Using Workfront Proof for approvals in GenStudio for Performance Marketing

Transcript

Hi everyone, we’ll give a couple of minutes for more folks to join in and we’ll start in a minute or two.

Hi, good morning everyone, welcome to this webinar. So in today’s webinar we are going to talk about how you are going to use Workfront Proof for approvals in Jam Studio for performance marketing.

Let’s look into the agenda for today.

First of all, introduction. So this is me, Barshan. I’m in Adobe since four years. I’m based out of Seattle and I have with me my colleague James. James, a quick intro from you.

Thanks, Barshan. Hi, my name is James. I’ve also been at Adobe for four years and I’m based out of Lehi in Utah.

So these are the things that we are going to talk about today. We are going to first look into some prerequisites that are required for the approvals in Workfront Proof and Jam Studio for performance marketing to work together. Then we are going to directly get into the demo. James is also going to walk you through the configuration and setup that is required for some of the Workfront Proof, for example, the approval workflows that are required for multi-hierarchical approvals. And then we are also going to talk about some best practices that are there. And I have also put up in this deck some reference material that are really going to be useful to you. Now, let’s quickly go into the prerequisites that are in there. And as I’m going to talk about the prerequisites, I’ll also be able to pull up from my sandbox environment and show it to you.

So whenever we are talking about approvals in Jam Studio for performance marketing, if you do not have the Workfront and the Workfront Proof, Jam Studio has its own approval flow that is within the Jam Studio ecosystem. But if you have Workfront as part of your license and Workfront Proof, which is part of the core module of Workfront, then you can definitely make use of Workfront Proof for the approvals to go. So all the approvals that you trigger within Jam Studio will go to Workfront Proof. Now, how do we set it up and what are the prerequisites to be considered? The first thing is to ensure that your Jam Studio for performance marketing instance and the Workfront are part of the same IMS org within the admin console. Your Workfront must be enabled within the DX unified shell. You will need to make use of the Workfront Preview tool. But even before approving the proof, you need to ensure that proofing as a feature or a module is already enabled in Workfront. And you can verify these things in the Workfront before you start for the process. Obviously, we’ll need some appropriate access both at the Jam Studio for performance marketing and the Workfront instance. If you are responsible only for approving the proof, you will need the access in the Workfront level. And if you have to see what the proof is about, then you will need at least a collaborator access in Jam Studio for performance marketing.

And obviously, we’ll have to activate the proof approval from the Jam Studio for performance marketing module that is there in the Workfront. So now let me take you to the instance and walk through this once one by one.

Okay, so over here you can see that the admin console that I’m into, I have the admin rights for both the Workfront and Jam Studio for performance marketing. So I have over here Workfront as a product. And I also have Jam Studio for performance marketing. And the instance that I’ll be trying on is the production instance of Workfront.

So if I go under here, if I go under the Workfront instance that I have, so this is my Workfront instance. And if I go under the setup part, I see proofing as a model over here. When I click on it, the proofing dashboard opens up. So this shows that proofing is enabled as a model over here in this Workfront. Now, let me show you the setup part of it.

Before that, once you click on the proofing section and you land up on the proofing dashboard, you can check the URL that you have over here. Right. You can see the domain of the URL is adobe.com. So this is basically my iMS.org.

id.my.workfront.adobe.com. So this means that Workfront is part of the unified shell. This domain has to be .adobe.com and not workfront.com. So this is something that you need to consider.

And once you have already verified that proofing is enabled, you can go under the setup part of it.

So under the setup, you will see a section called Review and Approval. So over here, there are the various proof rules that will be there. So you can set the proof rules according to your need. You also have a section for the approval templates. This is something that we are going to talk about later. We will also be showing a demo as in how you can actually configure an approval template. This approval template is mainly needed for multi-level hierarchical approval or if you want your approval flow to go on a particular path.

