Add and manage pins through a layout templates

Transcript

Imagine you’ve created an amazing dashboard with all the reports your team needs to understand what’s going on with the work assigned to them, and you want to make sure your team views that dashboard on a regular basis. You could of course send each team member a click path, and then have them add it to their favorites. Which is a good option? However, for some, that might mean out of sight, out of mind. So, to keep that dashboard visible and easily accessible to your team, you can use pins found in the top navigation. A pin is similar to bookmarking a website, in that you can pin an area of work or a specific object to the top navigation area and Workfront. For example, I know I’m going to be working on a particular project for the next 2-3 months, and need to access that project page to make regular updates and share assets I create. Instead of using the search box every time I need to find the project, or going to my favorites menu, I can pin that project to the top navigation area, so I always know where it is. To do that, I simply go to the project page, and click Pin Current Page.

The pin will remain there until I remove it. I can also, if need be, rename the pin to suit my needs. Now, as a team leader manager, using pins through a layout template allows you to give all your users easy access to the same information and areas of work at the same time.

So, let’s pin a dashboard to the top navigation area for a team. If you have permission to create and edit layout templates, you’ll find them in this setup area under Interface. If you don’t see that in the setup area, you’ll need to contact your Workfront administrator. To start adding pins to a layout template, you can either edit your team’s current layout template, or create a new layout template and assign it to your team. In this case, let’s edit an existing template. To do that, click the template title, and the page refreshes to show the creation page. Find Add New Pin under Top Navigation Area.

Click the pin icon, and select an area from the Add a Main Menu Item list. This will pin the whole layout template, and the entire layout template will be added to the page. This will add the whole area to the top navigation instead of a specific object. This is useful for an area like Time Sheets, so users can quickly log their hours, or the Teams page, where users can see updates on teamwork being done.

What might be most useful is to add a specific dashboard to the top navigation. That can be done by clicking Add a Dashboard, which is found at the bottom of the list. From the Pin and Page pop-up box, enter the name of the pin.

This is a custom name you create that shows in the top navigation for you and your team.

Then use the search box to find the dashboard. You can’t create a dashboard from here, only pin a dashboard that has already been created in Workfront. Once found, click Add, and the dashboard appears as a pin on the layout.

From here, you can add, remove, rearrange, and even rename pins as needed.

When you’re finished, click Save at the bottom of the layout screen.

From this point forward, when your team members log into Workfront, they’ll see the pins added through the layout template. As a note, adding a pin through a layout template does not replace any pins your users have previously added to their own instance. It only adds the layout template pins to their top navigation and puts the layout pins on the far left. If pins added through a layout template need to be removed, changed, or renamed to better fit the needs of your team, that has to be done through the layout template itself. Users can’t edit pins added through a layout template on their own. By adding pins through a layout template, you’re able to make sure team members have access to the same information in a quick and easy way.