At WorkSpan, we are constantly innovating to bring you new features and enhancements that will enable you to do your job even better. Read on to learn about the latest WorkSpan updates.
New Features in February 2020
WorkSpan 2.0 Sneak Preview: Get ready for the all-new WorkSpan user experience! We’re making WorkSpan easier for you, with a new look and a host of new features. We've heard your input on the product and our teams have been hard at work. The new UI is about to roll out and it’s a big, beautiful change! Here’s a sneak peek at some updates coming your way in March: Click here to learn more.
Configure who can see the metrics on an object: You can now share metrics with Participants, even if the metrics are global. That means you can share aggregate numbers with partners even if the underlying data is not yet shared. For instance, you can share the total number of joint opportunities to show a growing pipeline but share the opportunity details only when it is in an advanced stage in your sales cycle. Click here to learn more.
Auto-Linking: Auto-Linking (or Auto-Association) helps with linking multiple sources to multiple or single destinations in an automatic fashion with minimal user involvement. When an Auto-linking policy is created and activated, the policy is triggered at the creation point of the source object configured in the policy. Click here to learn more.
New Features in January 2020
Accounts Master List and Account Objects: Import and maintain your master list of accounts privately and securely on WorkSpan. Track the account lifecycle, powered by partnering motions, as your account progresses from prospect to customer. This new capability allows you to easily identify the total revenue and pipeline per partner for each account. Lead with this intelligence to drive business engagements and to determine the best partnering and solution fit for your account.
You can also link your alliance-originated and partner-nominated opportunities to your internal accounts. Bi-directional opportunity flows are now powered with a connected account. This feature is available to select customers for preview. Request this feature by contacting your Customer Success Manager or support@workspan.com, or click here to learn more.
Auto-Associate Opportunities and Activities with Sales Plans, Solutions and Partner Programs: Your company administrator can now programmatically govern and automate object associations at the point of creation. Robust and powerful policies can be configured to connect opportunities and activities to sales plans, solutions and partner programs. For instance, you can now automatically link Opportunities to Sales Plans based on Partners or Regions at the point of creation eliminating manual effort required to search and share, saving you time and improving data quality and governance. Click here to learn more.
Show/Hide Private Fields in Table View: You can now run joint pipeline reviews on a shared screen and be confident that your private fields are not shared with your partners. Simply set the toggle to hide private fields. Any private data in fields and metrics, will be hidden from all pages including overview pages and table views. This user setting is persistent across the application and across sessions.
NOTE: The toggle will hide private fields but does not hide rows. In order to ensure that you are only sharing rows that the partner can access, you should filter the Member Company column to that Partner company before starting the screen share
Create Partner Programs Reports: Running multiple Partner Programs on WorkSpan and want a way to report on all of them at once? You can now create a Partner Programs report with all (or some) of your Partner Programs, and track their progress in one place. Add charts for your important metrics and share the report to show off your success. Click here to learn more.
Admin controls for company name and logo: If you had a change in the naming of your company or your marketing team has a logo update, you can now easily perform these updates in WorkSpan. Any user with a Company Admin role has the access to update the Company name and logo from their company page. Click here to learn more.
New Features in December 2019
Display of multi-value, long text and URL fields: Previously, some fields on WorkSpan with long values such as URLs or with multiple values entered were not shown completely in the UI, with the ends of long field answers being cut off. Now, the UI will display all values entered into a field and will show complete URLs and entire values even in cases where the value is long. This will allow users to more easily review their data and decide where to make edits.
New Features in November 2019
WorkSpan Mobile: We are excited to share the public launch of the WorkSpan Mobile App. Access the Google Play Store or Apple App Store to download your free WorkSpan App.
WorkSpan Mobile puts your ecosystem right at your fingertips, so we can stay updated, take action, and continue to advance our work together in all-new ways, from all-new places.
- Increase productivity with the ability to approve and decline funding requests, claim requests, invitations, and endorsements.
- Accelerate joint sales by securely sharing sales opportunities with your trusted selling partners.
- Collaborate everywhere with the live notifications feed, direct messaging, and commenting capabilities.
