The Future of Adobe Workfront Proof

Transcript

I’m excited to be part of this awesome event and even more to give this presentation about the future of Workfront Proof. I’m Caroline, Product Manager of Workfront Proof, and I joined the Adobe Workfront family last June, and this is my very first event here. That’s why I’m even more thrilled to be here. I’m based in Germany and thought I definitely need to put an Oktoberfest photo here to represent the German stereotype and also a hiking climbing photo so you can actually see three different sides of me. Talking about three different sides, I also prepared three topics for today. As we’re on the growth track, my first topic is about leveraging Workfront Proof and also sharing ideas for how to improve your general review and approval process. You will also learn more about our latest enhancements for Workfront Proof and get insights what’s on the roadmap for this year and beyond. And of course, in case of any questions you have during the presentation, just drop them in the chat and I will be happy to pick them up after the presentation. Good. So you see a lot of exciting stuff await you. Let’s get started. But before, I quickly need to show this slide to remind you that everything I share today is not a commitment and subject to change. That said, let’s now jump to the fun stuff. Before we talk about the future, I would like to talk about today and how you can leverage Workfront Proof and improve your general review process. Here you can see the typical steps of a content review process, starting with the planning, which will kick off the content creation. And once it’s there, it will be sent for review and approval going through, hopefully not so many feedback loops before it can be finalized and delivered. Today, I would like to share some ideas around planning and organizing year-to-be approved assets, as well as a feedback loop with the content creator. Let’s first talk about the latter. Moderation and handoff to content creators is or should be an important part of your process. However, we notice that many customers are actually not utilizing proofing’s moderation capability to streamline feedback. I want to encourage you to optimize that step by setting actions on comments. By adding actions, you can decide which items the content creator should work on and which can be ignored. It also makes it much easier for the content creator to find the relevant feedback as we allow to filter for actions. Sometimes it also helps to add your own comments and rephrase the provided feedback to something more digestible or precise. Or you can just define guidelines for your viewers in the onload message to optimize the feedback. To further protect your content creators from distractions, we also recommend adding them once a day are needed and not as part of the workflow itself. As an alternative, and that’s a very interesting approach I’ve seen, is to add them to their own private stage at the end of your workflow. This would require to root through all the stages irrespective of the decisions. Food for thoughts. But if you don’t want them to access the proof at all, you can also utilize the print summary to filter for actions and your own comments to make sure they only get the information they need in order to adjust the asset. Another part of the review and approval process I want to touch on is the planning, but only quickly because each process is different and there’s no one-fits-all approach to it. We see that around half of our customers are using simple proof workflows instead of utilizing automated workflows. So every step of the review process is one project task and proof. Did you know that by using automated proof workflows, you can simplify that process and especially in case of reoccurring events, use templates to reduce efforts and risks? The graphic at the right illustrates that pretty well. We also know that you would love seeing your tasks and proofs connected. That’s something I will talk about later, but for now, we want to encourage you to take advantage of automated workflows and reduce the number of tasks. To not get lost in the jungle of tasks, we also see customers uploading the documents and creating their proofs on project level instead of task level. That’s another good idea how you can structure your proofs in the context of a project. I hope these ideas were valuable and will inspire you to further improve your process. Besides that, my key takeaway for you is to not stop improving your processes and utilizing existing capabilities. Join release sessions, exchange with other customers, reach out to your customer success manager or account executive. They are always happy to share more insights and tips and tricks. Talking about capabilities, I’m eager to show you our latest enhancements. First new capability I want to highlight is our enhanced proof security. We realize that many of you require strict access controls when it comes to your company’s sensitive content. To give you even greater control, we extended our proof login required capability to include reviewers and requester licenses. Previously, this was only available to workers and planners and those that had a proofing license. Same applies when electronically signing proofs. Your reviewers and requesters will now be able to participate in your approvals. By this, you can now achieve full compliance by enforcing authentication on your proofs and while giving the ability for all stakeholders to participate in the process. Switching gears to mobile, we’ve seen a lot of great improvements for mobile applications in the recent releases. What I want to highlight today is that the integration of proof and work front mobile applications. You will be able to view your proofs in a single and continuous modes. You will be able to add drawings and annotations and approve it within the work front app. The latest release brings us one step closer towards providing a native mobile experience for all proofing capabilities. Last but not least, it’s finally time to switch to new work front experience if you haven’t already because it will give you a streamlined and intuitive experience. One important aspect that goes hand in hand with this experience is the performance of the overall work front system. I’m excited to share that we have made significant improvements with our documents area for all projects, tasks and issues, as well as the user’s document area. With this new experience, you will find that the documents area loads over two and a half times faster than it did before. And it will give you a much more responsive system, allowing you to focus on getting your work done even faster. Wow, that’s what we achieved for you within the last couple of weeks. Well, let me further increase your level of excitement by providing