The next one is the section for the Adobe Jane Studio. Now, this is the section where you tell the system that the approvals that are coming in from Jane Studio will be using Workfront Proof. If this is not enabled, the experience is going to be different. And this is something that I’m going to show as part of the demo as well as in how the experience is going to be without enabling Workfront Proof versus enabling Workfront Proof. And we are going to look into it end to end in details, including how to set up the multi-hierarchical level workflows in Workfront Proof using the approval templates that are in there. OK, so at this point, we have verified that we already have the required prerequisites that are in there. And I told that I already have the admin access because you definitely need the admin access in the Workfront tool to set this thing up. So now let me go back to the Jane Studio for performance marketing instance. So most of you may already be familiar with this particular product, Jane Studio for performance marketing. I am under the content section of it and within the content section under the HTML templates, I have put up a default template that I’m going to try out. So using this template, I’m going to create an experience and then eventually I’m going to send this experience for the approval in Workfront Proof. Since I already have the access to Workfront Proof, I should also be able to approve as an intermediate step. And the way that we have configured is my colleague James is the final approval hierarchy. So first I’m going to initiate, then I’m going to mock how a first level approval is going to look like. And then the final level approval will happen through James as James is the final approval authority in Workfront Proof. Now this is the template that I have. Let’s say I am just simply creating an experience over here.

I’ll select any brand, doesn’t matter.

I’ll just select one asset.

And I’ll generate this meta-ant.

So these are the meta-experiences that are getting generated based on the brand, product and the persona that I selected. The default was the English language, so I didn’t have to select anything. All I did was I gave the same prompt, the default prompt that came up, and I just selected an asset. Once the experiences get generated, then I’m going to send them for approval.

And I’m also quickly going to check the score for these particular experiences.

So this one has 65 scores, so let me take a higher score one. Let’s say I don’t want this one, so I’m going to quickly remove this.

This has 69, so let’s say I’m only going to take this one.

I’ll remove this one. I only like this particular experience. At this point of time, I’ll send requests for approval.

So when I send for requests for approval, you can see that by default, a Workfront project comes up. And this is possible because I have already selected in the setting that I want the Workfront proof to be used for approvals in Gens Studio for Performance Marketing. Now, let’s compare the experience, how it’s going to look like when it is not enabled. So let me cancel it. I’ll go back to the Workfront setting.

And I’ll simply remove Use Proof for Approval.

I’ll just refresh my page with the experience and I go under Request Approval.

So this is the default flow in Gens Studio for Performance Marketing rates. For folks who are already familiar with Gens Studio for Performance Marketing, this is the flow that some of you have already seen. When you do not have Workfront proof enabled or integrated with Gens Studio for Performance Marketing rate. So you can select an approver, you can put up a message and it goes for approval.

Now, instead of that, over here we are showing how it’s going to look like when we have the Workfront proof enabled. So if I come under here and I’m going to enable it back again. Now I’m going to go back to Gens Studio for Performance Marketing and refresh the screen.

So you can see the difference in the workflow, right? So let’s say I’m going to put up Webinar demo.

Inter-ads. We can template.

It lists all the Workfront projects that I want it to be part of. By default, it will select the generated one. But in the template, you can actually select all the Workfront projects that are in there. So let’s say I want it to go under the default one, so I keep the default one. I have an option to select the template.

So I can select whatever templates are in there. So this is a template that we have created for this particular demo where it is basically a two-stage approval process. So when I send it, it goes to the first reviewer and the approver. And once that reviewer approves, it goes to the second reviewer and the approver, which in this case, which in this particular demo is going to be my colleague James.

So this is a mandatory field. You just select the template that is required.

And it shows you the different settings that are in there as part of the approval template. For example, the internal stage one due date is up to three days. The second one, the second approval step due date is up to two days. You do have an option to see what various options are in there. The reason that you are seeing these things as disabled is it is part of the settings in the Workfront proof, where as part of the Workfront approval template, all these things can be configured. If you want these things enabled, again, it has to be changed back in the approval template. And these are the details that James will also walk you through. But I’m just telling that these are some of the options as well, that if you want to give your Jane Studio users these options to select whether one decision is required or after how many days the approval will come, all these things, options can also be given to the end user of Jane Studio who will send this proof, these experiences for approval. So let’s say at this point of time, because these approval template is already in set and a lot of these things are already in configured, I don’t want to do anything. I’m simply going to send it for approval.

So once it gets sent for the approval, because it is going through the Workfront proof and has two steps of approvals in Workfront proof, we’ll call them as stages. So this is stage one and stage two. You can see for stage one, the reviewer was myself. So I’m going to go under Workfront and approve it. And for stage two, it says not started. This is James and this is me. So I’m going to go under Workfront to approve this one. So I’m mocking our first level of approval in this case.

So let’s say open from here.

So I can open from here or I can also go directly to the proof dashboard. So if I go under the proof dashboard, let me show you the experience under the proof dashboard.