Integrate Multiple CRM Sources into WorkSpan: Many large organizations don’t have a single, unified CRM platform. Often enterprises have multiple CRM systems for different regions and business units. Now, WorkSpan easily integrates with multiple CRM instances within an organization--even if the schema and fields vary across systems.
You can share opportunities with partners in WorkSpan, from any internal CRM system. Simply select the CRM Data Source when you Add CRM opportunities to your sales plans.
Featured Partners and Solutions on your Program Homepage:
As a program owner, you’re now able to showcase, promote, and celebrate the contributions of your top-performing partners and solutions, by featuring them right on your program homepage. This is a great way to recognize, inspire, and motivate your ecosystem partners! Click here to learn how.
Multiple Usability Enhancements:
- Table View enhancements: A "System Default" view is now available on all table views. This is the view that is included out-of-the-box for each object. You can now switch back to System Default if you erroneously configured a custom view and would like to start over from a default state. Also, the name of the current view is prominently displayed when you land on the table view, so you know exactly which view you are currently working with. Learn more about Table Views.
- Edit from the summary panel: If you frequently review your joint pipeline from the opportunities table view within sales plans, we have made it much faster for you to update the opportunities without ever leaving this page. Now you can edit fields from within the object summary panel, that is displayed when you click on a row in the table view.
- Create and edit tasks more efficiently: Create and edit pages for tasks that have been updated so that the most frequently used fields are placed at the beginning of the form. Users can manage tasks much more quickly with this re-organized layout. Read more about Tasks.
- Improved display of long field values: Previously, some fields on WorkSpan with long values such as URLs or with multiple values entered were not shown completely in the UI, with the field values being cut off. Now, the UI will display all values entered into a field and will show complete URLs and entire values even in cases where the value is long. This will allow users to more easily review their data and decide where to make edits.
- View character counts and limits: Many text fields in WorkSpan have a character limit, which was not previously shown to the user. Now all free-text fields will show the character count and limit, including on custom and template fields, giving users visibility into the length of response they can provide in a field.
Features Retired This Month:
We've been cleaning up around here and found a few features that weren't pulling their weight. Below are the features we removed from WorkSpan in November.
- The “Add Custom Field” capability on an individual object, such as a specific Sales Plan or Opportunity, is no longer supported. Through customer feedback, we learned that this feature was being used to add one-off fields by end-users that was causing data governance issues. If you need to add a custom field, a company admin can configure it on the company settings or can be added via a template configuration. Please contact your WorkSpan admin or your Network Success Manager at WorkSpan to discuss how to add custom fields for your implementation.
- From the Comments page for a specific object, you could previously navigate to comments for other objects in WorkSpan. We received feedback that this is confusing for users. If you add or open the comments panel from an object, you'll only be able to view and edit comments for that object. You can still access comments across all objects that you are a member of. This is available from the navigation bar within the Inbox > Comments tab.
New Features in October 2019
WorkSpan Homepage Updates: We’ve released some updates to the WorkSpan homepage to improve user experience, based on direct feedback and customer research. Here’s what’s new:
- Quick Access: Your recently accessed Partner Programs, Sales Plans, and Marketing Programs or Plans have been added right to the top of the homepage, along with Quick Action buttons like “Create Opportunity” and “Add Task”.
- Create new objects from the homepage: You no longer need to navigate to different WorkSpan applications to add a new plan or program. Click the “Create” button in the top right corner to begin planning your next big thing.
- My Work: We heard your feedback -- you want less noise and clutter, and more actionable information at your fingertips. That is why we transformed the Network Feed into My Work. This section gives you direct access to your recent, important objects. You can add bookmarks, filter to find items more quickly, navigate directly to your recent work, and check for updates.
- My Tasks: On the right-hand side of the homepage, just under Alerts, the new My Tasks panel shows you a condensed view of your most immediate deadlines, their priority, and their status.
See also: WorkSpan Homepage Overview
Reporting Enhancements:
- Marketing Plan Report: You can now create a report for your Marketing Plans and analyze performance across regions, quarters, partners, and more. Navigate to Reports and find “Create Marketing Plan Report” in the “+ Report” menu. You can build the report from a list of Marketing Plans or Partner Programs, or you can search for Activities to include with a Dynamic Query. As with all WorkSpan reports, you can save filtered Views, create Charts, and Share the report.
