What's new in Firefly 4: for existing users

At our annual Users' Group in October we released Firefly 4, our latest major upgrade.

This guide is for all those who have some experience using previous versions of Firefly, just to let you know what's changed.

For more of a general overview, please see Joe's blog post.

What hasn't changed

Don't worry - the structure of your site will remain completely unchanged and you will still find all your old content exactly where it was before! The major focus in version 4 was to give users a more personalised/personalisable experience in Firefly, as well as making it more social.

We have tried to keep most of the editing tools the same in this update, so they will all work exactly how you are used to. However, we've made it easier for you to find some of those tools and also access pages that are particularly useful to you, more easily. It's also now much easier to share links to pages you have made with others.

The 'black thing running across the top': the new user bar

My Feed becomes the Dashboard

Your Dashboard shows information personalised for you - announcements/messages you have been sent within Firefly, personal bookmarks you have created, pages others' have recommended to you and a summary of all incoming/outgoing tasks you have (more on that later). You can also see updates from 'pages you follow' which is most similar to the old My Feed view. What used to be called "subscribing" in My Feed can now be either making a bookmark or following a page - giving you more flexibility.  Your old subscriptions should have automatically been ported across as both bookmarks and follows, but you can change these using the tools shown at the bottom of the pages in question.

Tasks

All new in version 4 is the ability to set and manage tasks through Firefly. Only certain users will be allowed to set tasks. If you can you will see a "Manage Set Tasks" link in your black user bar. If not, you can only receive tasks, sorry! If you think you should be able to set them, please contact your local administrator.  When you set a task, the recipient will receive an e-mail but it will also appear in their dashboard and tasks view.

Firefly 4 has two main types of task: offline tasks and online tasks. Online tasks require the recipient to hand in work online. That might be through an existing marked work page or it might be through our new "Simple File Submission" option. Offline tasks do not require recipients to hand in work online, although they can manually mark the task as done. Both types of task provide reporting on who has completed the task, although more details are available on online tasks, as you might expect.

We recommend you use tasks whenever you set work using Firefly to take advantage of the new reporting functionality and management tools. However, rest assured all your old pieces of marked work will continue to work - indeed you can now create tasks from them!  You will need to use the same tools you used to to manage old pieces of marked work that were created before the task system was introduced i.e. Display Report on the marked work page.

Think of the marked work page like a re-usable worksheet, and the task the actual instruction to a particular class at a particular time - to do it.

Recommended bookmarks: sharing pages with others

Talking to Firefly users we found that you often create a page and then want to share it with a particular group or person.  You can now, using the Recommended bookmark feature.  Your recommendation will appear on the user's dashboard and also their bookmarks page.