Introducing WorkAdventure 1.17

This release come 3 months after v1.16 and is loaded with some goodies I'm sure you will enjoy.

Ready? Let's dive!

Quests and badges

Yup, you read that right. WorkAdventure finally has its own gamification system.

WorkAdventure is extremely flexible, thanks to its scripting API. Thanks to that, it has been possible for a long time to develop mini-games into WorkAdventure.

And boy, there have been quite a lot of those!

In most of those mini-games, when the game was finished, a congratulation message is displayed and... that's it!

But a few users went further. When the quest was over, they sent a request to a third party server that would store the score of each player. They would even display a leader-board of all players. Setting up a leader-board is a long task. It requires setting up a server, a database, communicating with WorkAdventure via an API, etc... It is not extremely complex, but it takes a lot of time.

With the new quests and badges system, we want to make this waaaaay faster. Even better, we provide some "out of the box" quests to get started without typing a single line of code.

And if you are not much into development, but still want some fun on your maps, we designed 2 quests that you can add to your worlds, right from your admin dashboard.

The quest and badge system is only part of the online version of WorkAdventure, because it requires a database (the self-hosted version is stateless). But self-hosted users can develop their own quest system tailored to their needs, and directly connected to their own backend.

Want to learn more? There is a complete blog article here.

Microsoft teams status synchronization

A much requested feature! WorkAdventure 1.17 is putting the foundations of an integration with Microsoft Teams.

In a MS Teams + WorkAdventure setup, managing your availability was a challenge. It was not uncommon to have someone coming talk to you in WorkAdventure when you were in Teams. Or to have someone call you on Teams when you were in a WorkAdventure bubble. Starting with WorkAdventure 1.17, you can share your presence indicator between WorkAdventure and MS Teams!

Just imagine. You enter a Teams meeting. Automatically, your avatar in WorkAdventure will move in "silent" mode. You will not be bothered during your meeting! And the opposite is true. When someone talks to you in WorkAdventure, your MS Teams status becomes "Busy".

For this feature to work, you will need to configure a single sign on with Active Directory. It is therefore available for Premium accounts only.

Third-party websites integration

This release comes with a first set of third-party websites integrations.

When a user is faced with the task to embed a website, it is not necessarily obvious to him/her what can be shared easily and what cannot (due to security HTTP headers).

This release of WorkAdventure introduces a first batch of third-party websites that can be more easily integrated with WorkAdventure.

Shortcuts are available in the map editor and in the chat to easily embed links.

Third party applications currently supported are:

• Youtube

• Google docs

• Klaxoon

• Eraser

In the next releases, we plan to add something more configurable that will let you edit the embedded applications.

Bandwidth throttling in bubbles

A new configuration setting now allows any user to limit the bandwidth of video and screen-scaring from incoming connections (in bubbles)

This should hopefully allow more resilient connections in places with limited network bandwidth.

We are very much looking for feedback on this new feature. Let us know!

A big thanks to @fcecagno for his contribution and for tirelessly updating his PR until it was merged :)

Screensharing in broadcast zones

When someone enters a broadcast zone or starts the megaphone, it is now possible to do a screensharing.

With this last addition, the "speaker / listener" areas are now feature complete and can finally be used!

Which means you can have a complete presentation in WorkAdventure without going through the Jitsi UI! (It is still Jitsi used under the hood)

Scripting API improvements

A number of small improvements have been done since v1.16 to the scripting API.

• A new WA.nav.goToLogin method takes you to the OpenID Connect login screen

• A new WA.ui.getMenuCommand method allows you to fetch a menu item by ID + you can now force the opening of a menu programmatically using the .open() method on the menu object.

• WA.ui.modal.openModal now accepts relative URLs

Your Woka as a Jitsi avatar

When in a Jitsi meeting, your avatar is now you own Woka.

Before, Jitsi defaulted to using Gravatar to display Wokas. While Gravatar is fine, it was somehow hidden, and also a violation of GDPR and CCPA. Indeed, the email address was transmitted to Gravatar to display the Gravatar avatar. Gravatar was acting as a hidden sub-processor. Thankfully, our community noticed and reported the issue. This is now fixed: instead of Gravatar, you avatar is now a Woka, which makes a lot more sense in addition to being better for your privacy.

Improvements and bugfixes

As usual, a huge number of small improvements and bug fixes have been shipped in this release.

You can check the full list on the release page.