Livingdocs Release May 2024: Livingdocs Assistants, Dynamic Teaser Lists, Document Statistics and Document Search Improvement

Livingdocs Assistants

A major step has been taken in the May 2024 Release: The introduction of the "Livingdocs Assistant" platform.

"Livingdocs Assistants" make use of generative AI or any other system to implement machine-based "collaborators" to support your journalists in doing certain designated work, bringing more flexibility to a newsroom's workflows.

With the addition of Livingdocs Assistants to your newsroom, your organisation can gain efficiency executing repetitive tasks and free up time for journalists to focus on creating newsworthy content. 

We understand that accountability is a critical issue when dealing with AI technology, therefore we make sure everything that a Livingdocs Assistant has done to your articles is tracked and noted as such in the document history.

From a technical perspective, the "Livingdocs Assistants" draw from the user context, and can then apply "commands" to a given document: inserting components and changing text or metadata fields, for example. The same capabilities are already available to fully automated systems without user interaction via the Commands API introduced in release 2023-11.

We are already thrilled to see the results generated by this new feature, and we are full of ideas on how to continually enhance this feature in releases to come.

We would love to hear directly from you how you are using Livingdocs Assistants and what problems you are solving with them. Please feel free to reach out to our CPO Beni Buess with any feedback.

Dynamic Teaser Lists

You can now define components for teaser lists as well as which Display Filters your users can configure in order to define which articles should be shown. Livingdocs will automatically make sure no teaser shows up twice on the page.

With this new approach for allowing users to define Dynamic Teaser Lists, you get all the filtering and sorting capabilities from dashboards paired with automatic teaser deduplication for your page management scenarios.

Depending on your current page management setup, switching to this more flexible and streamlined way of describing automatic sections of your pages require ample work in the Livingdocs configuration and in your website delivery system. Please consult the technical documentation and reach out to your Livingdocs contact for support.

Document Statistics

With the Document Statistics feature, we introduce the possibility to get a perspective on the nature and the state of completedness of given articles thanks to statistical information of document components, such as the number of images included in the article, how many subtitles are structuring the text and the general length of the full text.

Document Statistics can also help with your workflows. For instance, if you are an image editor, you may want to look into which articles still need an image before being published. In another example, if you are working with text target lengths, you can get a perspective on the progress of articles at a glance. We are very keen to hear how you are using this feature and which further workflows you will support with it.

Every component can be added to Document Statistics; more information on configuration can be found in the Technical Release Notes or in the Documentation respectively.

Document Search Improvement

In response to your feedback re the new search functionality introduced with November 2023 release as opt-in, we have made considerable improvements that deserve to be highlighted.

The improved new search will now yield articles when searching for their IDs not only within the search bar but also in the result list.

We also introduced the possibility to boost articles based on a date. You can define if you want to rank articles higher based on the last updated date or the publication date.

The improved new search uses language-specific functionalities; this allows, for example, your users to find articles mentioning a 'Kinderspielplatz' when they search for 'Spielplatz' and vice versa. In order to search for only certain words, users can enclose these words within double quotes, e.g. "Kinderspielplatz", and the search will only yield results containing this exact word.

We invite you to test and compare the functionality of old and improved new search in your newsroom again before making the full switch to the new. You can do this by configuring two side-by-side dashboards for the same content, one using the old search and one using the new. 

There are some technical details you need to know regarding the set up of the improved new search. Please consult the technical release notes.

Further improvements in the May 2024 Release include:

1. Display Filter for iMatrics and Retresco

   Livingdocs now offers Display Filters for the concepts from iMatrics and the entities from Retresco. If you are already using one of these integrations, you can now allow your users to filter for articles with a specific concept or entity attached.
   
   For iMatrics, this works out of the box.
   If you are using Retresco, please reach out to your contact at Retresco first; they need to make sure your setup has a new feature they implemented for this to work already deployed.

2. Manual Document Status

   You can now use the Manual Document Status to indicate the state of progress of a given document. The status is shown and can be changed in the header of a document. You can also get an overview about the status of a list of articles on dashboards.

3. Desk-Net: Global integration

   Desk-Net has offered different integrations for CMS for a while. Traditionally, a CMS integrated with what is called a platform (Kanal in german), to synchronise a story when a planning entry for a publication on a specific platform was created. This integration is what Livingdocs has offer for a long time.
   
   Now Desk-Net offers the so called "global integration", allowing for synchronisation to a CMS when a story (Thema in german) is created or changed.
   
   With this release, Livingdocs offers a feature to integrate with Desk-Net on the "story level".
   
   We encourage every newsroom to change the integration to the story level, as it has a couple of additional technical benefits without affecting the possibility to achieve the exact same behaviour as before, if that suits you best.

4. iMatrics Suggestions

   Since the first introduction of the iMatrics integration in Livingdocs, there was a Concept Management and Suggestion mechanism built into Livingdocs. With this release, we removed this in favour of directly integrating with the suggestion mechanism offered via the concept management UI by iMatrics.
   
   This allows you to use a fully-featured concept management. If you have been using the suggestion mechanism, please reach out to your Livingdocs contact to help you with a smooth transition.

5. Delivery Links in Table Dashboard

   If you are using delivery links already in the Publish Control Panel, you can now also access them more easily directly on dashboards. 

Breaking Changes & Upcoming Deprecations

In order to keep Livingdocs as streamlined and user-friendly as possible, we periodically remove features when we have found better solutions to the problems they solve. We will always give you ample notice so that you have plenty of time to make adaptations to your setup. You can find a comprehensive list of deprecations and changes that may affect your newsroom in the Technical Release Notes.

Breaking Changes

The changes below are immediate and could create blocking issues if not taken into account.

1. iMatrics concept management

   With the May 2024 Release, we removed the concept management and Livingdocs internal suggestion workflow in favour of directly integrating the suggestion workflow offered by iMatrics. Please consult your Livingdocs contact for a smooth transition if you are using iMatrics.

2. Technical breaking changes

   There are some technical breaking changes that should not affect the majority of users. Please consult the Technical Release Notes for details.

Upcoming Deprecations

The deprecations below are coming down the pipeline. Please make note of them so they don't creating blocking issues for you once they are in full effect. Please consult the Technical Release Notes for details.

1. Dashboard customizings

   Configuring custom dashboards of type dashboard and using Angular to implement custom dashboard cards is deprecated and will stop working with the November 2024 Release.

2. Desk-Net API

   If you are using the Desk-Net API from Livingdocs directly, some functions need a different parameter format. Please check the Technical Release Notes to understand if you need to make any changes. This is a very small and fully compatible change, and will already be breaking in the upcoming July Release.

3. textCount configuration

   With the introduction of the Document Statistics feature, we are deprecating the configuration of textCount in the editor config in favour of configuring anything related to counting characters on the project level.

To get more in-depth, technical information about this release, please refer to our documentation site. There, you can stream the recordings and peruse the slide presentations of our Feature Webinar and Developer Webinar, as well as gain insights into the technical specs.

We look forward to showing you what’s in store for our next release!