Workfront Fusion + Boards: A Powerful Productivity Pairing

Transcript

Hello and welcome. Today we were covering work for fusion and boards, a powerful productivity pairing. I’m joined by Carmen Batista. And my name is you and Mercieca. We’re going to be covering fusion boards, the fusion boards connector, and a very special boards configuration for your organization. A little bit about us. My name is Universal. I’ve been with work Friend and Adobe for five years now. Previously, I was a friend and Adobe customer. And I’m based in Seattle. My name is Sherman, but I’m a product manager and I’ve been with Adobe since 2022. I’ve worked customer retention, I’ve worked with payment services and customer success as well as part of the Commerce product. And now since this year, I’m part of the work from family. Today I will be talking about Fusion and I want to give you a quick summary of what I would be talking about over the next slides and how without fusion, you won’t realize the full value of an integrated, scalable content supply chain. You will be missing multiple opportunities to standardize and automate manual, repetitive workflows, wasting precious time that you could put to better use to expand and grow your business. If you’re missing on fusion, you’re missing out on the glue that solidifies all the pieces of the puzzle together before you frame it and hang it on your wall. Now, I want you to think about how many hours a week do you spend on the same processes over and over, or how many people in your organization repeat the same tasks daily? How many of your processes you think are 100% effective? And our leverage the right way. Even if you’re using AI to leverage those processes and an efficient content supply chain severely limits your ability to drive an efficient enterprise personalization or marketing program. In fact, the sudden boost in creation from Jini may become even more difficult to ensure compliance with brand standards. Time consuming review and approval processes may offsetting crispy the journey AI has to offer. There may even an increase in regulatory or legal compliance risk due to unknown source material. For the Jini I created, images and activation and measurement of content will become harder and harder than without a unified approach. What is exactly what from fusion? Fusion is Adobe’s enterprise solution to scale and automate your processes, allowing you to customize and interconnect different systems to move and translate data between them. It has an easy to use design experience, a set of Adobe product connected out of the box and its web APIs ability to connect waterfront to any web application. Fusion is the key to unlocking the full potential of a next level content supply chain experience. Think of it this way If work first as a race car fusion is that button on the dashboard that allows you to focus on the steering wheel and following the direction you want to take the car on. While the system controls everything else from speed to performance and everything in between. While workflow and planning can help you generate visibility and foster collaboration between your teams and team members, consolidating work into a single system, Fusion unlocks the power of automation and integration, helping you accelerate you time your time to market with automated processes, removing any manual error prone work and making sure you connect and integrate all of your ecosystem. Building a unique system of records within one tool and one flow only. There are five key building blocks to make this vision a reality and capitalize on the benefits of an optimized content supply chain. Workflow and planning help you streamline and orchestrate to work. Creation and production allow you to supercharge the content that fuels personalized experiences, asset management, governance stores, and makes the most of every asset you create. Deliberate activation and power to engage in experiences that deliver results and reporting and insights make it easier to understand content performance and make continuous improvement. Fusion connects your Adobe applications and your MarTech stack to streamline the content supply chain. Fusion automation increases the velocity of content delivery to achieve personalization at scale and fusion native integrations to products like AIM assets and Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop and Firefly. Integrate content creation to delivery and activation. These are some of the benefits that you and your business can experience with fusion. Speak to Value. When you combine fusion with workflow and planning, you will see your business create and distribute more production content, endless time focusing on the creative aspect of the processes instead of spending time on manual repetitive tasks. Accelerate and magnify value Realization. Connecting all of your capabilities within one platform amplifies the value that multiple Adobe products have to offer. Connect the enterprise where you will be able to deliver more with increased visibility with the same resources and budget you have today. Fusion allows you to increase the workload you process freeing up time for work that matters. One way work is Spanish is through boards on off work from products that helps you visualize your workload in a simple, easy. Do they just wait? No one is better position than anyone to explain your what forces how it works and what benefits it brings to you. You went over to you. Thank you, my friend. Many of our customers have started to use boards for specific use cases, especially when existing work front capabilities were perceived as too complex. Simply put, customers like the visual interface of cards on a common board. If you think of work front as a racecar, you can think of boards as the motorcycle racing beside that racecar