20.4 release overview

The 20.4 release was made available in the Production environment the week of November 9, 2020. For specific release dates and times for each cluster, see the Workfront Status Site.

This page provides information about functionality for both Adobe Workfront Classic and the new Adobe Workfront experience that is included in the 20.4 release.

Workfront enhancements

Administrator enhancements

Feature

Release dates and environments

New for administrators: Control how a custom field is shared

To give you greater control over who can edit, delete, and use custom fields you create, we have added the ability to configure exactly how you want them shared.

Up until now, when you created a custom field, it was editable by everyone in the system. This is still the default state of a custom field, but now you can limit the sharing of a custom field to certain users, roles, teams, groups, and companies. And you can determine whether your recipients can manage or only view the custom field.

Also, to make this experience familiar for you, we've designed the user interface for this capability to be similar to other object areas sharing throughout Workfront.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 15, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New for administrators: Standardized Custom Form sharing

We have standardized sharing for Custom Forms so you can use the same Workfront object sharing process you already know. And the new sharing experience gives you greater control over who can edit, delete, and use Custom Forms you create. You can limit sharing for a Custom Form to certain users, roles, teams, groups, and companies. And you can determine whether those recipients can view or manage the Custom Form.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 15, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New for administrators: Switch Workfront environment option available

For a more efficient and convenient experience, Group administrators and Workfront administrators can now quickly switch between different Workfront environments from any page in Workfront without having to log out.

In the new Workfront experience, the option Switch to Classic appears in the Main Menu.

In Workfront Classic, the option Switch to the new experience appears in the menu that displays when clicking the profile picture in the top-right corner of the Global Navigation Bar.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 8, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New for administrators: Administrators for a group assigned to a company can manage the company

We have made it easy for a Group Administrator to manage a company that is associated with their group in Workfront. Access to manage the company is automatically available when the association is made. This is especially important when the Group Administrator does not have administrative access to companies.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 8, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New for administrators: Email notification enhancements

Now, with a single click, you can enable or disable an event email notification in Setup. Just click the On/Off switch next to the name of the notification.

Also, notice our modern styling now improving the experience of configuring event notifications in the Email Notifications area.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 8, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

New for administrators: Associate portfolios, programs, and companies with groups

When Workfront administrators create or edit a portfolio, program, or company, they can assign it to a group. With groups assigned to these objects, it's easy to identify your group's responsibilities for them.

Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 25, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Assign a group to a team

To make it easier to manage and report on the teams that are associated with a group, you can now assign any group to a team that you have access to edit.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: August 29, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New for administrators: Assign a business leader to a group

To help you better organize and define your groups, we've added the ability to assign a user as a Business Leader for a group (or subgroup). A Business Leader is a Workfront user who makes business decisions for a group.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: August 21, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Introducing Workfront for MobileIron

Workfront has partnered with MobileIron, a Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform, to provide organizations a more secure and controlled mobile experience.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: N/A

Production release: August 21, 2020

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Resource Management enhancements

Feature

Release dates and environments

Plan work using Work Effort instead of Planned Hours

To give you flexibility when you're planning work on your projects, we have introduced the new concept of Work Effort for tasks. You can estimate whether the Work Effort for a task is small, medium, or large without manually estimating the Planned Hours for the task. Each level of effort is calculated based on a percentage of time from the typical hours per day as configured in your instance.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 8, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Project status-based colors for work items in the Workload Balancer

For better visibility and increased customization of your experience in the Workload Balancer, you can now change the colors of the projects and their work items to match the status of the projects' status. The colors correspond to group-level or system-level project statuses. The colors displayed can correspond to both system as well as custom project statuses.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 8, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adjust user allocation using percentage values in the Workload Balancer

You can now manage your users' allocations in the Workload Balancer using percentages instead of hours.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 8, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New icon for switching between hours and percentage values, or allocated and remaining time in the Workload Balancer

We have added a new setting that allows you to switch between allocated Hours and Percentages as you view the Workload Balancer. With this new icon, we have also eliminated the User Workload section in the Settings panel. The Workload Balancer shows allocated time by default, and we have moved the Remaining hours setting to the new Percentage or Hours icon.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 25, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

A new built-in filter for the Workload Balancer: Users on projects

To make your filtering experience in the Workload Balancer more efficient, we have added a new built-in filter in the Assigned Work area. You can now apply the Users on projects filter which displays users assigned to tasks and issues in the projects you specify.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 25, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Visualize completed work in the Workload Balancer

To allow you to easily identify work that has already been completed so you can manage user assignments correctly, we have enabled a visual indicator in the Workload Balancer that shows when items for a selected time frame have been completed. You can now see a green check mark for tasks, issues when they are completed. The project also displays the green check mark when there are work items completed during the time frame displayed on the screen.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 11, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New Default filter for the Assigned Work area in the Workload Balancer

The Default filter for the Assigned Work area in the Workload Balancer now displays only users that are members of all the teams that you, as the logged-in user, are associated with. The new filter now displays the most relevant information to you, by default.

