New Workspace Beta Build Coming Soon

We're finishing off the next build of the Broadchoice Workspace and wanted to talk about some of the changes coming in the new build.

The biggest new feature is Groups. A group can represent a company or an organization and offers a private place where people and spaces are separated from other groups. As a group administrator, you control who is part of that group. As we add integration with external systems, this will be how we partition access to those systems. Each group has its own directory of spaces:

This directory lists spaces that have been marked "public" - another new feature in this build. You may join / leave any public spaces within each group using this directory.

When you create a new space, you can place it in any group to which you belong. You can also choose to make the space public - so it appears in the directory for that group - or leave it private so you can control who joins the space.

Adding groups means that the left hand navigation no longer has all spaces together in a single "SPACES" tree but instead has a subtree for each group to which you belong, making it easier to organize and navigate your spaces.

We've also changed the navigation within a space. We discovered that some people did not realize that each space was an expandable tree containing files, notes, tasks etc. They clicked on the space name in the tree, saw the activity feed, and thought that was it. The fact that the expanding arrow in the navigation tree did not highlight when a space was selected contributed to that problem. Here's what the old navigation looked like:

If you clicked on a space name, the tree did not expand but you saw the activity feed and could no longer see the expanding arrow next to the space name. Several beta testers pointed this out (thank you!) so we have removed the tree below a space name and instead switched to a tab bar that appears when you click on a space name:

This makes it easier to discover the functionality of the Workspace and should help people realize the collaborative possibilities more easily. The owner of a space will see a "Settings" tab that allows them to change the name, description and public/private status of a space.

In addition to these new features, we have fixed a number of bugs - including the most requested issue of supporting"quit" (as opposed to just closing the Workspace window); we have overhauled how file upload / download is presented, as well as the underlying multi-file operations; added the ability to remove users from spaces you own; made it possible to unpublish content from a space (rather than just deleting it); allowed for a personal message to be included in invitations you send to friends and colleagues; and many more.

Once the new build is deployed we'll update the Getting Started Guide with more details of these new features as well as bug fixes and so on.

You can download the Workspace from the Broadchoice website.