car. Both with an insight into the the engine of it, the tasks and issues, as well as on the interface. The work from boards interface is made out of three different components. There is the board’s dashboard. This is where you organize all of your boards. This is where you can set notifications that are are set for if a new card is created or if you’re added to a card. The boards actual the board boards interface is where all the action happens. That’s where you can see all the columns. That’s where you can see the cards that you want to move to. Different columns. This is where you can where you set your tags and and you can set all this configurations that you want in your board. And then there’s the card interface and card interfaces. Can be used for connected cards or non connected cards. And that’s the board’s interface in a nutshell. There are a lot of common boards use cases versus informal strategic or pre-production work. This is where you can have like a planning meeting and you can you, you can basically brainstorm different ideas and then migrate those two tasks or issues by making the cards actionable. You have Agile methodologies, specifically Kanban, and this is where you can use things like work in progress limits, You can set columns for, for different statuses and you can really manage your work as a, as a continuous flow. You can use boards for team collaboration issues and tasks and those sorts of things. Same thing with personal tasks or issue management on both of those cases. You can make use of the the robust filtering that comes with with boards. You can also use boards for meeting management. This is one of my favorite use cases and this is where you can essentially set an agenda. You can manage the the different items from the meeting and the different topics in the meeting as cards. And then if later on, you want to make one of those those different topics an action item, you can quickly add it to add it to a column called Action items for example. And maybe you want to make those into task or issues. From that point on, you can manage them through your normal work management process. There are two types of boards. Static boards and dynamic boards. And for templates, basic boards, Kanban boards, retrospective boards and dynamic boards. A basic board is where I usually go when I want to create a board from scratch. If I want to start from the very beginning and start configuring everything within it, that’s where I want to go. The combined board is what’s associated with any board that’s created from the Agile teams can be an area. It’s also where you might want to start when you’re looking at combine in your organization because Work in Progress Limit, for example, is already set on those columns. A retrospective board is used for a specific type of meeting and and that’s used for when you’re done with an activity or you’re done with a project and you want to follow up on some of the the steps. If you want to learn from from the things that are associated with that. Lessons learned is what you might be used to. And then there’s a dynamic board, and this kind of sets up a wizard beforehand. It uses a query or filter that you’ve built beforehand, and it populates cards throughout the board, not just into an intake column like the other three. These meet a lot of customers needs, but what about those those needs that go beyond these standards? That’s where the board’s connector comes into play. The boards connector is built into fusion. If we think of boards as the cool motorcycle, as racing alongside the the race car of work friend, the addition of fusion and the work for boards connector really helps transform that board into a fully customizable supersonic jet like you always wanted. The work from Boards Connector was introduced in March as a beta release. It’s still in beta. We’re looking at moving into production sometime in the next six months with with the boards connector, you can set things like the tags. You can set new. You can create new boards. You can create new cards. You can update them, you can read them. You can change columns on and on, just like you’d expect from any fusion connector. And one of the most common needs that we’ve noted is an enterprise standard board. This addresses that additional template that you’re looking for. If you have something that’s customized in your organization now, maybe you can address that. You want to be able to reuse standard configurations across all of your and all of your boards. When you think about creating a board for each project, you probably want to go in and set different things that are standardized throughout those. Maybe you have a list of tags that you want to associate, and you have a list of common columns that you want it to apply in your organization. But before we go into that, let’s talk about some considerations. And I like to think about these. No matter what automation I’m using, is there something built in to work front that can accomplish the same thing? Is there something in some other tool in any automation? They can do the same kind of thing. You want to use what’s already built in the tool. In most situations. That’s consideration one. The next consideration is is this enough of a repeatable process or can validate the time spent building the automation with the value that the automation provides? This kind of plays into part the next the next point, which is okay, is there any way I can do that easier? You don’t want to create an automation for something that you’ve only that you only do once. It’s not worth your time. It’s not worth your effort. But if I want this applied to every project in a portfolio and I want it done the same way every single way, then it probably makes sense to do an automation. And if I can use a template to make that automation