Dao Le
Dao Le  -  CMS
Aug 22, 2018
  4781
(11 votes)

Feature notification in user interface

This feature was released in CMS UI 11.6.0 and it is built for helping the logged in users receive the news around new features.

Episerver World will occasionally publish RSS notifications on new Episerver features. The notification feature fetches the RSS notifications, extracts them into messages, and then pushes them to logged in users in the UI via the bell icon.

Image notification-item.png

When clicking on a notification, users are taken to the details of the new feature on Episerver World.

The feature uses a job scheduler to fetch RSS notifications and to push notifications. To configure the scheduler, access the admin view and change

the settings under Scheduled Jobs > Episerver Notifications.

Image Untitled.png

Aug 22, 2018

Comments

Aug 22, 2018 09:45 AM

I saw this in the latest release and personally I have to say this is a feature I would turn off. In my opinion its up to the agency/development team to guide clients and business users towards upgrade paths and their plan around this for the features that Episerver provides rather than direct feature updates being pushed directly in the CMS.

Updates are a developer focused task through Nuget and clients level of understand might cause them to not understand than features being alerted as out require a development and testing plan to roll out.

Obviously it's optional if you turn on this job but one important feature I think this needs straight away is controlling which groups see this notification. If you've got CMS admin/power users these are usually more your business stakeholders and if we did turn it on I'd only want these people to see it. I wouldn't want bog standard cms editors who's job is just to update content and likely doesn't have a knowledge of the solution/business processes to be show these.

Just my 2 cents

MartinOttosen
MartinOttosen Aug 22, 2018 12:10 PM

Hi Scott,

Good points. The current implementation is intended to be unobtrusive, and the plan is to keep the volume of notifications low and the content helpful rather than pushy. Would a "notification centre" solve your concern around controlling who receives this information? I.e. if individual users could choose to mute or summarise various types of notifications to reduce clutter.

Arild Henrichsen
Arild Henrichsen Aug 22, 2018 12:11 PM

I agree with Scott on this one. These notifications (and how people generally expect "integrated app store" functionality) will likely confuse customers and users into thinking that these new features are a one-click-installation away. 

Henrik Fransas
Henrik Fransas Aug 22, 2018 12:59 PM

I also agree with Scott on this on all the points he said.

To be able to control who gets them and for users to able to turn it off is a must I think

Aug 22, 2018 01:34 PM

Whilst this may not be right for every customer. I appreciate this feature being available. Anything that can help customers understand what features are newly available especially with the frequency of releases is a good thing (despite the need for expectation management from a partner).

I do think being able to filter this by user roles, or having a role that we can apply for users who will see these is a must (maybe similar to the EpiBetaUsers role)

I've always been surprised that you've never built feature allowing editors to push their own messages to other system users, using Episerver notifications. Would be useful for deployment notification or new features / training etc. Probably not too difficult to build....

Quan Tran
Quan Tran Aug 23, 2018 09:50 AM

I think this is quite useful because it informs users that great features are on the feed for them. Long time ago, the birth of language manager was really great because it significantly simplify the work process of Editors and for this feature, we also aim to notify only "great" features. No spam or annoyed here I guess.
But I agree that role configuration for this feature should be allowed.

Hung Phan
Hung Phan Aug 24, 2018 02:45 AM

The spam issue has been discussed intensively during the implementation phase and I guess that there's no spam here because it creates a side effect, not a good thing. Basically, in a bigger picture, we can consider this feature as a communication channel between EPiServer and clients and we can make it better based on feedbacks. At least, for important addons like Forms, Language Manager or new other important features like Content-approval, Client should know about it as quick as possible. Anyway, role configuratio and turnoff are reasonable and they are noted.

valdis
valdis Aug 27, 2018 08:33 PM

what "client" would do when they will get that info? partners are usually kept in closer loop with Episerver and they are aware of these new features earlier compared to customer. or at least at the same time. what business issue this feature tries to solve?

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Streamlining Marketing Success: The Benefits for Optimizely One with Perficient

As an Optimizely expert, I eagerly anticipate this time of year due to the exciting Optimizely events happening worldwide. These include Opticon, t...

Alex Harris - Perficient | Sep 17, 2024 | Syndicated blog

Creating an Optimizely Addon - Packaging for NuGet

In   Part One   and   Part Two   of this series; I covered topics from having a great idea, solution structure, extending the menus and adding...

Mark Stott | Sep 16, 2024

Optimizely CMS and weekly updates

Learn how reporting bugs in Optimizely CMS not only helps improve the platform but also benefits you and the entire user community.

Tomas Hensrud Gulla | Sep 12, 2024 | Syndicated blog

Introduce the ablility to select then delete items manually on FIND UI

In FIND 16.3.0 we introduce an ability to select items and delete them manually, it will helps you to delete unexpected items from the UI without a...

Manh Nguyen | Sep 12, 2024

The composable consulting model our industry needs

The architecture of a modern consulting business is ‘composable’. Certainly, we think of ourselves a composable consulting business and have done...

Mark Everard | Sep 12, 2024 | Syndicated blog

Keynote Summary from Opticon 2024, Stockholm

At Opticon in Stockholm, marking the 30th anniversary of Optimizely, the company celebrated significant achievements. These included surpassing $40...

Luc Gosso (MVP) | Sep 11, 2024 | Syndicated blog