Feature notification in user interface

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

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.

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. 

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

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....

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.

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.

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?