User Preferences for the Portal
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Spencer Vale
In 2.12 we created the new search driven portal and in 3.0 we have enhanced this by adding new collections including ‘Recent’ which lets students jump straight back into their recently used apps. Making the search view the default rather than a grid view was an intentional design decision as students rarely need to see a long list of apps and the new search feature is a powerful way to quickly find the app they need. However we know from customer feedback that there are some exceptions to this.
Rather than make the default view an Admin setting, we have a vision to enhance the user preference part of the portal. In 3.0 this allows the user to determine their theme (Light or Dark mode), but we could take this further by adding search vs grid view, allowing users to select the number of rows of apps visible in their view, or even defaulting to the collection that was most recently selected.
If you would like this feature, please upvote this post and add your comments about the different options you would like to see.
Spencer Vale
Released today in AppsAnywhere 3.1: https://www.appsanywhere.com/resource-centre/product/appsanywhere-3-1-keeping-users-informed-and-in-control-of-their-experience
This post was marked as
complete
Spencer Vale
Merged in a post:
Default order of collections
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michael coxon
The default view seems to be New(default)/recent/fav, which is of little use to most users, i know this can be changed so we now have it defaulting to recent(default)/fav/new which is better, could i request that this is user profile based rather than global setting, that's how it used to be,
Also can there be an all category, for us that would be the most useful and we would probably have that the default then users could choose recent or favs if they want.
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michael coxon
Also can more than 6 items be displayed that is somewhat limiting
This post was marked as
in progress
Spencer Vale
Hi Michael. Thanks for your feedback. You'll be pleased to know that in 3.1 we are giving users the preference of how many apps they want to see on the home screen and also providing a default category of all.
Spencer Vale
Merged in a post:
Unvailable apps UI
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Ariff Hafid
Don't display unavailable apps in View all Apps.
A toggle to show unavailable apps will work.
Feedback first added to this CR Forum post: https://support.appsanywhere.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/7790159494429-Unvailable-apps-2-12-UI
Spencer Vale
Merged in feedback from the Change Request forum after 2.12 release (https://support.appsanywhere.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/6454280540573-Customisable-Favourites-in-AppsAnywhere-2-12): With AppsAnywhere 2.12, when users add items to their favourites, the Favourites category on the main launch page only shows the first six favourites sorted in alphabetical order.
What would be preferable is if users had the ability to select their six most "favourite" items which would then be the ones that are displayed on the Favourites category on the launch page, and perhaps even the ability the order those sixe items.
Clicking "View all Favourites" could either work as it currently does in that it would display all items in their Favourites sorted alphabetically, or perhaps it could show those "pinned favourites" as the first six (maybe have a slightly coloured background around those six to indicate they are pinned), and then the rest of the favourites sorted alphabetically after them.
Additional customisable options that may also be useful would be allowing users to order the favourites by most recently used or by most often used applications (although these could also be useful sort options in general, maybe even as default categories available to users on the launch page).
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kris Smith
Spencer Vale: I really wouldn't restrict users to Six items on the favorites page.
Most of our students, especially the media courses, will have many more than 6 active applications (the Adobe CC suite alone would fill this) at which point 6 favorites is useless as they will still need to search for other apps on a daily basis.
Can I also add that, Having upgraded our test system to v3 the first3 comments from my team were "can we default to something other than that favorites thing?"
So add 3 votes to the tally (I think only 4 people have looked at it so far)
Spencer Vale
kris Smith: Thanks for your feedback Kris. One of the user preferences we're considering is the number of apps (or rows of apps) presented on the home screen.
Regarding being able to default to something other than favourites, that is already possible in 3.0. That can be determined in the App Collections screen within Admin (so an admin setting rather than user preference). Just set a different collection other than Favorites as the first collection. I think Recent will be useful for most users.
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Mark West
Spencer Vale: I think have an initial admin setting makes sense but then allowing the user to override that also is desirable.
The use case here would be for as as admins to define a "welcome bundle" i.e. some of the more common apps that we'd want new students to have (or perhaps even broken down by course - but that's whole other automation conversation).
But then once the students are established they'll curate their own list and might swap our default to favorites or recent used (since that'll likely be similar)
-Mark
Spencer Vale
Mark West: Thanks Mark, the first part can be done today with the existing functionality of creating a category called Welcome Bundle and making this the first App Collection. So if I'm understanding correctly you'd like the user to be able to override this in their preferences?
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kris Smith
Spencer Vale: Ok, I may need to chat with your guy abut this. I'm not quite getting what I need from this.
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Mark West
Spencer Vale: Exactly that. I knew we could define a welcome bundle category. But that's not good to present to a 3rd year student.
The whole concept of a welcome bundle only makes sense if a user can override it.
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kris Smith
Spencer Vale: Yes, users need to be able to set their own default.
with >300 apps we are not going to be able to set a perfect list for all users,