Product Communities

Have you ever received a Workfront email notification for a work item you aren’t assigned to, or seemingly even directly tied to? Or on the opposite spectrum, get assigned work and not know about it until you log in? Did you know that Workfront has over 90 system-level email notifications available within the global Setup menu that can be activated?  System administrators can globally activate email notifications within Setup > Email > Notifications by selecting the checkbox to the left of the notification name and then clicking the Activate button. Upon clicking the Activate button, a checkmark will automatically appear in the Active column to let you know it has been turned on for all users within your instance.  Likewise, if an administrator would like to deactivate a notification for all users, select the checkbox to the left of the notification name and then click the Deactivate button. You will notice that the checkmark i

“You cannot manage what you cannot measure.” Peter Drucker, Management thinker How does your organization define and measure success? Regardless of industry, chances are that both historical and real-time data is utilized, analyzed and turned into actionable strategies for decision making.  In order to manage and measure the success of your team, you must be able to quickly check the status of all work items each team member is working on. Visuals are key, and by having a team dashboard, you get an organized, high-level overview of existing work and work coming down the pipeline without having to spend time digging around the system.  This week’s blog focuses on four different ways that you can drive efficiencies through reporting and visibility within your organization: Team Dashboard TipsKey Performance Indicators (KPI) DashboardCalculating Slippage via BaselinesBest Practices for Managing an Intake or Request Queue  TEAM DASHBOARD TIPS A te

Why share your expertise? You are not alone   Customers often share that they feel siloed. There is value in connecting with other administrators to help, learn from, and elevate each other to accomplish goals faster. Everyone wants to be part of a family - or a community - of individuals who they can trust, depend on, and lean on for guidance.Others need your story - share it to teach and impact those who are just starting their enterprise work management journey within their organization. We are stronger and better together!You are doing big things  You are doing amazing work every day in your organization. This is an opportunity to highlight your story to show others the impact that you’re making, to paint a picture of what is possible, and to help guide others on their journey. As you transform work management within your organization, you’ll achieve positive, measurable results, move toward fulfilling your success story, and creating true competitive

The holidays are over and it’s time to hit the ground running. One of the first things you’ll want to do is make sure your strategic goals are set and to paint a clear picture of what winning looks like for the team. The next step involves one of the most important leadership skills–setting the team up for success.  Building a successful team can be a challenge. A team brings together a variety of personalities, experiences, opinions, and values. However, a great leader can develop teamwork by ensuring trust, commitment, and by focusing on these key concepts.  Communication Whether you work remotely or in an office, good communication is one of the most important factors to the success of your team and the work being done. Workfront provides several communication channels to help you collaborate with others—the update stream, Announcement Center, and integrations with Slack, G-Suite and Outlook. Outside of Workfront, implementing s

For Workfront, and many of our customers, the last month was focused on pivoting to conducting business virtually, and ensuring that we had the right plan, tools and technology to support our efforts. We then sharpened our pencils in terms of our business strategy, priorities, deliverables, and to ensure full utilization of our resources. Data-driven, transparent conversations with our teams has been key to this process for us, and others.  For one sporting good retail customer, what normally is a time focused on creating trade show deliverables, has been refocused on other initiatives to drive online sales. Over 350 people switched overnight to working remotely, pivoted their plans, and relied on the processes built within Workfront to enable visibility into the decisions to be made and the work to be done. All teams that make up marketing and creative manage their work through Workfront - from the request queues to project and task management. “It’s the only way we keep track

The holidays are right around the corner and 2021 is closer than you think. If you haven’t had a chance to do some cleanup or system maintenance, block time on your calendar and take action based on the recommendations in the blog, Tips to Tidy up Workfront. There is no better feeling than kicking off a new year with a clean slate, so send out those calendar reminders for your monthly governance meetings and wrap up the year on a high note.  As you start, or continue, planning for months ahead, make sure you have a proper communication plan in place, along with easy-to-use project templates and dynamic reports to maintain consistency and share key information. This week’s blog focuses on key elements around communication, planning, and measurement to help you draft an accurate timeline and execute on deliverables, while keeping everyone in the know.    COMMUNICATION Nothing is more important to the success of a project than effective and constant communicat