an overview of our current focus area, which is the full integration of work front and work front proof. With some of the latest and still ongoing enhancements, which are highlighted in blue, we’ve already worked towards a further integration between proof into the overall work front experience. In general, there are four areas we want to cover. Firstly, and that’s also the overall goal, we want to introduce a seamless user experience, meaning an end to end approval experience inside work front. This includes the mobile app, as well as other other capabilities listed here. One important area is configuration administration. We also want to have proof related user and workflow settings inside work front. Furthermore, we want to introduce work front organizational units, such as groups, teams, and job roles directly to your proof workflows. Here we will also allow to add the same person to multiple stages. I know a lot of you are waiting for it. For our agency customers, we want to introduce better organizational management through the use of hub and satellite support directly inside work front. Next up, we want to extend the visibility into your proofs through improved reporting capabilities, giving you insights into aspects such as proof and stage turnaround times, as well as bottlenecks. We also realize that not all of the proof collaborators are necessarily decision makers. Therefore, we want to introduce proof reviewers to our home and reporting area inside work front. And lastly, and that’s really where things become interesting, we want to automate the entire process by allowing you to connect your proof approvals directly with project tasks, keeping decisions, progress and statuses all in sync, whatever proof stakeholders receive or provide feedback. And not to forget, we also want to introduce the ability to configure proof workflows templates directly in your project. Let’s now dive deeper and have a look at the capabilities for which we already started to release enhancements and will continue to do so. With release 22.3 scheduled for mid of July, work fronts mobile app will offer the most important proofing capabilities built into the work from mobile app. This will enable you to attach documents and images in the comment field, as well as update and add contributors via tagging. And looking forward, our mobile team will continue to further improve the experience. Today, if you want to manage configurations on your proof account, you are required to navigate to proof stand alone system in order to do so. With this new experience, your users will be able to configure settings such as the proof default or decisions directly inside work from setup area. This will reduce the number of clicks and applications you need to interact with while improving your productivity. An analysis revealed that one of the main reasons for still navigating to proof stand alone system is to configure your proof templates. Even more, I’m happy to share with you that you will be able to create, update and remove workflows inside work from setup. The same applies to users individual proof settings, such as default proof roll and notification settings. They will be accessible inside work front. The capabilities I will talk about next are the ones which excite me and I’m sure they will excite you the most. And some of you have already got the chance and have been asked to test the prototypes. We would love to get even more customer involvement in your feedback. So let us know if you’re interested. And of course, in case of any questions, just drop them in the chat. So we can answer them at the end of the presentation. I know that for some of you, these slides are new. And there have been conversations for quite a few years. The good news is we are actively working on this and the whole initiative got a lot of attention excitement due to the Adobe acquisition. As you all want to know, the capabilities we want to introduce are the same, but their approach changed. Let me wrap up the capabilities first. We want you to have the new end to end approval experience with everything built natively into work front, offering a consistent experience to users. Instead of managing proof users and additional proof groups, we will have a single source of truth and be able to select your work front users, groups and job roles as it works today when assigning tasks. We also know about the confusion around document approvals and proof approvals. They gonna be unified, we already created some prototypes and are testing them with customers to get the feedback. To better plan your work, we aim to connect tasks and approvals and enable you to report in all aspects of your review and approval process. And lastly, support agencies to account for the clients and partners by setting the boundaries with the help of work from groups. So work from groups will actually honor the boundaries and you can decide who will see what. Rather than doing this in a big bang approach and develop all the capabilities before release, we are taking a more iterative approach to build out the new end to end approval experience. We are going to begin with the most simple flow to document approvals. That will allow us to deliver something much faster and give you progress on the integrated experience. While it also gives us an opportunity to test and validate with customers. Following the first deliverable, we will continually build on that. That means we will introduce advanced document approvals through multi stage workflows and then to introduce our new approvals to proofing and then build on that to deliver a feature rich experience. For some of the capabilities I mentioned before, I want to dive a little bit deeper. This one is the most important as it lays the foundation for everything that will come next. And it’s an initiative I’m putting my heart and my soul in to provide you with a single source of truth to define your organizational structure. Gone will be the days when you had to go to proof standalone system to configure your proof groups in addition to existing groups and work front. And you will finally be able to add teams and job roles as you’re used to it when assigning tasks or issues. Tight into this initiative is the introduction of a simplified permission model. This will allow you to share proofs similar to other objects and work front. We want to apply the same construct you already know for project task or issues. So instead of current proof roles, we will align it with the existing construct, which is few contribute and manage and also offer flexibility with advanced settings. Our goal here is to reduce the complexity we have today with permissions, document sharings and proof roles. Connecting task with your approval workflows is another important capability. Being able to view needed