build process easier. I’m going to go ahead and do that. For this case, we’re going to want to use the fusion template work, front work, front boards, create a board of a custom configuration and get started with, you know, building your own standard board. When I look at this scenario, takes about 10 minutes to build out a board with all the tags and all the columns, make sure all the all the settings are the same, all configured the right way. With this template, you can build the same type of thing in about a minute and 15 seconds. Considering it takes about maybe an hour to get all these things still completely configured and and add in all of your tags, you’re talking about a repetition of six times. If you want to repeat this process six times, it makes sense for you to use this template and build it out in your environment right? By doing so, you can improve the consistency of your operations and you can create some standardized tags and columns that you can use later on. Before we go into the template itself and how to launch the template, which I’ll do quickly, I do want to talk about the scenario and how it’s built out, unlike other other templates where you might want to use them in full in this one, you might want to use pieces of it. You may want to pull different components from this, different sections of it, and go from there. The first the first highlight here is really the trigger, the project time, because I needed some kind of trigger when we were building out this template. I decided to associate all of the boards that are created from projects in a certain portfolio. So that’s what these four modules do. They’re associated with the project. The first module is basically the trigger. So this is saying that new projects in this portfolio will launch this scenario. The second second module is only a wait is just waiting for you to populate the the name of the project. And then the third one is third module is basically just a read. It’s reading the project for any of the updates that you’ve made since that initial launch. That way you can account for maybe you want to change the project name. Maybe you want to add something else to the project that they could be applied later on. And then the last module is final is a final update that uses different, different information from the scenario and applies it to that project. So you can get a link back to the board in the project. Always recommend having that last piece so you can tie things together. This is what we call cross-referencing and I’d recommend you use it in this situation. You can see that what I’ve done here is created a link that appends to the end of the description. You may want to use a different field in your organization to keep the board. So that’s something to keep in mind when you’re looking at this template. The second part of the template is a simple module that basically creates the board. It’s a very, very easy interface to use. You may want to change the name of the board when you’re when you’re building this out. You may also want to use this for a different template. One of the most common use cases for this maybe triggered off of a task in that task is a task associated with a retrospective. In that situation, you probably want to use a retrospective template. The next module sets all the variables for the entire scenario. This is built out so you don’t have to change any settings if you don’t want to. On any of the remaining modules. The only thing that you have to do when you’re building out the template after that point in time is actually setting the connection. Just make sure that you’re using the right connection. The first three variables on here are associated with the first the first root, and they said the column name. So whatever you want, the column named for your first three columns, those will be set there if you want to use more than three columns. This scenario, the resulting scenario of this template, I should say, really allows you to expand from 4 to 6 columns in addition to the three. If you wanted to do more, yeah, you could do it, but you would do that after the fact. After you’ve built out the template. If you want to add in a column, we’ll show you how to do that in a minute. The next one is the work front domain. And that’s that only applies to the notification or the update on the details for the project. It will have company initially in the C, you would just change that to your domain name. So if your domain is company dot mind work friend dot com, you would change the company to Acme or whatever your company’s name is. The entire column, you can actually use a different name for your intake column. And so this allows you to use a different name if you’d like. Pretty simple. And then the number of columns changes the number of times. The next section will repeat. So if you’re if you want to have four columns built out, you want to change that variable to four, the next section creates the columns. And what this does is, is the top root. It creates it creates the first three columns or actually it changes the first three columns. I should say the middle root goes through and it creates at four, three, six, if you set those options. And then the bottom root aggregates all of those things, you’ll notice that it says six. I, I is basically saying that that’s the number of repetition. So the repetition that you’re on cycling through at that time, it will apply that to the different use cases. If I go here, you’ll notice that based off if it’s the fourth repetition for this particular module, which is the is the middle path yellow, one of the middle path, this section of modules basically creates the columns. The first root changes the three columns that exist and the middle root adds four, three, six. You’ll notice on this, this is the first