Yeah. So if you look into the proof dashboard, this is the place where they get to see all the proofs. So it says how many proofs have come in total, how many are waiting decision. So this is the main proof dashboard from where I can configure a lot of things, including the workflows. So let’s say these are the ones that I’m going to approve. I’m going to look into the one that has come for me. So this is the proof that has been initiated based on the experience that I sent for approval. So I click on it and I go to proof.

So this is how the experience is going to be when someone is just an approver of the proof in Workfront if that person does not have access to the Jane Studio. Now, you need basic access in Jane Studio, for example, at least as a collaborator for this particular experience to show up. Now, if I did not have any access in Jane Studio, not even a collaborator, then I’ll still be able to approve and make the decision for this particular proof. But this particular experience, when it shows what experience I’m approving, it won’t come up.

Okay. So this is the proof that I’m going to approve. But before approving, let me quickly talk about this particular interface. So over here you have the details of the proof that you are going to approve. It also has options of putting on the comment. You can see the brand score for this particular one. And this entire section, more like an iframe thing that is coming up, is coming from Jane Studio directly.

Over here you can see the details of the proof.

And you also can see the workflow that is going to be there. The workflow shows that I am the proof owner for stage one or the first step of approval. And then we also have the stage two for which it shows who is going to be the approving authority for stage two or the second step of approval. I do have an option to share this proof and to log this proof and various other options are also there. So you have certain settings at the proof level, individual proof level. But if you want to have a global setting for the proof, that can also be done from the proof dashboard. So at this point of time, let’s decide. So let’s say I do not want to approve this proof. I just want to send it back that it requests some changes. So I’m going to select approved which changes or changes required. So let’s say I select changes required at this point of time. And if I want, I can also send an email notification for me.

I have selected changes required and I have marked it accordingly.

So now if I see the experience in Chain Studio, I’ll simply refresh the screen to pull out the latest details.

So the approval thing shows it needs work because I have rejected work from proof as a first level reviewer. So let’s say I fix certain part of it.

I’m simply going to refresh it.

Okay. I think I like this one and I’m going to replace this part.

I’m just sending the copy part of it and I’m going to request approval all over again. Again, I’m going to select the template that is already in there.

You can see that when for the second time, which is version two, it also changes the version for this particular one. For the second time, I do not have an option to actually select the work from project because it is already part of a project where the first approval came through.

I’m simply going to send it back.

Okay.

Now I’m going to go under the proof screen.

So this is going to open this one and go under proof.

So the copy part of the experience has been changed and let’s say as a first level approval, now I’m confident that this can run successfully. So let me go and say yes or approved.

Right. And I’ll send myself an email notification. So at this point of time, it has been approved from the first level approval.

It shows approved over here and throughout the ecosystem it will show as approved. I’ll also get a notification over here. Let me show you the experience in Jamestudio.

Yeah, it says it is approved from the first level. So at this point of time, it has gone to the second level approval, which is James in this case. So James, I’ll hand it over to you or maybe if you can approve it, I’ll show the experience how it happens when the second level approval also happens. Yeah, I’ll just approve it from my end. That way you can see it in Jamestudio. I’ll go ahead and mark this one as approved from my end.

And that should be good to go. You may just need to refresh your page.

All right. You see this notification has already come. It is already approved. I didn’t even have to refresh it. It is kind of a push notification that comes.

And at this point of time, I have already published it. Now, since I have sent the email notification, let me also show how the email notification is going to come.

So this is the email that has come immediately that James has approved it.

So this is one example of email notification, how it’s going to come over here. So at this point of time, our proof is already approved and I have already published it and my experience is already there in Jamestudio.

OK, so this is the basic flow that I wanted to showcase. And now I’m going to hand it over to my friend James. And James, let’s walk them through the approval template, how the approval template works, what are the setup and the different configurations and different options that they have and the flexibilities as part of the application.

Awesome, thank you, Brushan. So here’s just a quick view of the proof that we just went through that process. If people are a little bit more familiar with the work front and proofing side of it, it just looks like a normal proof that came over from Jamestudio.

So how do we create these templates? If you’re not already aware of how to go through and create these workflow templates, it’s actually rather easy. We’re going to start off by going to our menu and going to proofing.

Once we’re here on our dashboard page, we’re going to go into our workflows area on the left.

And here is going to be where these workflow templates are. You see, this is the template that we just used, the Jamestudio two-stage internal. But let’s go ahead and create a new one and go through that process. So I’m going to create a new template.

And here at the top here, I’ll call this one Webinar Template.

