i-lign 8.0 release information

By Rachel | February 7, 2017

Happy New Year to you all. Our first release of the year launches i-lign 8. In this release we introduce the initial version of our All of business landscape, which provides a simple, up-to-date picture of the work going on in your organisation. We’ve also made significant changes to the Home page, including adding a personal kanban board. As well, you can now add initiatives directly to your organisation’s Business Groups which opens up the opportunity to simplify the way you structure work in i-lign. 8.0 also includes some technical upgrades and changes to the versions of technology we support. This post talks about changes scheduled for release in i-lign 8.0 and our timetable for this. If you’d like a preview version please get in touch.

Release timetable

The table below outlines our release timetable. The earlier we get your feedback the better (in terms of our ability to consider it for inclusion in the 8.0 release).

Action Timeframe
Customer review & feedback on 8.1 Wed 8 Feb to Tue 28 Feb
Preview of 8.0 available on request Wed 8 Feb
Meeting to talk through changes On request
Confirmed release date Sun 12 March

Our All of business landscape provides a single screen view of all your key initiatives. This is a real time, high level view which enables you to drill down to supporting detail. Our aim over time is to be able to view initiatives by filters such as review status, cost, benefits, risk. As a first step, you’ll be able to filter by review status in this release.

Introducing our All of business landscape

We’d like to develop this All of business landscape to the point where it could replace most, if not all, of your current programme and project reporting. We’d love to hear your feedback on this new view.

To view the All of business landscape

You can view the All of business landscape in just one click via the icon in the i-lign tool bar.

Significant changes to the Home page

The Home page provides you with a personal workspace to manage your work. We’ve added Board and Table views to give you flexibility to manage your work in different ways. We’ve also modified the List view.

Board

The Board groups your work by status under the following columns: Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Complete. You can drag and drop items between columns and these will update the status of the item. You can also filter what types of work you’d like to view, for example you might decide to select Tasks. Note that Action Items are shown separately from Tasks so you can use the board to manage these as well.

This is our first iteration of the board. We’re interested to hear how you use this feature so it can inform how we develop it. At the moment Tasks, are the only items which can be moved under the In progress heading. The ability to move other items into the In Progress column will be worked on in future.

Table

The Table view groups work which you own or have been assigned to by type. You can use this view to manage items such as Risks or Issues from different initiatives together as a group. The Table view also gives you the ability to customise, sort and filter your information.

List

You can use your My Work tab for a number of functions currently. These include using it to get to frequently visited places, identify work you want to prioritise and review your work by type (eg tasks, risks etc).

In 8.0 you can now use the Board view to prioritise and the Table view to review your work by type. As a consequence we’ve modified the List view, which is now grouped by context. For example if you expand the Initiatives heading, your can see your work items grouped by the initiatives you have a connection with. Select the initiative on the left hand side to see what work items you have under this initiative in the middle column. We’ve replaced My List with Bookmarks, Recent and To Do (under the Board heading on the left hand side). This covers the functions that could be carried out in My List, but in a more flexible way.

Adding initiatives to Business Groups

Value view of work carried out by Business Groups

You can now add Initiatives (projects / programmes /activities) directly to your organisation’s business groups by selecting a Business Group as the Parent of an initiative rather than a Programme or Project. This gives you a Value view of the work being carried out by business groups and the organisation as a whole. This Value view will be particularly useful for those responsible for managing or supporting work carried out by a particular business group or the organisation as a whole. To access this view, go to the Business Group you’re interested in and toggle from Organisation to Value in the top left hand corner.

Value view of a Business Group

Opportunity to simplify the way you structure work in i-lign

This change provides the opportunity to simplify the way you structure your work in i-lign. For example if you have initiatives structured under a business group programme eg IT Programme or Finance Programme then you have the opportunity to remove this programme. You may no longer need this programme as you’ll get a Value view of these initiatives via the business group. This means you may only need to set up programmes to define groups of initiatives that are actively managed as a work programme. Remember you can also use Portfolios to get a Value view of initiatives you choose to collect together (see here for details on Portfolios).

How to add initiatives to a Business Group

To add a current initiative to a Business Group, use the functions button to edit the initiative’s details. New initiatives can be added to a Business Group when they are set up.

A first step

This change is the first step in the developing the way your Teams and your Work is structured in i-lign. Our aim is to make it really easy to view and manage work at the single team level, multiple teams level and organisational level.

Technical upgrades and support

We now support web single sign-on for those of you using Microsoft Azure Active Directory authentication.

To enable us to use current technology to develop features, we end support for Internet Explorer 9 and 10. Customers currently using Internet Explorer 9 or 10 have the option of using an alternative browser such as Edge, Chrome, Safari or Firefox to run 8.0.

Self-hosted customers only

i-lign 8 requires Tomcat 8.5 and Microsoft SQLServer 2012 or SQLServer 2014.

Full list of changes

See here for more information about other changes and bug fixes.