As you, your leaders and your organization consider proposed initiatives in the future, available resources need to be considered first before work gets approved and underway. Think of the Resource Planner as a transaction register or a means to capture available capacity based on resource allocation. As each project in prioritized order depletes resources from capacity, less is then available for proposed future work. Eventually, resources may run out leading to a negative number (as shown in red) in Workfront.  To continue the Resource Management series, this week’s blog will provide steps on how to successfully use the Resource Planner to ensure successful capacity planning in Workfront.  1. DEFINE THE DEMAND In order to know if capacity can meet demand, you must first have an accurate picture of the existing and desired demand for work: In Flight Work Demand - The total amount of work represented in projects that are already created and scheduled / assigned to

Communication and collaboration within the context of work is an essential part of any organization’s system of record. This week’s Did you know? Toolkit offers several out of the box ways to maximize communication and collaboration in Workfront, along with a reporting script to help you visualize the latest update for every project you manage. We conclude with a few FAQs regarding our 20.1 release. Useful Practice Tip: Historical project communication should be stored as part of the project plan for the purposes of performing a project retrospective or even passing an audit.  Ensure project communication is reflected in Workfront by leveraging our robust collaboration capabilities and native integrations with Slack and MS Teams.Tag other users or entire functional teams into threaded discussions, or tag an entire project team with the Update All feature. This feature can be found under the Staffing area in Workfront Classic, described below, or the People area in the New Wo

No need to navigate away, include a webpage on your Workfront dashboard.  Are there numbers you pull from another system to include in Workfront custom forms? Do you want to make a Workfront request queue more accessible? Do your users regularly access a web-based document management system or wiki that contains needed project information? Including URLs on a dashboard allows your users to navigate quickly and easily to live websites without leaving Workfront. Before you jump into the setup, there are two conditions that must be met—the URL is encrypted (https) and the website must allow embedding as an iframe. You may be asking, what is an iframe?       “An iframe (short for inline frame) is an HTML element that allows an external webpage to be embedded in an HTML document. Unlike traditional frames, which were used to create the structure of a webpage, iframes can be inserted anywhere within a webpage layout

Workfront reports don’t just have to be a simple list with standard views, filters and groupings — they can be dynamic visuals used to tell a story, compare data, paint a clear picture of how work is getting done across the organization and keep the targeted audience engaged. There are six different types of charts in Workfront — bar, column, line, pie, bubble and gauge. Learn how to apply a chart to a reportIn order to apply a chart to your Workfront report, you must first add a grouping. For a quick refresher on report groupings, click here. Once a grouping has been applied, you can begin to create and customize basic or 3D charts to highlight data trends or patterns in an attractive and easily digestible way. And if you want to have the colors match your company’s style guide - no problem - enter in the appropriate RGB code. To learn more about adding charts, review the article, Add a chart to a report, and watch the short, 6-minute video, Create charts with reports, on Workfro

As general availability for the new Workfront experience nears, many customers are asking how they can train their users, when they should update training and documentation, etc. To help with the transition from Classic to the new Workfront experience, the Workfront training team created Getting Started slide decks for Work, Plan, and Collaborator license users. You can download these slides and use them as is or edit the decks with your organization-specific instructions and screenshots. These decks should be helpful in transitioning users to new Workfront experience, leading lunch and learns, or onboarding new users after general availability. The guides are available on the Learn the new Workfront experience webpage, under the Enablement Kits section of the downloads. Make sure to “Like” this post if you find it helpful. To ask questions about the new Workfront experience, please post the details in the comments section below. To share feedback, t

As an Enterprise Account Executive, I manage my accounts in Salesforce and manage the work related to those accounts in Workfront.I use Workfront to manage 2 things – my existing accounts and my prospect accounts. With existing accounts, there are always things we need to stay on top of from account plans to value pyramids to plans on how we can expand these accounts with Workfront. With a prospect account, there are always tasks and actions to be done to move the prospect forward. Ideally, they will follow a sequence of events from the first conversation to the close of the contract.In order to stay on top of all of these moving parts, Workfront is essential in helping me keep track of these activities. It is also imperative that the professional services (CX) team has what they need in order to successfully implement a new customer. Inside of each customer’s project, the CX team will find recordings of demos, value maps where we have put together processes, as well as the customer’s

Can you believe we are in August? August is always a big month in my house because the kids get back to school. Like many of you, we don’t know what to expect this school year, but I do know we’ll all get through it—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? In addition to back to school time, this August is a HUGE month for Workfront because we are delivering our 20.3 product release. What does that mean? It means that in addition to a number of enhancements on the core product, we are introducing TWO brand new products to help drive collaboration, gain more visibility, and fundamentally get work done. Enhancements to Workfront’s core product Let’s start with some of the updates we’ve made to Workfront’s core platform:  Enterprise controls. A structured approach to group hierarchy allows you to create, manage, and organize all your departments in one instance of Workfront, while remaining flexible enough for those teams to customize and manage the unique way they work,