approvals in the context of your project and have tasks updated whenever a proof review and approval completes. We recently had a design sprint where we tested our first prototype with it and with it the idea of being able to pre select the proof workflow and task level. So all uploaded assets will automatically get the workflow assigned. That means once your content creator uploads the asset, we will automatically kick off the first stage of your review and approval process and notify your stakeholders to provide feedback or make decisions. And having your approvals connected to tasks will then also allow you to see the progress inside your project. Beyond that, we are focusing on visibility and reporting to answer the questions on how can we provide better insights on in-flight work as well as historical work. You will be able to utilize the work from reporting canvas to report on all aspects of proofing. With this, we will introduce data points which aren’t here today, such as stages associated with proofs, information about which stages are active and which are inactive, and also turnaround times to report on starting points, ending points, and the various stage gates. So that’s the first part in terms of reporting. Second piece will be a proof specific dashboard. For those who know the proof system very well, you’re going to recognize the screenshot on the right, which shows the proof standalone dashboard. And we are taking this dashboard as an inspiration to research what works well, what can be improved so we can bring that dashboard experience directly inside Workfront. And it will give you real-time insights, what’s happening and where the bottlenecks are. As part of the research, we are also evaluating the SOCD traffic light system to see if it’s providing the right level of detail or how can we provide you with a quick visual information on the statuses of your proofs. Good. So there are more features and details I would like to share with you today, but unfortunately, my time with you today is limited. So let’s wrap up. Your key takeaways for this session are, first, keep improving your review and approval process. Stay hungry, join with these webinars to learn more about the latest enhancements and utilize them. Second, for me, it’s already pretty late today, but you should block some time to create an automated workflow, maybe even a template, which could be used to replace multiple single approval steps. And last, the Workfront plus Proof initiative is real. Product management, UX designers and developers are already busy developing prototypes, performing proof of concepts and defining requirements, and of course, conducting custom interviews. So if you want to help shape the experience we build, reach out to join the program. We would love to hear your feedback and your participation in the whole feedback process. And that’s for me. Now it’s your turn to ask questions. Thanks. Thank you, Caroline. There is so much great information coming for Proof. We appreciate that update. I know people are excited. Based on the questions coming in, there’s a ton of questions. So let’s get started and take a few of those from the audience. The first question is around timeline. So what is the timeline for all of this? How do I get involved? Also in the research program, you mentioned a few times that you’d love feedback. How do people get involved to provide feedback? Great question. Let me first start with the first part of the question. So it is important to know that we do our planning and work on a quarterly and six month basis. So we don’t have everything planned out in detail for the period beyond. So our roadmap is outlined for sure. Right now and for this year, we know that we’re going to focus on the capabilities linked to the section seamless user experience and configuration administration. So this includes the Proof account settings inside Workfront, which will be released with the 22.3 release in July. And for delivering a unified document and proof approval experience, which is going to include the utilization of Workfront org units. Here we’re going to pursue an iterative approach. So we’re going to release it in phases. Let me give you a little more details about it. So our plan is first to align the two approval systems by bringing the document approvals on a document version level. And with it, we also want to introduce additional capabilities such as locking once you have made a decision and viewing all documents in an enhanced viewer. So the proof viewer today. And once this has been released, we’re going to continue to continuously release more and more proofing capabilities, such as automated workflows or due dates, login require, etc. So at the end, they’re going to be one approval system. And there’s no confusion anymore which one to use. And it’s not only about feature parity, but we want to make sure that we’re going to deliver an enhanced approval experience for you. And that said, it’s really important to know that this approach gives us the opportunity to deliver value much faster and we can incorporate your feedback. And that said, I’m going to get to the second question. We would love your feedback and we would love if you would participate in the research program, which contains a prototype testing as well as feedback loops. So we’re right now setting up an easy way to subscribe. And in the meantime, please reach out to your customer success manager or account executive to let them know that you would like to participate and they’re going to reach out to us. That’s great. And based on again, based on the questions that are coming in, I know people have this is music to their ears, knowing that all of this work is happening. And I imagine you guys out there, you have feedback to share. So please don’t be shy. You’re helping us be better. So please do reach out to your account team if you’d like to get involved. We have a question from Daniel. Daniel says, our biggest challenge is syncing up proof workflow deadlines with project task deadlines. Any recommendations on making this as automated as possible? Yeah. So today our task and the proofs are not connected. That’s something we want to achieve with the integration. So for today, I would recommend using Fusion because I know that some of our customers are using it to get that synced up. That’s great. Fusion keeps the common theme today. Lots of little things you can be doing with Fusion. There was a number of questions around reporting. So just in general from a number of folks, will proof reporting be part of the new reporting module? Yes. So once we unify document and proof approvals, you will be able to utilize the new Canvas reporting canvas to filter for all proof related objects and break it down. And in case you want to learn more about the reporting