Encodify Winter ‘25 release

With this year’s winter release we’ve made some pretty cool updates to many of the platform’s features. 

The update includes enhancements to Workspaces, two big quality of life updates to Online Proofing, and an overall update to fields within the platform. This is in an effort to help give you a smoother workflow, and a better user experience. 

In this article we’ll be cover four of the major changes to be included in this version:

1. Improved appearance of fields
2. More improvements to Workspaces
3. Improved sharing
4. Adjusted comment color on status transition

If you’re looking for more in-depth descriptions of everything that’s included in this year’s winter release, you can find the release notes on the Encodify helpdesk (requires you to log in).

We’re introducing several improvements to input fields across the entire Encodify platform. The new elements aim to improve the user experience of forms and to make these components consistent across different pages.

One of the more noticeable changes is the length of fields. Yes, the ultra-wide fields are gone. 

In Version 20.0.1 we’ve added a max-width of 600px, which means users will no longer see fields that take up all available width of an item view form. This change was made to help improve the scanability of fields, as well as accessibility and to prepare our forms for future transformations.

• Scanability: If a field is too wide users have to scan the entire length to understand which field type it is. This is easier when the field can be seen without having to move your eyes. 
• Accessibility: When too wide, lines of text disrupt readability of the contents, which can reduce accessibility for people with visual disabilities or dyslexia. This is because the length of the line makes it difficult to gauge where the line starts and ends.

These changes only impact the visual look of forms, and should not prevent users from reading the content. Additionally, we continue to support vertical expansion of fields and other resources to ensure that content remains readable. 

Large-screen users will notice these changes the most, but it is important to stress that the amount of fields displayed is not impacted by this change, and users can still use two columns to fill available space.

As you may well have heard, we are working to move from Dashboards to Workspaces, and the enhancements added in version 20.0.1 are addressing some of the feature gaps between the two. 

These additions to Workspaces include:

1. Workspace management, which allows citizen developers (such as site & system administrators) to easily access a complete list of all workspaces. In dashboards this visibility has previously been restricted to view only those they had created themselves or had been shared with them. 
2. Improved widget library, which lets you categorize the available widgets to understand their specific functions.
3. Extend widget actions, which gives users the ability to enable or disable rights to add items or edit items from spreadsheet and calendar widgets.‍
4. Support for “Calculate SUM”, it is now possible to specify one or more fields when configuring a spreadsheet widget to be calculated and have the total shown in a sum row at the bottom of the widget in question.

We’ve got two exciting updates for our sharing capabilities. 

1. You can now allow sharing directly from the online proofing screen, making it easier to invite external users to take part in your approval process.
2. The Encodify platform now supports bulk item sharing, which means you can allow users to share multiple items through a direct link via email, application or a third-party messenger tool like Slack or MS Teams. However, all recipients will need access to the item shared with them, if they are to take part in the review round.

These updates should help improve your proofing rounds quite a bit, especially if you need clients, freelancers or other external stakeholders to take part in reviews and approvals from time to time.

When you’re going through reviews and approvals it is often beneficial to be able to restrict viewing access to specific comments based on whether they are internal-only or even based on which team needs to take action on the comment.

In the Encodify this is achieved by adding a ‘comment color’.

However, previously any comments added on status change were visible to all users, but that is not the case anymore.

Item comments added during status transition can now be access-restricted with a ‘comment colour’. This gives greater control over the visibility of comments added when transitioning status.

You can read more about how to add ‘comment color’ in Encodify here (requires you to log in).