Before this enhancement, all users that you had access to view displayed in this area.

Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 11, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

User allocation chart in the Workload Balancer

To allow you to have a high-level visual representation of users' allocation within a given time frame, a new setting now enables a chart view for how allocations are displayed in the Workload Balancer. Enabling this setting displays the users' allocation in a line chart that indicates the overallocations in red blocks, and the underallocations in blue.

Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: August 29, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Show or hide completed work in the Workload Balancer

A new setting now allows you to show or hide completed work items in the Workload Balancer. The setting is enabled by default and completed work items that match the filtering criteria and the time frame selected display in the Workload Balancer.

Prior to this enhancement, completed work items always displayed in the Workload Balancer.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: August 21, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Usability improvements in the Workload Balancer

To ensure a streamlined and user-friendly experience when you manage your resources in the Workload Balancer, various usability improvements are now available.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: August 21, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Project Management enhancements

Feature

Release dates and environments

Export custom forms and overview information from the Details section of a project, task, or issue

You can now export the custom form information to a .pdf file. You can export custom forms from projects, tasks, or issues when you access the form in the Details section of the objects.

In addition to exporting the custom forms of projects, tasks, and issues, you can now also include the Overview area to your exported pdf.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 15, 2020 (exporting the Overview area was added on November 3, 2020)

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Quickly add an iteration

To simplify the experience of creating an iteration, we've added a new button that allows you to add an iteration from the iterations tab. Here, you can create an iteration, then add tasks and issues later.

You can still create an iteration on the backlog tag as before.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 15, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release Temporarily unavailable

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

New Metrics section available in projects

To save time and increase understanding of the overall health of a project, there is now a Metrics section available in a project that includes information around the following:

  • Work that is complete, incomplete, overdue, and upcoming
  • Task and issue amounts grouped by status or priority
  • Work effort assigned to each user

You can make selections on the charts to see different aspects of the tasks and issues in a project and click certain elements to display task information.

To learn more, see Overview of project metrics.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 23, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

New option to cancel your action when discarding a request draft

When discarding a saved draft, you can now click Cancel on the confirmation message that informs you that your draft will be deleted. This way, you don't lose the draft in case you change your mind about discarding it.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 25, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Replace the Work On It button with a Start button

To help capture the date and time work actually starts on a work item, users can replace the Work On It button with a Start button that automatically updates the status and the Actual Start Date of the work item.

Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: August 20, 2020

Production release: October 8, 2020

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New fields allow you to report on data for a top-level group and all its subgroups

To help you identify data associated with a top-level group and its subgroups, we have added a new Top Parent ID field that you can use in Filters, Views, and Groupings when you create reports about Group objects.

This field should be especially useful for Group Administrators who manage groups that contain several subgroups.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: August 29, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Allow multiple drafts for a queue topic

To give you more freedom when working with requests, there is no longer a limit for how many drafts you can save for one queue topic. When creating a new request, you can select an existing draft from a list of drafts for the same queue topic, overwrite it and submit it as a new request or you can create a new request from scratch.

Prior to this enhancement, Workfront saved only one draft for each queue topic in your request queue.

Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: August 21, 2020

Production release: September 17, 2020

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Enhanced analytics

Feature

Release dates and environments

Pagination and sorting added to Enhanced analytics

To allow you to view the information you want to see without having to apply restrictive filters, we've added pagination and sorting options to each chart in the Enhanced analytics area.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 8, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Proofing enhancements

Feature

Release dates and environments

Carry over the existing proof workflow when generating a new version

Now, the existing proof workflow carries over to any new versions you create, no matter the method in which they are generated.