canvas, it’s BETA program just started to be launched. So they’re launching it in phases. So just go to Workfront 1 and search for reporting canvas BETA to learn more about the whole program and how you can participate. And also good to know is we are going to introduce additional data points which are not available today. So stages associated with proofs, the information if they are active or inactive and turn around times. And yeah, in addition to it, we want to have a specific proof dashboard to really be able to get real time insights and improve the tracking. Great. So if you guys missed that, that was really important that she shared. If you want to get involved in the BETA for the reporting canvas, that’s starting to open up. So go to Workfront 1, search reporting canvas, and you can see how you can get involved in that BETA. This actually is a follow up question or I think similar to that. Someone had asked, it was Leah said, what’s the easiest way to see the status of all your proofs at a glance? Great question. So today you need to go to proof standalone to see all your proof there. You can create your own view to get all this information. And in the future, that’s what we want to achieve with the proof specific dashboard to give you, with a traffic light system to give you all the information at a glance so you know exactly where to, where you need to remind your colleagues, your stakeholders, which proofs are on track, which are delayed. So you can improve your planning. Exciting. So there’s a little bit of here’s what you do today, but more good stuff. That’s the theme. More good stuff is coming. A question from Austin around videos. So are there any updates regarding proofing videos? Will it be possible to combine multiple videos into a single proof? Great question. And this has come up quite a time. So we are familiar with this ask and what we are doing. And I didn’t cover that in my presentation. Now, with being part of Adobe, we are busy exploring all the phenomenal technologies Adobe has to offer. So we don’t have a specific roadmap item, but as part of this whole initiative, we’re also exploring this capability. So how can we combine multiple videos into one proof? How can we combine static and interactive proofs into one proof? So, yeah, so it’s good to hear this question again, because it shows us it’s really an important topic. Yeah, it’s great. There was another question as well about that static and animated proofs and videos. So that’s good. It’s something that we’re thinking about. A question from Casey and said, I may have missed this, but when do the proof user settings merge with the work front settings? Good. So as I mentioned before, so the account settings will already be available in work front with the 22.3 release and the user settings. So we plan to do it right after it. But we changed the approach because I mentioned that the whole unification between document and proof approval is like a fundamental piece. So we need to do this first because then you won’t have any proof users anymore and proof groups. You will just be able to use the work front organization units, users, groups, job roles. And there we’re going to add the proof user settings, you know, today. Got it. This is the question again. They’re still coming in fast and furious. This one’s from Tammy and it goes back to when you were talking about how you can automate some of your workflow or make those processes a bit more efficient. And Tammy says, how can we see the new proofing routing process at the task level? Very interested in how this can work and could improve our process by automating it. Yeah. Yeah, so if you want to really want to learn how we think, how we could connect proofs and the tasks and automate it. So it’s always synced up. I would recommend to participate in our research program because there you’re going to see prototypes. We’re already testing it with customers. And of course, we would love to get your feedback here because it’s still in progress. We’re still trying things out and we want to know how you experience it. Because right now we already created some prototypes where you can say, OK, for this particular task, I’m assigning a workflow and every document which gets updated in this task will automatically get that workflow assigned. So once the task started and once you uploaded, the designer uploaded the document, the asset, we create subtasks with all stakeholders included. So who needs to make a decision, who needs to make a comment and the stage is there. So you see exactly if the proof is on track or not. Right, that’s really helpful. There have been a couple of questions that have come in around Frame.io. And I know that’s not something we had planned to talk about today. It wasn’t in your presentation necessarily, but I wanted to ask if someone wanted to learn more about that or if you have anything to share. But one, will we be able to integrate Frame.io into proof or kind of any plans for how that’s going to work? Or I know we talk about this a lot more extensively in our release webinars, so we can also point folks there if that’s a better place. Yeah, I think it’s a better place. I know that there are a lot of discussions ongoing how we can bring these two systems together because the one is handling large video formats. Our focus is on the whole automated workflow management. So there are really a lot of discussions ongoing how we can bring the best experience from both systems together. But in order to really get some details, I would recommend to attend the webinars. Yeah, and there’s been a few questions come up today because we’re sharing things that are coming up that aren’t available today, and so we’ve got limited time. But if you have questions about something we’ve shared or something that we have said is coming in the future, Workfront 1, there is a product releases section on Workfront 1. That’s where we have our webinars. We run those every time we have a release. There’s release notes that are really extensive and we’ll cover a lot of these topics in more detail than we cover here. Which leads me to, I think, one of my last questions, which is where do I go for more information about the features that have already been released? So, I mean, exactly what you just said. So we do have regular webinars you can attend. We do have release notes. We also have in-app communication. But one of the most reliable and good sources is Workfront 1. And I’m using it every single day on my own. So it’s always up to date and we always keep it updated before we do release any feature. So that’s the best source. That is great. And I know there are more questions that have come in, but we’re going to go ahead and say thank you for today. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing so much of this knowledge.