Update: Improve social interaction in the digital workspace

Most people use their mobile phone at the start of the day to check their planning and access the workspace multiple times a day to access applications, documents or information. As most customers have either a large group of mobile workers or a hybrid workforce, it is crucial to create and maintain social interaction between colleagues. This helps to strengthen your company culture and increases the retention of employees. That is why we are adding more functions that allow organisations to create social interaction in their digital workspace.

Improved creation experience in the Announcement Centre

The Announcement Centre in the workspace is a great tool to build communities within your organisation. It empowers communication managers to create groups in which people can share or respond to organisational news. In this update we will release the first improvement in the button where you create an announcement.

You’ll notice that the process of creating a new announcement is now much more user-friendly. Easily follow all three steps to create your announcement and you’re done! This intuitive design simplifies the creation process, and it is the first step of more improvements on social intranet features that will follow.

Share your emotions and stimulate social interaction with new emojis

We’ve elaborated on how important the Announcement Centre is for your organisation. We now extended our emoji replies to announcements with five new ones.

Before, you were able to give a heart emoji to a certain announcement to show your support. Now, you’ll have more emojis that you’ll be able to use on an announcement. The available emojis are a thumbs up, a heart, a sad face, a thanks and clapping hands to celebrate. You’ll also be able to see what emojis other people used in your organisation.

With this improved feature you can now show your support and give a more appropriate reaction on announcements. This will help organisations to improve the social intranet in their digital workspace by allowing people to share their feelings.

Improved responsive design for mobile devices

To support mobile workers, we have been focusing on improving the responsive design for mobile devices. In this update, you’ll be able to use your documents app more efficiently on any device as it has a new mobile interface. As an addition, all documents and folders will now be presented in a list view and the sort-by button is now added.

These improvements will reduce the time that you spend looking for the right document and will add to the overall experience of using the workspace on mobile devices. We’ve also when you click on an item, and we’ve changed the position of the action bar to make it easier to navigate.

With these new improvements you’ll see that it’s easier to find your way around the workspace on your mobile device. This is especially important for those who don’t work behind a desk every day. Think of healthcare workers, government workers or teachers.

Conditional Access for tile groups

Admins now have the possibility to set Conditional Access on an entire tile group. It allows you to easily hide an entire application group or information. It uses the same conditions that you can now set on specific applications, like devices, networks, operating systems, browsers, etc.

With this new function, admins are able to give all users a clearer overview of their workspace. For example, they can use it to hide a group that contains sensitive data (like patient records), outside of the company network. This will allow admins to protect end-users who use their workspace on any device, wherever they are, without having to worry about the impact on the security. The workspace can be optimised depending on the device you’ll be using. This means that you’ll have a different overview of your workspace on a mobile device in contrast to your desktop.

By setting conditions on groups you will be able to give employees a device based experience. For example, you could give a full digital workspace experience on their desktop and tablet, while presenting them only with intranet features on their mobile phone.

What else is new?

The features above are the highlights of this update, but we have one other improvement for you:

• There will now be an autosuggest from multiple contact lists.

Do you want to receive Workspace 365 release notifications? Go to the Support Portal to set this up.

Ps. Not able to see the new features yet? Then you’ll receive it shortly from your IT service provider.