New Boards Hub, Fall Update

[Microsoft]

If you have been following these posts, then you are more than familiar with our New Boards Hub initiative. We have been doing our best to keep our community informed of the new features and our rollout plans. Now is a good time to provide an update on where things are at with a couple of our new preview features, as well as our rollout plans.

Rollout slowdown

Several weeks ago, we completed the rollout of New Boards as the default experience through Ring three. During that time, we received a flood of feedback and issues.

We do a ring-based deployment where each ring holds a subset of customers. This allows us to roll out features to get feedback from a smaller set of users at a time. As the Rings progress, so do the number of customers in each Ring. Rings 4 and 5 hold 70% of our user base.

Instead of pushing to adhere to some timeline, we have decided to pause the rollout of New Boards Hub as the default experience. Instead, our focus is on quality and making sure all blocking bugs are fixed. This includes performance, functional, and accessibility related bugs.

We hope to have the outstanding issues fixed over the next couple of sprints. Our new tentative timeline to make New Boards Hub the default experience is early 2024.

Markdown for discussions

Sadly, the new Markdown editor for new comments has been a contentious feature. On one side we have a lot of developers who love it and prefer a Markdown editor over the HTML editor. On the other hand, there are many users who have non-developer roles that don’t care to know Markdown. It has become clear that we are not going to be able to force everyone into Markdown like we had hoped. Instead, we will be giving the users the option to use either editor.

This change will go into effect in a couple of weeks and will be available for the organizations who have already enabled the preview.

Team Automation Rules preview

We announced the Team Automation Rules preview just a couple of sprints ago. We have had a ton of interest and enabled many of you into that preview. Feedback has been great, and we are excited to bring this feature into general availability soon. We do have a couple of minor issues to clear up and release before it is ready for the masses. But things are looking good, and we hope to release it out before the end of 2023.

Send your feedback

Although we think we have a good handle on all the known issues in New Boards Hub, the product covers a large surface area. There are going to be some edge cases we are not aware of. Especially around custom extensions. Please send any questions or feedback you have to us directly via email. Your input is vital to help us get the New Boards Hub done right.

The post New Boards Hub, Fall Update appeared first on Azure DevOps Blog.

View the full article