Welcome to nGen Collaboration 6.10!

Two weeks ago the Product Management Team held a company-wide meeting (with an accompanying wiki) to solicit ideas from the nGen community for improvements to nGen Collaboration. The excellent response helped us develop a prioritized list of first steps and the Development Team immediately went to work. Below are 9 functionality improvements that address some of your top concerns. We will continue to work on the list and make significant strides in improving the usability of nGen Collaboration.

Major kudos and thanks to the Development Team who burned the Mignight oil to get this release out, and to Mike Roeder for his summary of the changes.

You might also notice that the platform is running much faster.

Favorites
There is now the ability to favorite a conversation, wiki, group or user. Click the icon next to any of these items and it will be added to your favorites list in the sidebar. Only the top 10 are viewable. To view all your favorites, click the All link under favorites, or when visiting My Page/Profile, click the favorites link. From the All page, you can choose to remove a favorite or turn off alerts for that favorite, which are on by default.

An e-mail alert is sent for conversations, wikis, polls, etc., and notifies you any time the there is a change or reply.

Recently Viewed
A top-10 rolling list of conversations, groups, and profiles you have recently viewed. It is cleared out on login and session expiration. It is in the sidebar below Favorites.

Drafts
nGen Collaboration will now save a draft of new conversations/wikis and edits every 30 seconds! This draft is not visible to other users. You can see your existing drafts from My Page, My Drafts tab. This functionality provides ease of mind and allows you to recover your document if something happens while creating a conversation.

Note: This feature is not intended to replace the unpublish documents feature. Please continue to use the Advanced Options tab on the edit page, and de-select the publish check box. This will prevent your conversation from being visible while you work on it.

 
Landing Page
You are now automatically directed to your My Page screen on login. You can revert back to the dashboard page as your landing page by visiting your preferences page and choosing dashboard for your login. This feature supports future functionality planned for your My Page (paving the way to make this page more configurable and contain more pertinent information about your account/preferences/settings down the road).

 
Shared Groups
You can now share conversations across interest groups. For example, with two private Interest Groups (Group A and Group B), Group A can allow all their conversations to be seen by Group B by simply selecting the shared option. However, unless group B does the same, group A cannot see group B's content. This prevents a group owner from unauthorized access to another group's content. "What's yours is yours and what's mine is mine, unless I decide to share mine with you."

Additionally, by selecting non-members can start conversations, members of other selected groups can create new conversation/wikis in your private group.

 
 
Denying Membership with reason
You can now specify a reason when you deny a users request to join an interest group, and that user will receive a notification.

 
Tell a Friend with Message
The Tell-A-Friend option now allows you to specify a message as part of the notification.

 
Hide Membership of Group
You can now hide the members of an Interest Group from the prying eyes of non-members (If you are a member of said group, you’ll still see the other members).

Outstanding Interest Group Invitations
You can get to your outstanding group invitations from My Page. It is at the bottom of the page.

There is much more to come in the near future, such as filtered search, wiki page versioning, integration of the hubs, and improvements to the user interface!