Over the last couple of months, our team has been hard at work designing and developing ground-breaking functionality and features to help organizations transform the employee experience.

This quarter, we officially released Version 4.0 of Akumina’s Digital Workplace Framework, here’s whats new:

Project-based Collaboration– Workspaces

From Slack to Microsoft Teams it seems like every day there’s talk of another new collaboration tool promising to deliver improved productivity and enhanced collaboration. With the majority of the tools on the market enabling team-based collaboration, Akumina took the opportunity to address the needs of project-based collaboration where there is a specific timeline, series of milestones, specific people involved, task and content, with the ultimate goal of completing a project.

By leveraging the Microsoft Graph API, Akumina Workspaces connects all the components of a project from the tasks, milestones, conversations, documents and more together into a single user experience, so users can work together in one place, real time without having to jump between multiple applications, chat tools and email to get work done! 

Auto-Translation for Multilingual

This past spring Akumina announced the release of Multilingual support for our digital workplace platform. We understand the hard work content owners go through to manage, update and maintain content in multiple languages which is why we are continuing to go the extra mile to build functionality that makes working with multilingual content as simple as possible for our users.

New to version 4.0, Akumina’s platform includes machine translation using Microsoft Cognitive Services. With auto-translation, content editors can now easily translate content into multiple languages with the click of a button.

Content editors working on creating new content can simply turn auto-translate on or off for each new piece of content. For example, if a content editor needed an article in English, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese the editor would simply create the article first in English and then within the same screen click “create language versions” and enable “Auto-Translate”.

Content editors can auto-translate content with a simple click for multiple languages at one time

 

Content editors also can utilize auto-translate for previously translated content. For example, you may have an article in Spanish, but just received changes for the article in English. By simply replacing the previous Spanish content with the new English content, and then clicking “Auto-Translate”, the Spanish version of the article is instantly updated with the translated content.

Auto-translate is built with flexibility to auto-translate pre-existing content as well as new content

When using auto-translate to update content, editors can choose what content fields to translate including the title, body, summary, and meta description. This allows users to disable fields that don’t need to be re-translated to reduce the time to process as well as the character counts against a monthly translation quote of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services.

New Drag and Drop Interface

Akumina’s platform now allows end users to easily control the look and feel of their personal dashboard and project workspaces. With drag and drop functionality, non-technical users can drag and drop pre-built widgets controlling what content is front and center to simplify their workday, perform their job, and make business-critical decisions.

To enable the drag and drop interface, users simply click on the widget tab and a fly out window will appear with a list of widgets for users to choose from. Widgets within a dashboard page are designed to pull in content and data from internal systems of record that help users perform task related to their job. Users simply click on the widget they want to add to the page. Once added, the user can drag and drop the widget to any location on their page. Akumina includes a series of pre-built widgets for users out-of-the-box including my team, newest documents, recent documents, forms, my apps, and more. Organizations can also easily build out new widgets leveraging Akumina’s framework to cater to the individual needs of their employees.

Leveraging a fly out menu, users can drag and drop widgets onto a page.

Users can easily drag and drop widgets around on a page to customize the experience of the page.

 

New Employee Detail Page

A digital employee directory can provide real tangible (i.e. time savings) and intangible (i.e. employee satisfaction) benefits for organizations. Akumina’s employee directory provides the fastest way for employees to access the most up-to-date information on their colleagues including work, mobile, email, instant messaging, etc. With the launch of Version 4.0, Akumina’s employee directory now includes a new employee detail page which pulls data from an employee’s Office 365 profile. Within an office 365 profile, users can update their personal information such as including skills and expertise, interest and hobbies.

New Content App Creation Flow

With Akumina’s new content app creation flow, administrators have the flexibility to create different content apps with different views to manage the same content. For example, an admin could create two news publishing apps utilizing the same content source, one for a junior communications manager who can only see limited fields and one for a senior communication manager who can access advance fields associated with publishing a news article.

Widget Store

Akumina has launched a brand new widget store providing a repository of widgets for customers to add to their projects. The widget store lives within Akumina’s Widget Manager and displays all available widgets along with a one-click install process to simplify the process of adding widgets to projects.

We look forward to adding new widgets regularly to the widget store from our own in-house developers, partners, and customers.

Additional Enhancements

For developers and admins already familiar with Akumina’s platform, we made various performance enhancements as well as user experience enhancements including:

 

 

 

 

• Ability to set widget load priority – allowing developers to control which widgets on a page load first (i.e. those on the top of the page).
• Custom loading views for widgets – developers can customize the experience an end user sees while a widget is loading
• Quick access to content apps from front-end widgets. Users can now easily jump to the content app that is mapped to a widget right from within the widget without having to manually go to the AppManager and find the app.
• Importing and export capabilities for widgets – developers can now easily create a zip instance of all widget instances. This saves developers time from having to rebuild widgets when moving from staging to production sites as well as flexibility to easily share widget instances between sites.

You can check out the complete release notes at Akumina’s Learning Center.