module that you see here as the repeater. What the the variable does four repeats is it takes into account those number of columns that you said on the previous section, and then it goes, okay, I’m going through maybe I want four calls. The first first three repetitions. It’ll go through the top root the columns four through six will go through the second root and they’ll all go through the bottom row. Here’s here’s how that works is that it filters based off of the repetition. So the first three will only go through if it’s less than four. Second one will just go from 4 to 6. And then you’ll notice on this module, which is which is in the middle root, that what this is doing is it’s switching the repetition number with the variable that you’ve said in that multiple variables module. The next three modules are associated with tags. So if you think about another section, this is another section of, of the scenario. These are very simple to build out. You basically just enter in the tag name and then select the tag color for each. If you want to add more, you can do so after you’ve run through the template and you would simply use the create a tag module. The last three modules that I’m going to talk about here are basically the are basically built for configuring the intake column. The first module creates the intake column. The second one gets the ID from the column associated with the intake on and then it applies it to the last one, which actually sets the filtering rule, the intake rules. So then every task that’s created in this project will create a card in the board. Hopefully that makes sense to you to get ready to run the template. And because we’re using projects in a specific portfolio, you’re going to want to start off by going to the main menu and the portfolio section pulling up the portfolio that you want to use and finding the good from the URL. It’s located right after the portfolio slash inside of the portfolio area, log in to work for Fusion, Find the template in the template section in Fusion. By searching for boards, you’re going to look for the work. Work from boards, create a board of a custom configuration, and then then you’re going to create a new search scenario from this template. This will walk you through building out the scenario through a quick and easy interface. You’re going to select the organization, you’re going to select your team, you’re going to insert that portfolio ID after portfolio ID and the optional filter. Now, note here, you could add in additional filters if you wanted to at some point in time. Maybe you can do that now if you want to, just to have it associated with a status. So you use an ampersand status equals, and then whatever your status code is, you have a number of different options there on all the work front modules and all the work front boards, modules, you’ll have a connection. The only that you’ll need to connect to, I’m assuming that you already have used a worksite connection before, so you’ll have wanted to select in there. Otherwise you’ll need to add one by clicking add and adding it through there. When you get to the variables, you’re going to want to go ahead and create additional variables for any additional columns. Pass the three that that are built in you might want to use for. For example, when you do so, you need to keep the variable name in the same format as the column one, column two and column three. You don’t shouldn’t have to change the column one in column two, column three variable names. If you do, it might break the scenario further down the line. But if you change it to column four, for example, then you could call it whatever you want. The variable value is actually the name of the column might be a little bit confusing for people. The variable value is the same as the Call me when you do that. Also change the number of column variable. So you change the variable value for the number of columns to four. If you’re using four columns, for example, it’s really important that you also change the work from domain name variable. When you go through this, some optional changes that you can also do, you can change the tag. So like I said, change the name, change the tag color, or you can add a tag. This is something that you do after you’ve run through the template. Scroll to where you’d like to place that new module. Typically right after the other tag module, create a tag models and you’d enter the tag name and the color. When you’re all said and done, you should end up with a board associated with your project. You’ll notice on on this one I’ve got into columns. I’ve actually used the fourth column, which you can just see there on the slip on the right. I’ve got a link actually in the project details that links me back to that board so I can I have a bit of a flow between the two interfaces other than the things I mentioned here, There are a few other things that you can change. One, you can change the trigger. If you want to have this associate off of the task. Like I mentioned before with the meetings, you can do that there. You can actually just run this manually. If you get rid of the two project sections on either end, you can add additional columns. If you want to do more than six, you’re going to have to add in those. Add in quite a bit to the scenario. If you want to do less than six. It’s very easy to do that just by changing those variable values or adding new variables and changing the variable values. If you want to add or remove tags, you can do that as I mentioned, and you can actually change the filtering as well. You can add more projects to the filtering or you can add advanced filtering. For right now, I would ease off on doing too much when it comes to the filter changes, but I know that that’s a possibility. Some other examples of using the board fusion