And you can also assign a template owner. Let’s just give this one to me. I’ll be the owner of this template.

Yeah.

You can also assign a template group. Template groups are very helpful if you have lots of different people working in the same workspace and you want to have different template groups. They’re essentially just like folders.

You can assign a template time zone. Most of the time this is going to default to this system default in your environment. But you can change this for each template, approved template that you create. So some of those settings that we were talking about earlier where we weren’t able to add more people or remove people when we were creating the proof from Jamestudio, these are these little checkboxes right here which say allow. So for example, if we wanted to be able to add more people to the stages that we wanted to get approved from, we definitely want to make sure that add people to stages is selected.

But if maybe we don’t want to allow people to remove anyone from a stage, we could uncheck this box here.

So there’s a couple of different options in here that you can really use to refine which kind of permissions that you’d like to give.

Going down from there, we do have we start actually getting into the different stage items. So a stage and proof is essentially just one step in the approval process. So if it needs to go to a certain person or team and then on to another certain person or team, that would be an example of a two stage proof.

For this one, we’ll just leave this one as in the name of like stage one. You can set a deadline up here. So I could say, you know, in the example we had, we had three business days, let’s say at 3 p.m. And for the first stage here, we’re probably going to leave this one on proof creation when we want to activate it. We do have a couple of different options on here, but for the first stage, it’s almost always going to be on proof creation because we want to immediately start kicking off that first stage.

For deadline options here, we do have a couple of options, but for most cases, if you are using deadlines, you’re going to want to use the calculate from stage activation date.

Lock stage option is when you lock a stage, any kind of comments or further approvals are not going to be possible. It locks it and prevents it. So there are a couple of options in here. Most of the time, a good one to use is when all decisions are made or when the next stage starts. Either one is good because now that it’s moved on to the next stage in the process, you probably don’t want anyone else making any comments or approvals on that particular stage.

The primary decision maker, I’ll come back to this one in just a second and describe what that does. The only one decision required option, if let’s say you have a five person team, but only one person on the team needs to actually give the go ahead that this is good to go. This would be a very helpful option just to make sure that you don’t need to get approval from all five people, just one person on that team.

Private stage is a very good option for when you want to not allow other users to see the comments or approval status of a specific stage in the proof. Let’s say you have an internal and external proof that you want to use and you don’t want the external team to be able to see what the internal team is saying. Private stage is very helpful, but it does come at a cost of making things a little bit more locked down and not easily able to view.

Do not allow the stage to be deleted. It’s a pretty good practice to leave this one checked as this is going to be pretty critical if someone comes in here and just deletes a stage. You probably don’t want to allow that to happen.

Now we get into the actual reviewers and approvers that are on this stage. So by default, it has the proof creator on this stage. You can change that or make someone else the owner. For this example, I’m just going to add Barshan to this first stage.

And I’m going to give him a role here of reviewer and approver because I want him to actually make that approval.

And you can also adjust the email alerts that are given to them. So most of the time you want to leave this at default, but if you want to have it more activity or less activity, you can adjust that at the template level.

Now, we definitely want to add another stage here to make that a little bit more like multi-stage process. That’s the whole reason we’re using these workflow templates.

And for this one, I’ll put a deadline of two business days at, let’s say, 5 p.m.

Activate stage. Now this one is where we get a little bit more, you know, when do we want the stage to be activated? If we want this to be a linear process, like in series, we want the first stage to be fully completed before we move on to the next one. This is where we can adjust that. So on this one, I can say when all decisions are approved on the parent stage, that’s like the one we have set up in the template. Let’s go and choose that one. And now we get the option to choose the parent stage. In this case, we’ll choose stage one. But there are a couple of other options for this activate stage. Whatever makes the most sense for your workflow.

Deadline calculated from, again, we’ll probably use the calculate from stage activation date. Lock stage. I’ll leave it at manual for now.

And then I’ll come back to this primary decision maker in just a second. I’ll go ahead and check. Do not allow the stage to be deleted. Now go ahead and add myself in here as the reviewer and approver of this one.

So now I have a pretty simple two stage process. I could add additional people in here. Let’s say I wanted to add a another user here as a reviewer and approver. But I only want to I want to make Barshan here the primary approver. So that’s where this primary decision maker field comes in handy to say that, hey, Barshan is the final approval decision maker. So if he says, you know, not approved, even if everyone else on that stage has approved, it’s going to be not approved. So that’s the function of that choice there. You can also share it with other team members, but by default, it does share it with the entire company, the entire work front instance.

