What's New in Accolade 17.1 Release
The following sections describe new functionality and areas that have changed in Accolade in the 17.1 release.
Introducing Accolade Ideas
In this release, we’re excited to introduce Accolade Ideas. This feature empowers the submission, management, and development of ideas within Accolade. Here’s how the new Accolade Ideas feature can help capture and grow ideas that align with their business goals:
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Idea Submission – Accolade Ideas allows contributions from Accolade users, and company employees, and partners who are on the network but do not have an Accolade account. Capture fresh ideas and keep a detailed record of each one, including its origin and progress over time.
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Campaigns – Campaign managers can create and tailor campaigns to meet specific goals. They can also set priorities, track ideas, and use a Kanban workflow to move ideas from concept to development. Registered users with permission can view active campaigns and submit ideas. Collaborators can edit and rank ideas based on criteria important to their organization. Accolade Ideas offers reporting tools to help turn idea data into actionable insights.
Accolade Ideas will help organizations streamline the idea-to-innovation pipeline to quickly bring the best ideas to market.
Enhancing Resource Planning
- Tracking Outstanding Requests at the Pool Level – Previously in 17.0, Accolade introduced the Resource Pool Availability Chart on the Pool Details page. This chart acts as a quick summation of the Resource Capacity page for each pool. With 17.1, it has been updated to include requested demands too, allowing users to view the pool’s total remaining availability in one glance. These outstanding requests are denoted by a hashed bar in the chart, and assists Resource Planners in identifying what a particular pool requires in terms of resources, and whether a pool can take on more work.
- Setting Default Capacities for Resources – Accolade 17.1 now includes the ability to set a default capacity against a specified date range for a resource, on their Resource Capacity page. This allows Resource Planners to efficiently update a resource’s capacity for an extended period of time. This value is editable as needed, and can be updated on the Gantt chart for specific periods as well. With these enhancements, the Resource Capacity page gives users a detailed composite view of a particular resource, including their pool and attributes, their total capacity and remaining availability, and their total demands, i.e. assigned demands and unfilled requested demands.
Updating User Permissions
In previous releases (16.1 and earlier), users needed Process Manager rights, along with “add” permissions in a specific access group, to add new projects to that group. As a workaround, users without the necessary permissions submitted ideas as a way to add new projects.
Accolade 17.1 expands permissions to simplify access control while still allowing users to add new projects.
Any user with a process execution role can now be granted add rights to designated access groups. This means a user can add projects to an access group even without being given permission to access the group. For example, a user might have only access rights for Group 1, only add rights for Group 2, and both access and add rights for Group 3.
Improving the All My Work Page
With this release, Accolade has made the following improvements to the All My Work page layout:
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All work cards, including project cards, deliverable/activity cards, gate cards, and idea cards, now display their Project IDs. This allows for easier identification and search.
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When maximized, all work cards now accurately display their project name and project ID. Previously, longer project names were occasionally displayed truncated, and this has been rectified.
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All open idea cards are now visible on the All My Work layout. This includes idea cards submitted through AIL and Accolade Ideas, and campaign cards.
Updating License Reports
The License Reports page, along with the Project License Count report, now has an updated user interface, complementing the newer Accolade user interface. Additionally, Accolade 17.1 introduces a new license report: the User Count report. This new report displays the number of active and inactive users by user role.
Revising Ad-Hoc Deliverables
Previously, ad-hoc deliverables could not be created on projects with process models that did not include previously defined deliverables. However, these projects may need to be amended after the fact as well. To assist with this, Accolade 17.1 now allows ad-hoc deliverables to be created on these projects too.
Phasing Out Deprecated Features
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Pods and Layouts – With 17.1, the Portfolio Optimizer pod and Plugin pod are no longer available.
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Ideas Manager Role – Although Ideas functionality has changed with this release, the role of Idea Manager has been retained so that users with those rights may continue to manage existing Ideas in Accolade. Note that the name of the “Idea Manager” role has been updated to “(Deprecated) Idea Manager.” There is no change to the functionality of this role.
Microsoft Teams Update for Integration Functionality
Microsoft Teams has updated the way in which it loads and displays website tabs within their application, to enhance the security and reliability of external websites opened on Microsoft Teams. With this update, Accolade will no longer be able to display specific Accolade project tabs within the Microsoft Teams tabs itself, and as such, only the Accolade link will be displayed in the respective Microsoft Teams tabs.