Workspace Beta 1 Build 3 is live!

I'm a day late getting this news out - and all our beta testers have already been notified - but we've added so much new functionality in this build that I wanted to blog about it.

This new build addresses three main areas, based on feedback from beta testers and our own roadmap:

• Activity feed improvements
• Salesforce integration
• Collaboration around notes

The activity feed now provides hot links for the author, the space and the item being added/edited so that you can easily navigate from the activity feed to a specific user, space or content item. This was on our roadmap from day one but took a couple of iterations to arrive at the best implementation (and we're refining it slightly for Build 4, coming soon). You can also reply to messages in the activity feed by clicking on the new "Reply" icon. Replies are automatically posted to the appropriate space and clearly marked as replies. These changes make the activity feed one of the core navigation idioms in the Workspace.

Salesforce integration allows you to connect a Group with a Salesforce API account so that users within that group can automatically see their active opportunities, directly within the Workspace, and easily create collaborative spaces associated with each opportunity. This allows them to have non-Salesforce colleagues help them work on closing deals. We demo'd this new feature at the recent Dreamforce conference (for Salesforce users and developers) and we got a lot of positive feedback on this!

Finally, we have enhanced notes in several ways. We have replaced basic plain text with a Rich Text Editor to allow simple HTML notes to be created. We have expanded the note editor to fill the center panel in the application. We now allow you to mark notes as being editable by other users in your collaborative space. This makes notes much more useful for collaboration. We'll be expanding some of these features into tasks at some point.

And of course we fixed a number of bugs and added a number of minor enhancements (such as adding the ability for group and space owners to remove users or completely delete the group or space).

We're hard at work on Build 4 which will substantially enhance the way Workspace users invite friends and colleagues to participate, as well as allowing new users to sign up directly. Eagle-eyed users will have noticed the "beta" tag has disappeared from the logo in Build 3 and won't be surprised to learn that the last wave of beta testers have been added to the program. Our beta program is closing (and we'll have exciting news for our active beta participants shortly) and the Workspace will be launched officially very soon.