- Campaign Report: To avoid confusion with the new Marketing Plan Report, the report type is formerly known as “Marketing Report” is now called “Campaign Report.”
- Use Dynamic Query to build an Activity Report: Previously, you had to manually select a list of Activities to build an Activity report. We’ve made your job of building reports easier by giving you the alternate option of defining a Dynamic Query, such as Events in North America in 2019. Any new Activities that match your Dynamic Query will be automatically added to the report whenever it is refreshed.
Track Expenses: You asked us for the ability to track expenses on your Opportunities, Sales Plans, Activities, and other objects on WorkSpan, so we made it happen! To add an expense, simply click on the “Add Item…” menu and find “Add Expense.” Learn how to use Expenses.
New Features in September 2019
Restrict Participant Visibility: Your WorkSpan Programs, Solutions, and other objects are designed to enable and drive engagement and contributions from multiple partners. However, these objects can include competing partners and you may prefer that your partners are not aware of each other’s presence. The Restrict Participant Visibility feature provides object Owners with a new measure of privacy by allowing them to prevent their partners from seeing or interacting with each other within that object. Simply configure this security setting within the Discoverability panel of an object, under the question “Can participants view other participants?”
Hide Empty Campaign Fields: To provide a cleaner experience on the Campaign Strategy pages, empty fields on the Campaign Strategy page are now automatically hidden. In order to view or edit the hidden fields, click the "Show Empty Fields" toggle button. Empty fields are then shown and can be edited. See also: Editing a Campaign
Hide Metrics and View All Metrics: If you've built an intermediary metric for the purpose of included them in a metric formula, you may not want the intermediary metric to be shown on the Summary page of your object. You can now Hide those metrics. Also, we've created a new View All option so that you can see all the Metrics for an object on one page. Learn more.
New Features in August 2019
Enhancements to Metrics: Several enhancements have been added to Metrics for all objects. The updates allow users at all access levels in WorkSpan to see metrics calculated from the records that the user can access or from records available to a company. Here's what's new:
- Partner-specific Metrics: All partners in partner programs with multiple partners (setup as participants), can now track their specific, individual metrics against the goals set for them on the program. This helps drive urgency and action for partners to be more engaged and can also drive greater activity in the program.
- Formula based metrics: You can now create metrics based on a formula. The supported functions include addition/subtraction/multiplication/division, and operations such as min (val1, val2), max (val1, val2) on metrics and numbers. You can even reference one or more metrics with the formula of another metric.
- Count Distinct: In addition to Sum and Count, we've added a third function to your options for Simple Calculation metrics, Count Distinct. This function allows you to view the number of distinct values within a field, such as the number of distinct accounts across opportunities in a Sales Plan.
See also: Setting Up Metrics
New Features in July 2019
- Self Service Data Exporter
- Metrics Enhancements
- Enhancements to Filtering Capabilities on the WorkCenter
New Features in June 2019
New Features in May 2019
- Enhancements to the Partner Programs App
- Companies Panel renamed to Discoverability
- Advanced Search added for Search Ease and Exactness
- Single Sign On (SSO) with SAML ((Security Assertion Markup Language) and OIDC (Open ID Connect)
- Product Line Items on Opportunities
New Features in April 2019
- Revenue Splits
- WorkCenter on WorkSpan (WOW) on Your Mobile Devices
- Solution Recommendations in Partner Programs
New Features in March 2019
- Self Service Workflows To Automate Your Partnering Processes
- Partner Programs App For Holistic View Across All Your Partnering Motions
- Assessments App to Drive Account Assessment & Qualification
- Accelerating N-Way Partnerships with Multi Company Opportunity Views
- Opportunity Path To Build Guided Sales
- Cloning Reports
- Self On Boarding on WorkSpan
- Microsoft Azure AD Single Sign On (SSO) Added to WorkSpan's SSO Choices
WorkSpan's Self Service Data Exporter
WorkSpan's Self Service Data Exporter allows you to export your data from WorkSpan. You can then use this data to import into your Business Intelligence applications enabling you to meet your reporting needs with rich data from WorkSpan. You can also import this data into your CRMs and Marketing Automation Systems.
