Mar 2023 | Improved Kanban, Social Media Sharing, Mobile Device Layout; New Supervised Signatures

Traction® TeamPage Release 6.2.62 includes improved full-screen mode for sharing Kanban tables during meetings, improved presentation of content teaser when sharing TeamPage articles in social media, and improved mobile device layout for feeds, sections, task lists, status and similar views. The Signatures management page now includes a table of supervised signatures to help supervisors track the status of employee signatures due on requirements that the supervisor is responsible for. Supervised signature status also appears in the email digest customized for each TeamPage member. The release includes over 35 bug fixes and improvements, see TeamPage Change Log for a description. Please read on for a summary.

Improvements

Kanban

• Revised and improved fullscreen mode for Kanban boards. In fullscreen mode, the board itself now takes up much more of the screen, and additional parts of the page, such as the Related Content block and the page footer, are hidden. The page title header, which includes Kanban Actions, Filters, and Search controls for the board, still appears at the top of the screen. These changes are make fullscreen mode more attractive for shared screen meetings.

• Removed the Columns and Swimlanes sub-tabs on the top-level Kanban tab unless debugging is enabled, since the sub-tabs aren't generally of use to end users.

Signature Requirements Module

• Added improvements to help supervisors keep track of the status of signatures for requirements for they're responsible. The user profile > Signatures page now includes a table of supervised signatures, when applicable. And the signatures reminders in the email digest now also cover supervised signatures.

Mobile Device Support

• Greatly improved the layout of feed volume pages and sections, task lists, status update views, and various other similar types of pages and presentation styles on mobile devices, or in any environment in which the size of the browser is constrained. The author avatar image, when present, now appears on the left side under the title rather than to the right of the feed text, and the text now occupies more of the available horizontal space. This improves readability and information density.

Avatar Images

• Added users' avatar images next to their names when displaying lists of users in various contexts, such as task assignees or event invitees.

Comment Form

• Added support for styling the comment confirmation message that appears when a user successfully creates a comment using the inline comment form but is not able to read it.

• Added "(Optional)" and "(Required)" indicators where applicable to the Name and Email fields presented to Visitor in TeamPage's inline comment forms, making it clearer when those values are required vs. optional.

External Directory Service Integration

• Greatly improved error reporting in user directory login and lookup testing, and in other administrative interfaces that offer interactive user and group lookups. Previously, in many cases, the error message reported on a test login failure or a test user or group lookup failure would be incomplete or misleading. In some cases, the underlying errors were not even logged. Now, much more detail about the underlying causes (if known) of any error are reported to the administrator as accurately and completely as feasible, which avoids having to examine the log file to search for this sort of information, and ensures that the administrator has the information they need to troubleshoot user directory integration issues. This particularly applies to configurations using ActiveDirectory.

Sharing in Social Media

• Modified TeamPage's default configuration so that requests from "Amazon CloudFront" user-agents will be handled with the same "search" skin served to bots/spiders used by search engines and other automated systems.

• Added Open Graph META tags to the HEAD of TeamPage's search skin renderings of single entries, ensuring that the canonical URL, title, description, and suitable thumbnail images are provided to social media platforms when a user chooses to share an article in TeamPage. Users must use the permalink of an entry to share it for this to work properly, because the URLs for TeamPage's ordinary user-facing pages are not compatible with these types of sharing operations.

Bug Fixes

Deleting Articles

• Fixed a bug that could, in certain cases, prevent a user from deleting an entry they authored even if they had "Delete Own Articles" permission in the containing space. The user would be allowed to attempt to delete an entry, either via the context menu or the control in the editor, but the operation would not be performed.

• Fixed a bug that could prevent error messages from being reported to the user if an attempt to delete an entry failed. Instead, the delete dialog (and the edit dialog, if launched from there) would simply close and the page would be refreshed, leaving the user confused about what occurred.

Comment Form

• Fixed a bug that prevented the expected confirmation message from being added to the page when a user successfully creates a comment using the inline comment form, but is not able to read it. Previously, the comment would be successfully created, and the comment form would disappear, but with no indication to the user that their comment had been created.