connector creating or meeting board for from a meeting task when it can start. I like this a lot because I can. I can set up a task list and when I complete the task before it, it’ll basically say, okay, here’s a meeting and, and, and it’s linked to my task. I can add a standard checklist, all cards moving to a specific column, and I can create a board that’s built for projects. So the cards are actually represented as projects. And then if you change the conditional one of those projects, it’ll reflect in the board. This takes about two scenarios to do three key takeaways from today’s presentation. Our work for boards is no longer limited to just the options available via the user interface. Sky is really the limit fusion can be used for automation of workflows that span both work for workflow capabilities as well as boards, other Adobe applications and thousands of other tools. Fusion is really easily making. Use of fusion templates can kickstart your process automations and reduce time to develop, while also installing scenario building best practices. Really take a look at our fusion templates and and you will grow in your knowledge of fusion by tenfold for more resources associated with this conversation, we have the following links. The Adobe Work Front fusion for product documentation to work for an API. We’ve got the community on experience, league boards, connector documentation, getting started with boards and then a great customer use case from Summit 2020. For my friend Neil, who is doing another presentation today. Actually, it’s in that presentation and everybody smile because now it’s time for Q&A. All right. Excellent presentation, you and Herman, Thank you so much. You have any questions for UN or Herman? Now’s your chance. Drop in the chat, please, and then I will get started. First question, I’m going to direct it to your Amon. Melissa wants to know is Fusion a buy up within Adobe or is it already included. Efficient into buyer? Within waterfront? You have three different types of licenses select and prime and ultimate. The first two are based on product usage. So how much do you use fusion and how many operations that you process with Ultimate? There are no limitations in usage. Great. That’s helpful. Thank you. And then you and those questions for you. Erika wants to know, how do you add existing tasks in a project to board? Yeah, that’s pretty straightforward. Within the test window, you’ve got three ellipses right at the top of the screen there. Go ahead and click on those and go add two boards. It’ll walk you through the the wizard through that. You can also add them through the board if you want, but that’s the easiest way to do it. Okay, super descriptive. You can just do it with your eyes closed one and then Ryan has a question Can this work for a fusion template that’s currently being demoed and walked through be provided to us for us to play around with in our test drive environments and this is, you know, he’s near to Fusion and so he wants to see how to help get started. Yeah, absolutely. It’s actually available in the fusion templates area. So the third option on the left, when you get into fusion, walk down the menu and you’ll find templates. If you can do a search for boards, you’ll see that and I think we’ve got two other templates that we’ve got built out in there for you when you are walking through the wizard to create the template. So you are, I think it’s create scenario from template or something I think is the option. You’ll just need to change the connections and you can select your sandbox environment. There. Great. And then does the recommendation on any tutorials or demos that is just actual boards overview? Yeah, there’s, there are a few available there on experience. Like I think there’s six videos that are posted someplace in the community, unfortunately not at the link Andy right now, but we’ll provide that for you. But if you look up, there’s a simple boards of video, there’s a hybrid boards video and a few options in between. So yeah, Ruby I’d recommend going to experience like searching for those our reviews. Otherwise we will be dropping a link to the experience like thread where you can continue this conversation after each posting in there and we’ll be sure to provide the resources that you need. I think it’s the question at sea. Edward wants to now confusion sense in real time when a required record field is updated in work front, thus dragging triggering an immediate transmission to an external web application. Or does fusion run a scheduled sweeper first to detect upgrade updated records? Yeah. So the web hooks Web hooks trigger what are called watch events modules in infusion. And so there are three typically three, at least two on the work front side, there are three watch trigger modules and you select watch events and that uses web hooks. And so that’s that’s an action in any tool that essentially pushes a call through the API. As let’s see. And then this question is for you both. I’ll start with you. You in one of your favorite workflows, Adobe apps or tools that you use fusion to automate. Can you provide managers? Well, I’ll tell you about one of my most recent ones, and that’s one I’m really excited about it. It takes a word document, the Temple template word document like you use for a mail merge, and it uses those variables and it actually creates a PDF from that using work front data to fill in the variables. We also we also use it for creating a PowerPoint using PDF service, the PDF services modules. It’s a really cool integration. It ties in a bunch of different applications and a bunch of different ways to use the tool, and we’re using that Actually in my normal day job, which is an ultimate success, where we we work with customers and we build an impact summary slide and that’s what we’re using