So now that I’m done setting up this stage, I can go ahead and create. And this will create a new stage for me here where it’ll show or the new workflow template or show me all my different options that I’ve selected. And I can now start using this when it comes to Gen Studio.

And that’s that’s the portion of the demo, Barshan. Back to you. Thanks, James. James, would you be able to walk through some of the best practices? We have the next section for the best practices for the work front proof, as in what someone should actually be doing while setting up the work front proof.

Absolutely. Did you want to share your screen for the slides? Sure, I can share it.

So here’s some best practices when you’re creating that work front proof. I talked to a couple of these when we went through the actual process of creating the workflow template.

But when you’re wanting that multi-step approval process that Gen Studio doesn’t provide natively, this is when you’re going to want to use that proof template and automated workflow to combine those complex approvals with Gen Studio.

When you’re selecting which roles to use, you can see that in my demo, I use the reviewer and approver. This is going to be the main role that you use if you need someone to make an actual approval. But sometimes you just need someone to see it, which would be good for a reviewer. Or if you just want it to read only, kind of just a BCC, that read only role is very helpful as well. But author moderator is going to be mostly held out for people that are going to be the actual author of the proof. Or if you see someone to make sure everything is running smoothly, that moderator is very helpful as well.

Proof permission profiles, which can be managed at the individual user level, should be aligned with who’s allowed to manage other people’s proofs. So most of the time, everyone in the system is going to be a manager. That’s just kind of like the base level of proof permissions. Next up would be supervisor. If you need people to update proof permissions that they are directly on, or the admin proof permission can actually update any proof in the system that you can see.

Stages should often have a clear sequence and only use private stages where needed. Like I said, private stages can get a little messy if you can’t see all the comments on the previous stage of the proof.

For each stage on the proof, make sure to add recipients and assign the proof roles accordingly.

Template owners should be limited to a small admin group. We don’t need to have a different owner for every different type of proof. Most of the time it’s going to be the same small admin group.

Guest usage and require login policies should be explicit. This is to add a little bit more options for security and permissions for external users. But most of the time, your work users are going to be in Workfront and make those approvals in proof in Workfront.

Lastly, we want to keep the number of templates small and clearly named, so not too complex. You can start to include numbers or say, hey, this is the legal proof.

It should be tested in preview environment in the same IMS organization. That way you keep things neat and tidy and have a good testing process. And keep in mind that only one user or only a user can only be added to one stage on each proof. So even if they may need to approve multiple levels, they can only actually be added to one stage on that proof.

Thanks, James. I think we are reaching the end of the session. So we have put up some reference materials that are in here. So this deck will be shared with you. It has all the reference links that are in there that are relevant as part of this demo that we did and the webinar that we did. But we’ll take some questions. And while we do that, let me also launch the poll. So a poll will come up.

You should all see a poll coming up.

But if you do have any questions, you can use the Q&A function or the chat function.

You’ll have this recording posted in the experience league after a couple of weeks, within a couple of weeks time. And yes, if you have any questions, feel free to post these questions over here.

I think there was one question, James, you have already answered that Gens Studio for Performance Marketing is a separate product. It has a separate license and Workfront, of course, is a separate product.

If you have any questions, you can put in the chat or can also use the question and answer module here in the teams.

And if there are no more questions, OK, I think we are seeing a question coming up.

Thanks, Steven.

All right. So if there are no other questions, I think we’ll end the webinar today now.

And this recording will be available. OK. Is there any other question coming up? I see someone typing in. Maybe we’ll wait a few moments.

Thanks, Crystal.

Good question. I think it is Alhad is asking a question. The iframed view in Workfront, is that a custom dev or part of the integration itself? Yes, a good question. This is definitely part of the integration itself. You do not have to do any custom development for it. But one thing to consider is that if you have appropriate access in Gens Studio, like, for example, in our demo, James was the final approver. Now, imagine if he did not have enough access, not even as a collaborator in Gens Studio, then he would still be able to approve or disapprove the proof. But just that iframe window won’t show up for him. Right. So that will be blank. So that’s why we say that it is important that you have appropriate access in the Workfront as well as Gens Studio.

Just to summarize, it is part of the integration itself. No custom development needed for it.

OK. Any other questions? If not, I think we are good for today. This recording will be put up in Experience Leaks within two weeks, and the deck will also be shared with you all.

Well, that’s it for today, then from me and James. Thank you all for joining today. You all have a great day. Bye.