Event Form

• Fixed a bug that, in certain cases, prevented automatic end date/time adjustment from working properly in the event form. When the start date/time is adjusted in the event form, the end date/time is always supposed to be automatically translated forward or backwards so that the difference between the two date/time values remains fixed. This now works properly in all cases.

Signature Requirements Module

• Fixed a bug that prevented users from using their email address instead of their user name when adding a signature for a requirement.

External Directory Service Integration

• Fixed a bug that could, in certain cases, prevent TeamPage's background security principal cache refresh process from completing successfully, and possibly put the TeamPage service into a temporarily uncertain state, requiring a restart to fully resolve.

• Fixed a rare bug that could prevent TeamPage from displaying type-ahead completions for users with email addresses in the Email Articles and Email Reply forms if any candidate results from an external directory service (such as ActiveDirectory) did not have at least one associated email address.

• Fixed a bug in the Migrate Principals process that prevented the encoding for the matched security principal group from being correctly filled into the "New Encoding" field. The old principal encoding would remain in the "New Encoding" field even for a group for which an equivalent match was found in the new directory, with the result that the references to that group would not be migrated unless an administrator manually modified the "New Encoding", either by pressing the "Lookup" button or entering the principal encoding manually. The principal migration process now handles these cases correctly.

• Fixed a bug which could prevent a TeamPage server from being usable when running with a journal that references external user or group security principals that require a certain plug-in, but when the plug-in is not installed, or is installed but not enabled. When the required configurations for certain types of external security principals are missing, TeamPage will now remain usable; and administrators will be able to see all references to those principals, and examine the (likely incomplete) information TeamPage may have for them.

Kanban

• Fixed a bug which, in some cases, caused swimlanes to appear in the wrong order when viewing a Kanban board. When this issue happened, various other display anomalies could also occur.

• Fixed a bug that caused the Show/Hide status of Backlog, Start, End and Archive columns to revert to its previous state if the page was reloaded.

• Fixed a bug that caused the Default Swimlane to be displayed as expanded when it should have been collapsed if the order of the swimlanes was changed and the page was reloaded.

• Fixed a bug that could cause various display anomalies when a swimlane's position was changed while it was collapsed.

• Fixed a bug that could cause an error message to be reported if Visitor interacted with certain Kanban board controls.

• Fixed a minor issue that could cause warnings to be logged when viewing certain types of Kanban-related entries.

External Search Engine Integration

• Fixed an issue that might, in some unusual cases, prevent batches of documents that had been registered in the indexing accounting system from being unregistered on completion.

Quality Management and Standard Meetings Modules

• Fixed some minor layout problems with the sections displayed on the Nonconformity > Overview and Meetings > Overview pages.

General

• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused incorrect details about modifications to some types of fielded data, such as the "Assigned to" and "Notify" fields for task entries, to appear in the edit summary information that appears in places such as the Activity > Feed page. Although the text displayed in the "Compare Versions" pages would be correct, the feed version of these details could present incorrect information captioned "Added", "Removed" or "Changed".

• Fixed a bug that could cause minor layout problems in the user profile > Notifications > Watch List view.

For Developers

• Added support for Entry thumbnails, including support for either generating an IMG tag to refer to the image, or generating META tags with the appropriate og:image:* property values. com.traction.sdk.Entry now has the method Icon getThumbnail(); and SDL now has the entry.thumbnail.html.image and entry.thumbnail.html.opengraph SDL tags. The SDK will always generate at least a default thumbnail for the image.

• The entries and journalrequest SDL tags now support proj= attributes that contain the space qualifier prefix "::" before the logical space names. This idiom is useful in many cases in which space names may come from sources that contain the prefix.

Related

Microsoft Azure AD Cloud support for cloud and on-premises authentication and user management An example of how TeamPage External User Directory Integration works

Sep 2022 | Introducing Kanban for TeamPage, by Takashi Okutsu

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.

A Fabric, not a Platform Making work actionable as well as observable: Objects, context, conversation, connection.