for. It’s pretty exciting. Awesome. What about you, Herman? I would have to say it’s the using of Firefly connector to integrate with the asset generation within the workflow, the general workflow, but that’s probably because I’m biased. Firefly is such a great product and I’m such a nerd with I animate generations. So now I think that’s a great one. Firefly and just generation of images is, you know, it’s the creation these days. So awesome and well, have you, Herman, what’s the advantage of using fusion over the work for native integrations with other products? That’s a really good question. While we’re allows you to with the native integrations to have it interacting with two specific products, let’s say we’re from an AM with fusion, you open up the play field and you can have a much more integrated workflow running from beginning to end. So if you have things that integrate, let’s say Marketo and Salesforce and we’re front and also Firefly, for example, you could have an end to end automated use case. And it’s not just the, the one thing when you do from where front and native integration to AM or for integration with Marketo just to name examples. Okay. And then how many products can I connect to Fusion with out of the box? We have over 70 out of the box connectors that you can use into your workflows. Some of those I include Adobe products such as AMP sets or forums, Firefly, Firefly, Photoshop, Angle, Workday, Marketo, JIRA, Dropbox. There’s a lot of things there. Also, if you need to connect with any specific app that you we don’t have the connectors for at the moment. We have an HTP connector that allows you to integrate with any API in just a few clicks. So it’s really good. Awesome. And then related to that, what’s the future of fusion? What can customers expect going forward in terms of enhancements? Yeah, we have a couple of things in the pipeline. I can speak to the things that I am working on as a product manager, so we are working on having activity logs on the platform so you can keep track of what your users are doing in the system or have done. We are working on scenario promotion, so it’s easy to take your scenarios to process production data with a more, much more simpler and faster process. We’re doing ideation, our own scenario scoring. So there is going to be a feature in the in the future maybe that will allow you to tell to know how you can improve your scenarios or what things in your scenario can be changed so you can reduce the risk of errors. We’re running them. We are working on removing the file size processing limit, something that some customers have issues with in the past. So you can use larger files in your automations. And also we are working on releasing a fusion assistant and working on a AI assisted scenario generation as well. Okay, Lots of exciting things coming. And is it okay if I encourage our customers, if they have any ideas or feedback on what else they want to see from fusion? So just go into the thread that we’re going to drop into the chat and add their ideas and feedback in there for you. Absolutely. All feedback is welcome and really appreciated user feedback because that’s what we used to know. We’re moving in the right direction for you right here. Hey, back to you. And what do you like bored so much? And then what have you heard from customers and why they like boards so much? Well, I don’t know. I don’t know about you, but for me, really, when I when I’m working in an applications, I don’t like having to switch applications, but I don’t mind switching the way that I work as an analyst. I like to use boards just from the interface perspective. I can I can see the progression of things, the new boards interface, while it’s not new necessarily more, it’s about two years old, I guess, but it really helps things move from from left to right. It’s it’s a very familiar interface, very easy to customize, move things around. And it gives me another option. You know, sometimes I like to look at things through a task list. Other times I like to really see the movement of something across my screen, across the different columns. Yeah, totally. And then actually I have another question coming in. Do we have a connector for Power BI and Work Front? I think we do with some with fusion, right? I believe so, yeah. Okay. Well, there we go. We do. Back to you. And what are you most excited about that’s coming soon to work front. Oh, I’ve got to say, work from planning is coming down the path. I’m really excited about it. It really does add another layer onto the work management base that everybody’s gotten used to and using forefront, it just adds a few, a few things that really enrich that experience for for our customers. So I’m really excited about that one. And it’s coming up soon. Very soon. Yeah. I’m excited for it to the end user myself. So I can’t wait to like getting my fingers into it. And then, Herman, do you have anything that you’re most excited about this coming soon to work from outside of the fusion enhancements? I would have to say planning as well. It’s going to open up the game a lot for our customers and it’s going to solve a lot of issues as well. So I’m really happy to see that one going out great. And so at time now, and if you have any more questions, please copy and paste experienced league link in the chat so that you can keep the conversation going with you. And and Herman, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having us. Really appreciate getting a chance to talk to all of you. I wish I could see all your faces, but maybe, maybe we’ll figure out that technology in the future sometimes. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s been absolutely great having you today. So thank you for joining. And if you have any questions, just let us know. We’ll be happy to take them.