WorkSpan's Self Service Data Exporter lets you export your data and linkages from the context of your Partner Program. You can select links to export for the following objects:
- Opportunities
- Solutions
- Sales Plans
- Partner Programs
- Partner Profiles
Also See:
Overview of WorkSpan's Self Service Data Exporter
Enhancements to Filtering Capabilities on the WorkCenter
To help you quickly navigate to objects that need your attention and/or action such as approval of fund requests or claim requests, we have added the filtering functionality to the Requests >Approvals tab on the WorkCenter.
You can easily filter by a stage e.g, fund requests and then further filter those fund requests by stages such as Incoming for easy and fast navigation.
We have also enhanced filtering on tasks. You can now filter all tasks by the following categories:
- Assigned to you
- Assigned by you
- Tasks that you are watching
- All
Partner Profiles on Partner Programs
Multi-partner activities are key to accelerating your ecosystem revenues. Leading ecosystems are encouraging partner-to-partner activities. Finding the right partners to engage with, in a growing ecosystem is strategic and paramount.
As you scale your partner programs, you must have in-depth knowledge of capabilities that your partners add to your program. Enabling partner connections based on this learning leads to higher trust and success in joint engagements.
As a program owner in WorkSpan, you can now create partner profiles via templates. This profile can be set when a company is on-boarded into the program. The profile can include mandatory fields such as an internal Partner ID that the company must specify to be accepted into the program.
The partner profile can also include additional details to describe the company’s capabilities and interests in the program:
- Company Program Profile - the company's role and value proposition in the program
- Target Customers - customers that the company is targeting
- Target Partners - types of partners that your company is interested in working with
- Program Competencies - company's program-specific expertise and certifications
Companies in the program can search for partners with common interests, complementary expertise, and with alignment on shared business objectives. For example, an Integrated Software Vendor (ISV) company can locate a System Integrator (SI) partner that specializes in the IoT competency for the healthcare industry.
Only with WorkSpan, you can establish instant connections. You can contact the partner manager or request access to solutions from that partner to include in your opportunities.
Also See:
Enhancements to the Partner Programs App
- Clearer Call To Action Buttons has been added on the Partner Programs Landing Page to ease actions like- finding solutions and sales plans, registering opportunities, finding partners and other actions.
- Advanced Search has been added for an easier search for objects that you can then link to your partner programs.
- Default Partner Program Templates for linked solutions, sales plans, opportunities have been updated to allow sharing with partner programs.
- Member Companies panel has been renamed to Discoverability and has been enhanced on all objects to include Partner Program options for all members in your member companies.
Also See:
Companies Panel renamed to Discoverability
Member Companies panel has been renamed to Discoverability on all objects in WorkSpan and has been enhanced to include Partner Program options for all members in a member company.
You can use the Discoverability panel in an object to set up and tailor access to an object for an entire company in your network. An object can be made discoverable (visible) to all employees in a company and/or to all members in a partner program. Once discoverable, employees can find (search) and send a request to join an object.
On this panel, as an owner on objects, you can:
- Update the Sharing Mode for objects
- Update if all employees of a company can find and request to join by default when a company is added on an object (when the first user from a company is added on an object, the company is automatically added to that object)
- Add new companies in your network to an object
- For all objects (except Partner Programs), you can also select if you want Program Members to Discover and Request to Join the object.
Also See:
Discoverability: Sharing an Object Company Wide
Advanced Search For Search Ease and Exactness
Advanced Search has been added to complement basic search in WorkSpan objects for easier search of objects for object linking. For example, from within a partner program, you can easily navigate to the Sales Plans section and search for a sales plan that you want to link to.
Single Sign-On with SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) and OIDC (Open ID Connect)
SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)- an open standard for identity providers (IdP) to pass authorization credentials to service providers (SP) has been added to enhance WorkSpan’s Single- Sign-On (SSO) capabilities for your log on ease and safety.