Previously, there was a slight difference in how the proof workflow was carried over depending on where you generated them in Workfront.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 8, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release (Postponed to March 2021)

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Auto-generate a proof when uploading a document setting disabled by default

The option in the user profile to automatically generate proofs when uploading documents is now disabled by default for new proofing users. This change does not affect current users. If you have this setting enabled, it will remain so.

Previously, this setting was enabled for new users by default.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 18, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Document approval buttons available in the Proofing Viewer

To align with the proofing experience in Classic, the document approval buttons are now available in the Proofing Viewer in the new Adobe Workfront experience.

Previously, you could approve a document only from the Document Details area.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 9, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Mobile and integration enhancements

Feature

Release dates and environments

Added functionality in Microsoft Teams notifications

To make it easier for you to use Workfront through Microsoft Teams, we've added new functionality to Microsoft Teams notifications sent from Workfront.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: TBD

Production release: With the 20.4 release (Postponed to December 2020 or early 2021)

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Get help with Workfront mobile's virtual assistant commands

While in the mobile app, you can ask the virtual assistant to help you with commands by saying What can I do?” an “Help me with commands.”

These commands display a list of the different things you can ask the assistant about.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: N/A

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Create a task quickly in the Workfront mobile app

Use the new quick task option in the Workfront mobile app to quickly create tasks. Simply enter the task name and attach any documents you might have. You can still fill in additional fields like descriptions and assignments if needed. Just click the arrow to the right of the task name.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 18, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Other enhancements

Feature

Release dates and environments

Improved encryption for Workfront Proof

We are making some changes to improve the strength of data-in-motion encryption of the Workfront Proofing Application. The weak TLS ciphers will be deprecated on November 11, 2020.

Please ensure you are using a supported browser when accessing Workfront.

 

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 20, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New look and feel for 3 email templates

To improve the readability and overall experience, the following email templates have a new look and feel

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 15, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New email notifications for teams

We've added 2 new email notification for teams: when a single predecessor of a task assigned to your team is completed and when all predecessors of a task assigned to your team is completed.

 Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: October 15, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

New API objects that trigger event subscription updates

Two new API objects, documentVersion and proofApproval, were created and are configured to trigger event subscription updates when a document is versioned or approved.

Available on these dates:

Beta Preview release: September 11, 2020

Production release: With the 20.4 release to Production

Available in these environments:

The new Adobe Workfront experience

Adobe Workfront Classic

Workfront Scenario Planner enhancements

Most new features coming to Workfront Scenario Planner release with the 20.4 release. For information about these new features now available in Preview, see Workfront Scenario Planner with the 20.4 release - October 14, 2020.

Workfront Goals enhancements

Most new features coming to Workfront Goals release with the 20.4 release. For information about these new features now available in Preview, see Workfront Goals with the 20.4 release.

Workfront Fusion enhancements

New features in Workfront Fusion are available in Production at a cadence outside of the 20.4 release schedule. For more information about the latest features, see Adobe Workfront Fusion release activity

API enhancements

API version 12 is now available with the 20.4 release.

For information about what’s new and updated, see What’s new in API version 12.

For more information about API versions, see API versioning and support schedule

.

Workfront Maintenance Updates

For information about the maintenance updates made during the 20.3 release, see Workfront Maintenance Updates.

Announcements

Flash deprecation

At the end of 2020, Adobe and all major browsers finalize deprecating Adobe Flash technology, which means these tools will stop functioning.

Workfront aims to assist you with moving to the newer technology by providing a suite of new solutions that do not rely on Flash. Find out more about replacement solutions for each specific Flash-based tool in the following article: Replacement of Flash-based tools in Adobe Workfront.

All Flash-based tools will be removed from all products on November 19, 2020. We recommend that you start using the new tools and retire the Flash tools before then, to increase the security of your instance. If you would like us to disable the Flash tools before November 19, you can contact Customer Support.

20.4 Release Webinar

The Workfront 20.4 Release Webinar will be presented Wednesday, October 28, 2020 at 11:00 AM EDT. Register for the webinar here.

Change in Preview release cadence

Starting on May 20, 2020, Workfront began to make functionality available in the Preview environment on a weekly basis. Prior to this change, functionality was typically released to the Preview environment every two weeks.

For more information, see Change in Workfront preview release cadence FAQ

Allowlist of additional domains required for accessing Workfront

If your organization uses a firewall, you must add the following additional domains to your allowlist in order to ensure uninterrupted access to Workfront:

  • event.split.io
  • sdk.split.io

For more information, see Configure your firewall’s allowlist.

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