Hi! My name is David Burggraaf and I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Workfront. I’m excited to be sharing some thoughts with you this month on the topic of work automation. Throughout my career, one of the things I have observed is that those that do well, automate. Whether it is engineers or people in finance, marketing, sales, HR, IT, or elsewhere, one of the common traits of the successful is that they automate. So, when a brother of mine asked me how they could be more successful in their career, I said “automate!” Before we dive in, it’s important to set the stage. Nearly every organization struggles with efficiencies on some level. Everyone is trying to get products to market faster while still being innovative. It’s not a surprise when we see that over 40% of employees are spending at least a quarter of their week doing repetitive tasks. A recent CMO Council study noted that $1 trillion is lost by companies every year due to mismanaged tasks, resulting in wasted productivity

Greetings! My name is Heather Foeh and I lead the Customer Marketing team at Adobe Workfront. If you have ever read a success story about a fellow customer, attended a User Group, received our customer newsletter, and more, that is all the work of our team. Our goal is to shine a light on our customers’ success while also making sure you’re communicated with in a timely manner. A few weeks ago, Adobe Workfront proudly celebrated YOU, our customers, in our 11th annual Lion Awards. The Lion Awards honor customers who are achieving positive, measurable results as they transform work management within their organization. This year was a bit different, not just because we were virtual–we've done that before!–but because we held the awards in tandem with the Adobe Experience Maker Awards.  The Experience Maker Awards aim to celebrate the exceptional experiences Adobe customers are creating through Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, and we were honored to be part of the joint ce

Next to St. Patrick’s Day and the Spring Equinox, the highlight of March for many is Selection Sunday, when millions across our country eagerly complete their hopeful brackets for March Madness, carefully analyzing the data and teams at play. Whether you are a college basketball fan or not, there are a handful of lessons to be learned from March Madness that you and your team can benefit from.  Think about your business—what’s important to you? No matter your company or industry, your customers, employees, and product or service most likely come to mind. For these elements to mesh cohesively, you need a team that works together just as well.  Below are three lessons we can each learn from and apply to our role within Workfront:  Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.It’s amazing how many times we go into something not fully prepared, thinking that if we just wing it, everything will turn out okay. College basketball is the same way—just because you are a 1-see

The end of the year is quickly approaching, which means it’s about time to write down the same New Year's resolutions we use every year—eat healthier, exercise more, and save money.  Although personal goals may remain the same, the way work gets done is constantly changing. According to the Workfront State of Work 2020, people and teams are under constant pressure to work faster and more efficiently. Workfront is designed to help you and your team master modern work, so consider the following ideas to elevate your team’s work productivity within the tool. 1) Designate a Workfront champion.  This person is your go-to for all things Workfront. For most system administrators, the role of Workfront champion is automatically assumed, simply based on access level. However, every organization has someone who’s an early adopter, someone who knows every keyboard shortcut, or someone who can navigate the system without even looking. This is the ideal user to ch

Working from home isn’t new, but shifting to an entirely distributed, virtual workforce IS new and, for many organizations, unprecedented.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing our best tips and best practices for navigating the shift to a virtual workforce. Our goal isn’t to overwhelm, but rather to share what we’ve learned from thousands of customers - and our own Workfront employees - about communication, collaboration, prioritization and visibility.  Below is a list of our very best resources, across the Workfront Blog, recorded webinars and our own resource library. It’s your very own Workfront Survival Toolkit!  Collaboration and Communication Need ideas? Here are 6 Ways to Collaborate with WorkfrontGet connected. Integrate Workfront into tools your team is already using, such as Slack or MS Teams, to collaborate within the project or task. Workfront customers shared ideas for how to keep communication flowing using IM, you can see those here. And i

Did You Know? Send a proof to anyone, using just an email address. Reviewing and approving digital content can be a manual, tedious process that delays your projects and pushes back deadlines, especially if a decision needs to happen from a person outside of your organization.  Did you know that Workfront allows you to share proofs with anyone for review and approval, using just an email address? You are not limited to users with an active Workfront account or who belong to your company—you have an unlimited number of guest reviewers and approvers who can request edits or make decisions on a proof. A proof in Workfront doesn’t necessarily have to be a document, image, or PDF. Unlike other proofing tools, Workfront supports a variety of file types for proofing, all of which are listed in the article, Supported proofing file types. Depending on your Workfront plan or integrated environment, you may be able to generate a proof from a URL as a screen capture or&nbsp