OpenID Connect 1.0 is a simple identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. It allows you to verify the identity of your end-users on the authentication performed by an Authorization Server, to obtain basic profile information about the end-users.
Enable SAML/Open ID Connect has been added to the existing SSO options on the Security Policies > Authentication section of the Companies page.
You can now use your own SSOs to sign on WorkSpan.
Benefits of Single Sign-On are:
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No need for repetitive Log In(s) to one or more of your applications. You are signed on automatically to all your software.
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Company Admins can enable/disable Single-Sign-On for their company users.
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Enhanced Security by eliminating risk due to bad passwords and Multi-Factor Authentication enablement.
Also See:
Product Line Items on Opportunities
You can now easily integrate your opportunity product line item fields from your CRM system to WorkSpan and use WorkSpan to track and report on product-level metrics across all opportunities, sales plans, accounts, and partnerships.
After linking a CRM opportunity or bulk-adding opportunities from your CRM, the line items will be attached and displayed on WorkSpan opportunities.
Line Items are private company fields accessible only to users within a specific company.
You can easily view:
- Revenue for a product across all opportunities in a sales plan
- Revenue for a product line across all opportunities in a sales plan
- Target versus actual for opportunity count, pipeline, and revenue for a product line in a sales plan
See More:
Product Line Items on Opportunities
Solution Recommendations In Partner Programs
Solution Recommendations have been added for partner programs to allow opportunity participants linked to a partner program to view matching solutions within the partner program.
This feature allows you and your partners to easily find complementary or matching solutions that help make overall deal value proposition more compelling for your end-users and increases win rates.
See More:
Solution Recommendations in Your Partner Programs
Revenue Splits
The Revenue Splits feature has been introduced for you to allocate revenue for a single CRM opportunity in your company across all contributing partner opportunities in WorkSpan.
An opportunity for your company can be sourced by one partner, influenced by additional partners and closed by yet another partner.
Partner managers in your company can request % splits on behalf of a partner, and a weighted amount based on this split % is calculated for the partner opportunity. An approval process is included to ensure that the splits consider requests from all partner managers, with notifications to partner managers at appropriate times in the review cycle.
With this functionality, you can recognize and reward the contributions across all partners and partner managers that played an active role in getting the deal to closure. Partner managers and the partners are incentivized to participate in all future deals and accelerate your win rates.
Also, See:
WorkCenter on WorkSpan (WOW) as a Mobile App
WorkSpan’s New Mobile App to view your Requests, Due Tasks, Messages, Notifications, etc. is now available on your mobile devices both for Android and iOS. Currently, it is available via invite-only. Please Contact Us if you want WorkCenter on WorkSpan on your mobile devices.
The WorkCenter aggregates all your incoming requests (approvals, invitations, and endorsements), tasks that are due, inbound messages and comments, and notifications of actions on relevant objects -- all in one central location.
The mobile Work Center will further boost productivity allowing you and your partners to review requests, tasks, and messages on the go.
The live notifications feed will also keep you in the loop when your colleagues and partners make any updates.
Also, See:
Navigating the WorkSpan Mobile App
Staying Updated with the WorkCenter
Self Service Workflows To Automate Your Partnering Processes
Self Service Workflows to conceptualize, plan and automate your defined business processes to drive joint sales, joint solutions and joint marketing operations with your team and partners have been added.
As a WorkSpan Admin in your company, you can configure workflows with custom stages for solutions, sales plans, opportunities, marketing plans, and activities. Users in your company can automatically progress through custom stages in the workflows that you have created and then associated with requisite templates.
To improve process efficiency, for each stage in the workflow, you can also:
- Configure tasks and task assignments
- Select people and companies for object sharing
- Customize field properties, i.e, make some fields public and keep some fields private
You can have a different stage flow for each workflow that you configure, enabling processes in your workflows to range from quick and effective to methodical and precise.
Also, See:
Partner Programs App For Holistic View Across All Your Partnering Motions
WorkSpan’s new Partner Programs App has been built to give you a holistic view across all your marketing, sales and solutions partnering motions. You can track key metrics across all your partners, and accurately measure ROI as you get visibility into the joint marketing and revenues from joint solutions and joint sales deals. These powerful partner metrics help drive engagement and accelerate desired business outcomes.
