System Admin Best Practices (September 29, 2020)

Transcript

Welcome everyone to the virtual user group on system administration best practices. Really excited. Thanks all for joining. We have some really great material here. If you’ve all haven’t been to user groups before, I’m gonna give you a little explanation of what’s gonna happen. We’re gonna have a presentation from our speaker today, Anthony Amgrund. And then we’re gonna have some breakout sessions and we’re gonna have some really great discussion. That’ll be a time when we can all really share everyone’s ideas. There’ll be two questions that we’ll center around. We’ll cover those in a second. But right now just letting a little couple more people flood in. Looks like we’re at 82. Let me give it one more minute. Okay. So I’m Andrew, whoever didn’t know that. I am a strategic success manager at Workfront. I see a lot of my other teammates on here. Really happy to see you all. Good morning. Good morning. A little disclaimer here for everyone that today is being recorded. So make sure you really get your best ideas out there so that we can all listen to them on repeat for many days to come when we listen to the recordings here. A little reminder again, some housekeeping. We’d love to see your video. So turn it on. Give us a great smile. Audio for sure. When you’re ready to speak, speak up. We’d love to hear from you. And we really recommend the gallery view so you can see everyone or the speaker view so you can just hear what’s going on. Okay. We’re gonna move a little quickly here so I give Anthony all his time. First let’s do some introductions. Again, I’m Andrew, a customer success manager at Workfront. So how about everyone go into your chat function now. Type in your company, your role, and your location. A quick note about what you hope to learn and take away from this session. I’m really interested to know what life hacks are going on around system administration, especially if I were to join right now as a system administrator. I would want to know something brand new that you all wish you knew. And my favorite item I’ve bought this year, so go ahead and type that into the chat too. My favorite item would probably be my Subaru. I got a Subaru and I can drive around and do some hikes and stuff so I’m really excited for that. I’ve got some some great answers coming in here. Let’s see. Rollerblades! Oh my god, that’s awesome. I love that. I should really get back on that. Groceries, great. Always love a good grocery run. Purple mattress, great. Standing desks, you guys have wonderful answers. Way more than I could think of. Instapot, great. So here’s a quick agenda. Just keep typing those in. Keep typing those in. Quick question. Yeah, sure. Is there a way to join this through browser? I don’t know that there is because we use breakout groups and so I think you do have to join it through the app. That’s unfortunate. All right, thank you. Yep. No problem. Actually, you can join through the browser. You just can’t participate in the breakouts or any polls if they were there. So you can still attend, you just can’t attend the breakouts. No, it actually gives you a notice saying that it’s not allowed so it wouldn’t even join the meeting. Oh, really? Yeah. That’s odd because we really are only allowed to use it through the browser but have to get special permission to use it so that we can attend using the breakouts. So okay, sorry. All good. We’re already learning some interesting stuff. I’m telling you this morning is just full of really good wisdom. Well, we’re happy to have you here. If you can’t participate, we’re really sorry but keep chatting in the group chat possibly and if you have any questions, make sure to include them in the chat so we can get to them. So quick overview of our agenda. We’re gonna go straight into the best practices in just a few seconds here with our special speaker Anthony. Then we’re gonna have some group discussions. We’ll have a wrap-up and then the event will end. There should be a poll at the end of the event so keep your eyes on the screen at the end and we’ll have you take a quick survey poll that’ll really help us for the next ones. Without further ado, I’m gonna hand it over to Anthony here. I’ll stop sharing my screen but everyone get ready for some great tips and tricks here. Okay, I have to go do my little tip so I can see the chat. Okay, there we go. Alright, well hello everybody. Everybody can see, right? My screen? Perfect. Okay, well hello everybody. My name is Anthony Amgrind. I work at FCB on the global team as a project manager and I am the group system admin and I’m very excited that Workfront has asked me here to talk to you guys about just some best practices and some tips that I have learned as a global system admin. I want to talk a little bit about FCB for those of you who don’t know about us. We are a global advertising agency. We have offices all over the world. This is our consumer side. Besides this, we also have a global healthcare network that has five offices in the New York metro area. We have several in Europe and so yeah so we do everything from the initial branding. We have a whole agency that works on the names for drugs that helps come up with the names for the drugs that you see on television and we do everything then to the ads and commercials and websites that you see. Our philosophy at FCB is never finished which I know is horrible from a project management perspective but the idea behind it is that we’re always telling the brand story. The brand story is never finished and we accomplish this through what we call the bedrock program. We have a with every client we do a bedrock for their brand to let them know what is the value and purpose and key initiatives of their brand. We try to create behaviors with our customers for the brand and then our big thing since Carter and Susan have joined us is the brave together is the generosity. How can we make sure that we’re doing the best for our clients and helping each other out too which for those of you in advertising know it’s kind of very siloed the way our industry is used to working so it’s been a wonderful change the last few years. To give you a