It's Vancouver Early Availability time, and that means I get to share a lot of the great features and enhancements that our product teams have been working on for our customers and partners around Workspaces and UI Builder.
What's new in Workspace?
What can your agents expect in configurable workspaces? You can get additional details from the Workspace release notes.
Email in Workspace
Compose and send emails from the activity stream. Rather than having to leave the current page and open a new tab you can now compose an email directly from the activity stream with most of the same options as the full composer that opens in a new tab. Note that this will automatically work for any table with email turned on in any workspace using the new Standard Record Page template introduced in Tokyo. Not all OOB workspaces (like Service Operations Workspace) are using the new record page template at this time.
In addition, email now supports:
- Forwarding emails WITH attachments
- Drag and drop email addresses between to, cc, and bcc
- Using email templates
Attachments
Add custom declarative actions to attachments. By default there are options for Download, Remove, and Rename attachments, but you can now add custom actions through the declarative action framework.
Take an action from a successful attachment upload in UI Builder. A new event was added to the attachment component that fires when an attachment is successfully saved to the record. Tie an event handler like a notification to this event to give feedback back to the user.
Other Workspace Enhancements
- List editing is turned on by default
- Compact mode available for forms
- User preferences persist across sessions for records of the same type for Agent assist, Activity stream, rich text editor, stacking preferences, and the form section.
- Resize modals to expand without having to scroll
- Customize highlighted labels on form fields
- Guided Tours now supported in workspace!
What's New with UI Builder?
A lot. What can your developers expect to see in UI Builder in Vancouver? I'll highlight my top features here, but make sure to read the release notes and get hands on for more details. In this release we really focused on making UIB easier to use and improving the developer experience.
New Column Layouts. One of the pieces of feedback we've received is that the container based system made it difficult for developers who don't have flexbox or grid expertise to get started building pages with a more advanced layout, especially if columns were involved. With this new column layout feature, developers can quickly build out an advanced layout with multiple columns, percentages, and nesting columns without being a CSS expert.
In addition, you can more easily add containers and components to a column, edit the style of a page, or resize content with updated on-stage controls.
Note that this new column layout system will only apply to new pages.
Popovers. There may be time where you want to show additional information about something based on a UIB event, but you don't want to use a modal to take the user's entire focus. We've added popovers in the Vancouver release to solve this issue. Popovers work similarly to modals in UIB, but let users continue to see the rest of the page.
Preview. Previous to Vancouver, in order to see what a page was going to look like (especially if a repeater was involved) you had to save the page and open it in the runtime using a persona that would see the variant you want to preview/test. In Vancouver we've added a preview button that will show the runtime version of the variant you're on without needing to change roles, audiences, or even save the page.
Undo/Redo! This might be my personal feature. Undo/redo allows users to backtrack on any action within UIB. It supports the standard keyboard shortcuts and even works across saves, which is incredibly helpful if you're someone like me that auto-saves without realizing it.
Styling Usability. You can no apply styling properties with low-code visual aids in the styles tab. This is helpful if you're like me and always forget what margins and padding mean, what a rem is, or how small px changes to a border radius are rendered. We've also added progressive disclosure here so we're not showing as many options by default in order to make things a little simpler for most users.
Lastly, if you're reading this post this feature is probably not for you, but we've added a What's new button at the top of UI Builder that walks you through many of the new features in UIB.
Which new feature is your favorite? What would you like to see in Washington and beyond?
Thanks Brad. Where can I find instructions for using it? I can't find anything in Docs. This is what I am looking for -- how to set up Compact Mode in HR Agent Workspace.
@Cindy Good For compact mode there's nothing to setup we just made it a little better when you toggle on compact mode in the preferences
For the labels next to the fields, that's a different feature that only applies to workspaces using the standard record page, which hasn't been uptaken yet by most of the major workspaces so you won't see it.
