autonumber field - docket numbers

Since this item has now been Declined (for now), I invite those interested to consider our UberCalc solution, which is a swiss army knife of functions you can use to enhance Workfront, such as generating job numbers, aggregating data, designing custom tabs with specialized workflows, and much more.

Regards,

Doug

Thank you for the submission! We think this is a good enhancement to the Workfront platform overall and this product area in particular!

Workfront currently prioritizes large-scale, foundational enhancements such as the new Reporting experience and changes to the core data model, so this item does not fit in our near-term roadmap. As such, I am marking this as Declined now, but we'll keep this in our backlog for the improvements for this area so that we can revisit the decision in the future.

I am wondering if there is any new consideration for this functionality. I did see new posts about this in the community and I get asked about this almost daily from my users. We are struggling with the large volume of work that comes through our system and no way to have a consistent numbering scheme nor keep the number from jumping so rapidly. This is vital to our success in using Workfront. Any updates would be appreciated.

My organization is struggling immensely with the lack of a standard tracking number that can be utilized by our customer and staff throughout the whole lifecycle of the request to project process. They receive initial communication about their request reference number but then that changes to a project reference number. We also need to have a more sequential numbering system as this is used to archive our project information in another system. We have only been live for a couple weeks and we can already see the numbers growing at a rapid rate where it isn't going to be very beneficial to us to have such a large number in the very near future. We may not be able to implement other work areas in the tool until we have a better solution. Please reconsider and provide some options for our highly production based organization that received thousands of requests each week.

I agree with the other comments, it doesn't make sense. I'd love to know what the customer requirement was that had each reference number unique. What could they have been doing?

YES! What Kevin Quosig said. Incremental, auto-generated numbering is what we want, too.

@Kevin Quosig.... Spot On! There are so many simple ways to have universally unique and locally unique sequential IDs at the same time. I wonder if Workfront QCs their status updates that are posted on these? Could you imagine that having gone through a formal review process and still making it out the other end.

I don't see why this has to be either/or based on the 2018-08-20 support reply.

I also think it was a silly idea to accommodate one customer to the detriment of others; why not keep both?

Keep the Reference Number as any other system GUID and unique across objects system wide, makes sense even from a backend perspective; having a unique key is useful.

But still have a field type or secondary parameter that would be, say, unique across objects (Project Number separate from Task Number).

OR, have a special field type of "Serial Number" that has parameters such as

• starting number
• increments (some people need jumps of 1, 5, 10, etc.)
• object to apply to (portfolio, program, project, task)
• number of digits (some folks need a fixed number of digits)
  • Leading zeros (if the number of digits needs to be absolute like 0005)
• prefix (to account for alphanumeric internal systems such as A12345 or XY12345)
• suffix (same as prefix above)
• separator (both pre- and post-, to account for A-12345, 12345-B, or A-12435-B)

Needless to say I too need incremental, auto-generated numbers such as:

• Incremental project numbers.
• Incremental Work Order numbers (which in our case are based on Tasks)
• Incremental PO numbers (which are based in a custom form logic)

The omission of such a feature seems out of touch with corporate business users and needs. It's much easier when doing accounting to cite the number than an arbitrary title field which could be too close to the name of another field.

English-language in day-to-day dealings amongst workers and project managers is nice, but managers, directors, HR, and Finance need numeric identifiers that follow some logic.

When you create a calculated field (but you have already opened lots of projects, what is the best way to start that? I also of course don't know how to do a calculated field that only relates to new projects?

Maribeth,

Many of us share your disappointment. One alternative is to use a calculated field that can create a numbering system for your use case.

Michael