Today we are celebrating the fact that we won the Kentico Site of the Year 2014 award for best Intranet with our project "Joost", a Social Intranet built on the Kentico platform. In this post I will highlight my top 5 favorite out-of-the-box Kentico features, that we facelifted in this Modern UI design.
1. Personalized dashboard with live tiles based on "user widgets"
Users can simply drag-and-drop widgets and reorder the tiles as they desire. Some widgets are static and cannot be removed. The goal of the static widgets is to allow the editors to push specific content to users of Joost.
I love the way how we incorporated out-of-the-box user widgets in this personalized dashboard.
2. Context menu that provides out-of-the-box Kentico features
We implemented a context menu in the tiles by adding a chevron in the top right corner, which is available when you hover over the tiles. This allowed us to present tile (content) manipulation features like the deletion of the tile. Another cool out-of-the-box feature we utilized is the selection of a web part container, to allow the user to switch between large and small tile sizes.
Regarding document management, the context menu offers features that you will typically find in the document library web part. Especially the check in/check out feature is a great addition, which allows users to edit documents using Kentico's WebDAV integration.
3. Pin to start
Also one of my favorites, as this one actually generates the code that results in a user widget being placed in the Start section on the Homepage.
4. Smart Search results & custom filtering
We decided to create a generic approach for presenting the content and choose to display the tiles as Smart Search Results. Because every content type inherits from the same metadata set (via page type inheritance) we could apply Smart Search Filters to filter the results on subject (taxonomy), publication period and department. We enhanced the Smart Search Filters to display the total number of results that match the search criterea.
5. Groups and projects
Last but not least is the collaboration section in Joost. We used the Kentico groups module to enable users to create and manage their own groups or request new projects. Groups and projects are technically the same but differ in workflow. A group for example is automatically approved. Projects need approval from an administrator. We added logic to automatically archive inactive groups and projects if their content (documents, media, messages etc.) was not updated in the last couple of months. The rest is pretty much out-of-the-box in a new look-and-feel.
