CloudM Product manager Ashleigh Thomas gives you a detailed walk through of the UI updates coming soon for CloudM Manage

We understand that UI changes can be annoying, especially when you’re used to using a piece of software in a particular way. But sometimes change is necessary, and at CloudM we don’t do anything without good reason.

We have carried our user research which has shown that there were a few key areas we needed to focus on for the redesign of CloudM Manage; below I’ll cover how we improved those areas and what you can expect from the new, enhanced platform.

Read more about why we made these changes here

Navigation

• Overwhelmingly, the biggest feedback we received was that the navigation system was confusing and often led to a lot of jumping around between areas to perform certain tasks, leading people to become confused as to where they were within the product.
• By overhauling our page structure and giving each primary navigation area a clear, defined purpose we’ve managed to solve the problem, creating a more seamless journey for our users.
  

Home

• A brand new area to view data and insights about your domain. Expect this area to grow in the future - so keep an eye out for updates!

Directory

• Browse all of your Smart Teams, org units, contacts, groups and users in one place.
• We have also introduced profile panels that slide in from the right of the screen, over the top of the existing screen, instead of separate profile screens. This means that now you can view and close a profile, and quickly return to the same point in a list, making viewing multiple profiles much quicker and easier.
• If you are managing multiple domains, the Managed Domains settings can also be found as a sub feature of the Directory section.

Administrate

• You will find all of our most powerful administration features here such as offboarding workflows and email signature management.
• There was plenty of confusion over what Provisioning and Deprovisioning actually meant so we have made a little change to the terminology we now use. From now on, the processes of adding a user to and removing a user from your domain will be referred to as Onboarding and Offboarding.

Settings

• Control all of the platform-wide settings such as custom branding, on-premise integration and audit logs.
• We’ve also introduced a new way of viewing extra information about org units, users, Smart Teams etc. The new side panel view allows you to view extra information and perform tasks without having to leave the context of the page that you’re currently viewing.

• We have simplified how you can customize the look of the new UI. To compliment the new look, you can choose your brand color to replace the CloudM default colours. You can still add your logo to the screen, and a custom favicon. If you have set the Primary button color in the current UI to a custom color, this color will automatically be used as your Branding color in the new UI.
• Synchronization & Notifications settings can now be found under the Domain Settings option.

Core Feature Enablement

• This ties in very closely with improved navigation. Previously our core features had locations on the primary navigation bar, but to actually use the features you first had to find an applicable entity and choose the feature you wanted to use from within the actions menu. Now each of our core features can be used entirely from within their page. A mini browser enables you to choose the entity you wish to configure, this makes configuring multiple org units or smart teams much simpler and quicker.

• We’ve also added an explicit onboarding section to complete our user lifecycle management offering. Here you can share documents and calendars with Smart Teams and groups.
• Finally we’ve added a brand new ‘Offboarding Status’ page. Another highly requested feature which allows admins to see, at a glance, all of the offboarding actions that are occurring within their domain. Users can perform bulk approvals, rejections or abort commands across multiple offboarded users at the same time.

Groups confusion now solved

• We previously had two different types of group in the product: Groups and Smart Groups, as well as our powerful Smart Teams feature but we found this could get pretty confusing for the user. We’ve now merged Google Groups and smart groups into just a single ‘Groups’ type which can have either dynamic or static member lists.
• You can still view all groups with just dynamic member lists with advanced search drop down by using the ‘Show only dynamic members’ option.

In-Software Help

As much as we have worked hard to make our software as intuitive as possible, we know that you might need some help from time to time. That is why we have added a couple of in-software help features:

• Knowledge Base Widget - Selecting the Question icon in the header now opens up a Help widget that allows you to view Knowledge Base articles without leaving the software.
• The top articles that will be suggested to you when you open the Help widget will be relevant to the screen you are on. If you are on the Org Units screen, expect to see the “What is an Organizational Unit?” article suggested.
• In-Product Onboarding - We're adding guided walk-throughs to the platform to help guide new and existing users through some of the processes, workflows and any new features

Please note that depending on your individual user permissions you may not see all of these areas

We're Building a Platform

We’re building a platform to enable our users to perform a multitude of different cloud administration and management tasks all within the same application.

These UI changes lay the foundation for us to start building towards that vision.

You may have noticed that the left-hand navigation bar is a little… sparse. Well over the coming months you can expect to see buttons for CloudM Migrate, a new Archive product that we’re working on and some other exciting ideas that we have in the pipeline.

If you have an idea for a new feature that you’d like to tell us about, then feel free to submit your idea here: https://cloudm.co/ideas/feature-voting

For a full walk through of the platform’s new features, I’ll be conducting a free on demand webinar, going live in line with the launch at the end of September, so keep an eye out!

Read more about these changes