation files
• Easier search in the Email App
• Increased click area for items in the Document App

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.