January 2023 Product Release

Blogs in Igloo have a new look and feel to improve how users experience and interact with content. The redesign of blog articles is part of a larger Content Consumption project that will modernize the layout and design of wikis, forums, files, calendar events, and microblogs over the coming months. Changes have been made to better utilize space, emphasize critical content information, and encourage more interactions. See below for a list of changes and new functionality. For more information about the full scope of this project, check out the Content Consumption webinar ( Customer Care - October 2022).
- A new single-column layout maximizes the content area. Critical content metadata such as publish date, views, and followers now appear in line with the content.
- Improved placement and styling of the Follow, Like, and Labels buttons aim to encourage more content interactions by making it easier and intuitive to like, subscribe or discover more on content topics.
- New Icon and placement for Admin Action button.
- Tabs for Comments and Related Content centralize important information and discussions to add context and value to the article content.
*Note: When comments are turned off, the comments tab is hidden from viewers but is always visible for admins - Related Content displays more information making it easy for users to effectively discover and navigate to other helpful articles.
- New Copy Link button makes it easier to share content.
- Attachments and recent activity have been given more area to properly display titles and critical content information.
- Minimization of tasks.
- Removal of Rating stars, Channel information and Search bar.
- Our research and data showed that these were underused elements that had limited value and took up a great deal of space on the page.
- IMPORTANT NOTE: The Rating feature will be deprecated once the content consumption project is applied to all channels. To turn this feature off early - visit your Digital Workplace Admin Panel > Global Setting >Rating and uncheck the box.
Channel Notification Control
As a follow-up to the global notification setting introduced in November, a channel configuration has been added to give Admins and Content creators greater control over subscription notifications. This new functionality suppresses subscription notifications generated when content is added, edited, moved or deleted. Suppressing subscription notifications at the channel level can make it easier to make changes to channels and channel content and help reduce redundant emails when newsletters are being leveraged to highlight critical communications from multiple channels in the digital workplace.
This setting can be found on the channels settings page:
Changes to this setting can be seen in the channel's activity log.
When notifications are turned off - Content creators will see a warning that indicates that no notification will be generated.
Turning off notifications at the channel level does not affect the following:
- Activity feeds
- Subscription notifications triggered by comments
- Subscription notifications triggered by @mentions
Notification will be enabled by default and changes to this setting are captured for auditing purposes.
Tweak
- Calendars no longer allow users to create events in the past.
Bug Fixes
- User indexing issues - IGLOO-19549
- Search does not produce expected results for certain query types - Non-English languages - IGLOO-20534
- File Manager typo says uploaded new version instead of uploaded - IGLOO-19705
- Wiki edit screen refreshes on save for users with write access - IGLOO-20136
- Switching Language in File Manager doesn't change language in many places - IGLOO-20550
- Switching language to Italian and name of file doesn't appear in dialog box - IGLOO-20551
- Data Cleanup - Remove poll votes that reference poll choices that do not exist - IGLOO-19911
Known Issues
- Inviting attendees to the Calendar event clears the attendee list (IGLOO-14172)
- Auto Archiving Not Updating Search ( IGLOO-17477)
- Links Widget disappearance keeps occurring (IGLOO-17844)
- Internal links in document previews not working as expected (IGLOO-19592)
- Files not previewing (IGLOO-19645)
- Event date updates do not work from Google Calendar (IGLOO-19928)
- Broadcasts sometimes fail with a timeout (IGLOO-20124)
- File previews timing out (IGLOO-20128)
- Subscriptions are failing to load (IGLOO-20225)
- File Manager - Throws "we've detected a file being edited already" error (IGLOO-20239)
- Users can comment on emailed-in content when Channel has comments disabled (IGLOO-20303)
- Intermittent notification failures for group subscriptions (IGLOO-20562)
- Link is generated while mentioning revoked member (IGLOO-20573)
- dbo.WorkplaceConfiguration Audit table not updated after Notification enabled/disabled (IGLOO-20596)
- Channel notifications uncheck - on moderated or draft contents, the warning message is showing which should not (IGLOO-20616)
- Mobile app intermittently freezes. Says app not responding (MOBILE-1466)
- Mobile app delays when performing various actions (MOBILE-1471)
- Igloo Mobile app crashes frequently (MOBILE-1482)
- Images in Blog Articles widget larger than expected (MOBILE-1499)
- App crashes when user taps on "Read and Agree" button of content that has read tracking turned on (IGLOO-1586)
9 Comments
Woo hoo! This is great, and after watching the webinar I'm excited for all that's coming When does the team expect this new look to be implemented?
Cristina Herrera - Love you're excitement - we are pretty excited too. The new blog design is available in your preview environment, if you want to check it out now. The changes will be live in production January 20.
The January 2023 release has been rescheduled to the evening of Wednesday, Jan 25. New features will be available on Jan 26.
I love the vast majority of this update (my photos/videos/etc. can take up an even wider amount of space on blog posts? Sign me up!), but there are two small things I'd love to see adjusted:
As an example of both of these not playing all that well for me visually, I've included a screenshot of my last post on my org's intranet. I wish that the first line summary about our "recap and recording" had a better way of standing out compared to the rest of the article. Currently, it reads like it's all part of the same body copy, and I just left an extra line break in there when typing it all out.
Also, as you can see, that "9831" stuff, which I think was fine not to worry about when it lived in the footer version of the author info, is a bit sore-thumb-y. Once again, if it's just a matter of telling the "ig-post_content_author__department" class to hide itself, I'm happy to do an override for it, but if there's a more built-in setting way to handle this, I'd be even happier.
Edit: For clarity, I'm sending in this feedback now because my org just got this rollout. I did not hear staff feedback yet, but I'm personally happy with it overall. That said, I'd definitely love to know if there's a non-"mess with/override the CSS directly" way to address the things I pointed out.
One other minor bit of feedback. I feel "followers" is a bit too over-emphasized where it is right now. This is generally an ego thing on my end, but I feel bad knowing that we don't have many folks "follow" a post (that said, I don't think many folks need to follow a post, you know?)
Along with that, while I wouldn't want it prominent, I liked the "preview" data, and I'm not sure where it went. The reason I liked it is that we have a specific feed for "big" news that would also then get sent to people instantly via the default subscription settings, and it was nice to see how many folks saw it via email even if they didn't go to the full blog page itself.
Richard Gamble I am also following the email preview data for my organization and also would like to know where it went.
April Morris I honestly wouldn't mind if "views" was a totality of previews and "views," and someone could always hover to see greater details. It might even make people who are invested in things like this but don't always appreciate the nuance of views vs. previews happier!
To be honest, we were a bit surprised by this update, but with some java script we have made some quick changes to the layout in our environment.
I agree with you Richard Gamble about the summary font size which we have made bigger and bold.
The author info we have moved back to the bottom together with the labels. In general we thought that it looked a bit "messy" at the top.
What we might need to have a look at is to make related links more prominent. For news it may not be as important but for other content such as wikis and documents we would really want to have related links more visible. And if I am not mistaken, wikis are up next according to the plan.
In our org, it's the norm for staff in several departments to view a blog post via email previews. It was very helpful for those publishing to be able to see those previews as immediate confirmation that folks are beginning to see their post -- a low number of "views" being displayed at the top has been misleading some of our authors today and prompting them to broadcast posts that have already been seen. Is there any way that we can change the layout so that we can still see previews alongside views in the summary bar?