I hope April showers have brought you May flowers! It’s been beautiful here in Utah this spring. We recently released the 2021 State of Work Report, our seventh annual study focused on how digital workers view and value work. We originally embarked on a journey in Q1 of 2020 to study how the two largest age cohorts in the workforce—millennials (ages 23-43) and Generation Xers (ages 44-52)—approached work. The data came back just as companies were sending their employees home to work, and provided a pre-pandemic snapshot of work trends. We ran the same study in Q4 of last year and then compared the two data sets, which gave us a view of how Covid-19 changed digital work.  The results of the survey are fascinating, and I encourage you to download the report. The study clearly surfaces generational differences in how individuals work, but also shows how the pivot to remote work has changed the way individuals view and complete work.  Here are some takeaways I foun

A challenge that many users face is efficiently navigating many tasks, tools and applications on a daily basis. As someone who likely wears multiple hats, you probably know that not all hats can be worn at once. Productivity and output decline when adding more to the mix causing distractions; and your best work cannot be done with laundry lists of to-do’s in different places. Rather than switching context every few minutes to keep track of all of the moving pieces, look to Workfront integrations to do the work for you. ENTERPRISE CHAT TOOLSMicrosoft Teams and Slack dominate the chat tool market and many customers prioritize integrating these with Workfront. By using a chat tool and Workfront together, users can drive efficiency by staying easily connected, avoid duplicate work by having one source of truth, and focus on the task at hand by centralizing communications. Not to mention that improved work management and fewer loose ends as chat conversations are reportable in Workfron

As the owner of leadership meetings, I find Workfront to be invaluable in creating agendas that other team members can contribute to, recording decisions that are made, and easily assigning and tracking action items.Each meeting is a project under the leadership team program. It’s easy to locate past meetings when we need to reference them:An agenda looks like this:With the option of putting the agenda items in whatever statuses work for your team. We use these customized statuses: standing, requested, action item, parking lot.Action items are easily recorded and tracked.The request queue for our organization has helped me execute on items and track them easily. Here is an example of part of my request queue dashboard. I can view all of my daily requests as a "to do list" on one screen (okay, maybe two screens because It’s so large!). It is empty right now and that’s a reason for celebration!Prior to using this request queue, team members would email me, walk by and ask me, mention in

Did You Know? 19.4 Release Highlights Features included in the 2019.4 product release from Workfront make managing custom forms easier, help you find tasks faster, and let you visualize user’s time off on a calendar. Here are some of the highlights of the release, which will be available to all customers starting Friday, Nov. 15. For information about all of the features included with the 2019.4 release, see the product release overview. Deployment of the 2019.4 release begins today, Nov. 13. Watch trust.workfront.com for all updates. Change custom field types Have you ever created a custom checkbox field only to realize it should have been a drop-down menu? And then had to create a brand new field with the same info? Well, you don’t have to do that anymore. You can now switch a field’s display type to another, similar display type to prevent duplicate fields and make custom data more manageable.   For more information on changing the display type, see the “Cr

Does your organization have a “single entry” for new work requests? Or rather, does your organization have a front door, a side door, a back door, and many other entry points to receive these requests?If you answered yes to the latter, don't worry, you are not alone—this is a common problem for many companies. Without a consistent work intake process, it can be nearly impossible to know what needs to be done, and when, because there is often a limited, if not a complete lack, of visibility for your people. Even more challenging, is the unknown amount of ad-hoc work consuming valuable resources and time from higher priority initiatives. I am sure we can all relate to those asks that “will only take a few minutes” and end up taking a few weeks – let’s work together to eliminate those!The first step is to get familiar with utilizing request queues (your clearly visible front door) to help you create a single space

First and foremost, as the Chief Customer Officer at Workfront, I want to take a moment to thank you for all for being great customers. Thank you for letting us into your businesses and, for many of you, into your lives. I always appreciate your willingness to really partner with us and to share your feedback - both the good and the not-so-good - in very candid, constructive ways. Your willingness to evolve with us helps us become a better company, and for that we are grateful. The last few months have been difficult for everyone - both professionally and personally. Having young children and a work-from-home spouse myself, I can empathize with the challenges you are facing. I also know that many of you are in industries that are suffering - you are dealing with furloughs, layoffs and increased workloads. One of our great customers who processes unemployment claims is working 24/7 with everyone up to the CEO on the ‘front-line’.   We realize this new environment can l