New Boards Hub, Fall Update

Dan Hellem

November 21st, 20237 0

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.

Try New Boards Hub Today

Dan Hellem Program Manager, Azure DevOps

7 comments

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Quintos November 21, 2023 7:23 pm 0

Do you have any plan to migrate AzureDevOpsServer’s codebase to dotnet 8 or Support Docker Container Deployment?
- Dan Hellem November 22, 2023 4:54 am 0
  
  No plans that I am aware of 🙁
James November 23, 2023 4:59 pm 1

Thank you for listening to feedback! The whole process around “New Boards” has been one of the most transparent SaaS teams at Microsoft.
Per Sundqvist November 23, 2023 11:55 pm 1
Hi Dan, do you have any status of these 2 bugs in the New Boards Hub?
1. 1. If we have links from a work item to a branch in another project, using New Boards hub shows Branch Link not found.
  https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Branch-link-could-not-be-read/10478980?q=branch+link+could+not+be+read
  Issue suggests turning off New Boards Hub as solution, isnt really the best solution.
  
  2.If we use test case annotation on boards, users with out Basic + Test Plans license cant delete the Test Case from the Card. Gets Api error: Failed to update annotation. You are not authorized to access this API.
  Turning off New Boards Hub solves this also
/regards Per
- Dan Hellem November 24, 2023 8:29 am 1
  
  Thank you @Per. We do have some trouble sometimes where support will close tickets without our product team being aware. This is a good example of one of those times ☹️. I have re-opened that ticket. Can you please create a new ticket for the 2nd issue with all the details and email me the link directly so I can ownership of it?
Michael Taylor November 27, 2023 7:39 am 0

From discussions in the other blogs related to the new MD editor it was stated that it was a one way migration. Once an org switched to MD it couldn’t switch back. With this update and the ability to “toggle” between HTML and MD does that mean that it is now possible to switch back and forth or is it still one way? Is the data being stored in MD and just converted to HTML if the toggle is enabled? The reason I ask is:
– MD to HTML is mostly straightforward but not going the other way so it is possible for someone to put in HTML description that doesn’t translate back to MD correctly (I believe). Specifically I know there were some HTML features (background text formatting I think) that were not supported in the new editor and toggling to the HTML view might give the illusion of it working when it wouldn’t.
– If we are consuming this via the API then if it is all MD then we’d need to run it through a converter if we wanted HTML but if the existing data wasn’t migrated then it would be harder to tell if we’re already dealing with HTML or if it is in MD format.
- Dan Hellem November 27, 2023 9:53 am 0
  
  per the blog post, we are going to allow users to choose the editor at the time the comment is created. They will be able to convert existing HTML comments to MD if needed. But it should not really matter. We will support both and the APIs will allow you to set the MD/HTML at the time you add the comment as well.