The Partner Programs App helps you manage different types of partnership activities, such as your joint solution efforts to bring new solutions to market; joint marketing activities to build market awareness and generate leads for these offerings; and joint sales to enable sales organizations across your and your partner’s organization to collaboratively sell these offerings and accelerate revenues.
You can now easily get a complete picture of a partner program or even within a single partnership. You can:
- Track your partner activities across different KPIs such as regions, industries, initiatives, etc.
- For a program with multiple partners, you can launch, for example, a Technology Partner Program and invite all your ISV partners.
- For a program designed to encourage collaboration among your partners, you can invite your ISV partners, SI partners, and Channel partners to collaborate on joint solutions, present a holistic deal to your end customer with complementary offerings across partners.
Also, See:
Assessments App To Drive Account Assessment & Qualification With Speed and Efficiency
An Assessments App has been built where you’ll be able to build assessment questionnaires to enable your partners at scale, and drive fast and effective account assessment and qualification.
These questionnaires are customizable and can be tailored by solutions, by regions and by other criteria pertinent to you.
Assessment templates include scoring models and recommendations. Reviewers can provide in-context comments and guidance to assessment owners based on scores. You can convert high-scoring assessments to qualified opportunities. This enables you to save both your & your partner’s time, invest in accounts that are a good fit for your offerings, & increase win rates.
You can easily view responses to your questions via heat-maps in the table view of your Assessments Report.
Also, See:
Accelerating N-Way Partnerships With Multi-Company Opportunity Views
WorkSpan has gone way beyond the traditional partner management systems paradigm of only supporting 1:1 relationship.
WorkSpan—the only Ecosystem Cloud can host N-way partner engagement and collaboration on opportunities.
We’ve made it easier for companies to engage in N-Way partnerships with a configurable opportunity dashboard and layout that allows companies to tailor opportunity fields and values to their business. Each company can maintain its own fields for a specific opportunity, including products, services, and revenue forecasts. You no longer have to spend time and effort on constantly converting information from your company’s data format to a format prescribed by other companies.
In this multi-company view, you can see what your partners choose to share on how the opportunity is progressing within their company. Every company in the partnership gets an unprecedented level of visibility to drive the deal forward.
Also, See:
Opportunity Path To Build Guided Sales
WorkSpan now provides the capability to enable your partners and field sales reps with prescriptive sales playbooks.
In the new Opportunity Path section, you can include clear actions for the owner to progress the opportunity in each stage and close the deal.
You can also record milestones and dates for the customer buying process. This enables the opportunity owner to align sales actions with the buying process. For example, you can record the customer RFP submission date and work to complete your opportunity proposal stage ahead of the due date.
Report Cloning
As a report owner, you can now easily clone (copy) reports in WorkSpan.
The selection criteria from the original report-selected items or dynamic query criteria are copied by default to the cloned report.
You can also choose to copy the following sections of an existing report to ease the process of creating a new report:
- Saved views and charts
- Shared with people
- Shared with companies
Also, See:
Self On-Boarding On WorkSpan
Self onboarding flows to help you and your partners to easily embark on the WorkSpan Platform have been added.
During sign up, you can seamlessly enter your roles, job headlines, and work profiles to tell us about yourself and your work engagements.
You can easily update your profile at any time too.
The self onboarding flow will let you define your preferences via which we can present you with tips, tools, and techniques to facilitate your self guided and self-paced learning on the WorkSpan Platform.
From signup to solution creation and from account setup to asset management and much, much more we want you and your partners to succeed and have a great experience using WorkSpan!
Your success is our success-nothing more.
Microsoft Azure AD Single Sign-On (SSO) Added To WorkSpan's SSO Choices
Microsoft Azure AD SSO for all existing and new Azure AD/Office 365 users has been added to WorkSpan’s Single Sign-On choices.
Single sign-on provides users in your company access to all of the applications and resources that they need to do business, by signing in only once using a single user account.
Once signed in, employees in your company can access all of the applications they need without being required to authenticate repeatedly.
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