Users may notice a few things different once they've logged in starting today. You may recall that early in 2015, we changed the default page that users end up at upon login from their user profile to My Workbench, a dashboard that helps users to quickly find and create content. Today's updates help tie up a few loose ends in the My Workbench section to make its use more efficient.
Among the changes are:
- Re-organization of the top tab bar and introduction of the 'Utilities' section
- A new CMS Announcements block
- Improvements to the Find Content tabs
Changes to the top tabs
All of the tabs pertaining to your drafts, edits, etc. now fittingly live under the section "My Content." In addition, a new "Utilities" section holds links to assorted tools you may occasionally use but aren't directly related to finding or moderating content, such as the link checker report and a taxonomy term browser.
Speaking of the taxonomy term browser, this feature is now available to all users. It has spent the past several months in a limited beta pending the My Workbench improvements. It is a simple tool to help you look up taxonomy terms by vocabulary, name, or ID.
A new way to be informed of updates to the CMS
My Workbench now features a feed of CMS-related announcements from the Web Team in the Office of Marketing. Topics may range from feature additions to notices of upcoming updates to hints for common issues and questions. You'll get up to three announcements right on your My Workbench page, with links to view more announcements and access the CMS User Guide. We hope this tool will help us to better inform you and help you to be better informed.
A few minor tweaks to the Find Content section
Users with access to a lot of Workbench Access sections will appreciate that the Find Content pages now show the full breadcrumb for a piece of content's section (e.g., "International Education » About" instead of just "About"). The Find Content pages for Articles and Sliders now show a thumbnail of the photo when applicable. The table rows have also been organized to reduce clutter while still showing the same information as before.
Wrapping up, looking forward
These updates bring some refinement to the process that began earlier this year of making My Workbench a useful landing page for our content editors. We have a list and hope to hit more of the pain points in the editing user experience over the coming year. As always, the "Web Team Support" link is a great way to get a hold of us if you have problems or feedback.