look at our instance we’ve been on work front since the at task days October 2013 I became global system admin in February 2014. We have about 4,500 users across 35 work front groups. There’s a bunch of other stats for you. The big thing is as you can see obviously I have no problem with people creating reports and dashboards whenever they need and I know that some people like to keep a lockdown on that at some control so for those of you that like to have a little more control over your reports and dashboard creations if you want to just kind of put in the chat why you like that why you that’s that works for your group I think that’d be great for people to see the other side of it. I’m of the philosophy that hey whatever will make their lives easier I’m happy to help them create it so that’s why we have so many of those. The one thing I did want to point out is we don’t use time sheets or the financial data like cost or bill rates and we don’t use the task projects or document approvals the only approvals we use are the proof HQ approvals. For us if a project if a PIF is converted into a project it’s been approved if it isn’t that it’s canceled so we don’t need the official approvals tied to that so those are just three things that I’m not the most familiar with when it comes to Workfront. I did want to just point out too about the new Workfront experience because that’s you know a big thing we’re all thinking about. FCB was very lucky we were part of the alpha and beta testing so a lot of our users learned about the tool have been working with the tool for over a year now or even longer so we were very fortunate to have it in our instance with that had a lot of people who were looking at it to give feedback. We are making the switch on October 5th you know we had kind of heard that the 20.3 release was going to be the last one that had any updates to classic although it looks like 20.4 will have some but to be safe we wanted to switch everyone over so for the purposes of this program I just wanted to let you know that because all the screenshots I use are from new Workfront experience but everything we talked about can be in both classic and new Workfront experience so yeah. Another thing maybe if you want to put in the chat just so that you don’t feel like you’re all alone if you want to put how far you’re along with the new Workfront experience like have you even started you know it’s still kind of if everybody then in the chat wants to kind of see where everybody is situated when it comes to new Workfront experience I think that would be cool to share. So let’s talk about some best practices. My number one best practice that I absolutely love is utilizing groups. Groups is a great way to create separate areas in Workfront and for us because we have different business units or different agencies in the tool that’s really important. It allows one to have you as a system admin have group admins which can help you out without giving them full access to the whole system so they can create custom statuses they can change project preferences they can log in as people to help out with bugs or anything so that is a great tool now and so by utilizing groups for the different areas of our business having those group admins help out now that I’m especially now that I’m a team of one has been very helpful with that. Two things though I do kind of want to point out with this I’m not a fan of separating the groups by departments if all the departments are working on the same projects so like for us every project will have the PMO creative development account analytics so for us it doesn’t make sense to the groups as departments because the project will always belong to the project management department so if account for instance wants special statuses those special statuses will never be on the project because the project can only belong to one group so when you’re breaking out groups really different business units or entities people who kind of work completely separate from each other is the best way to do that it’s not really the best one in my opinion when it comes to departments. I’m also in its current state I should say because there’s any product people on here I’m not a big fan of the subgroups we switched right away that was a misunderstanding on my part I thought that if they were subgroups I could put a filter in for FCB health global network and it would filter all those agency reports up it doesn’t do that it doesn’t for permissions for access level but not for filtering and reports the reason for that is we had a bunch of our health agencies all grouped together but now I can’t have a group admin that’s just for one of those business units or I can’t have a special status now for like area 23 it asked me for all of the health global networks so personally I if I were to go back in time I would have kept them all as regular groups because it’s very easy to do multiple people as group at or a person as a group admin in multiple groups if you need it so you don’t lose that functionality but it just gives you a little more flexibility so that’s something that I would change a little differently and then I just want to say if you are a system admin that does like the subgroups you know if you want to pop in the chat why you like that one I would love to hear what you’re getting out of it to do that because like I said in its current state not the biggest fan although I know product is while working on that hopefully for the future oh yeah here’s all my notes good for the PDF for those who are looking gonna look at the PDF later okay there we go my second tip is the API Explorer I know that’s weird because everybody’s like well we’re not doing integrations or I’m not a developer I was using the API Explorer after I took that advanced reporting class again back in the Att&ck days but what’s really nice about it is that it teaches you that not only the different object types in Workfront but their relationships with others and this can help you when it comes to building reports or even knowing where to start your report you know I know for us a lot of people are like hey can I get a report like this and they’ll send me like an Excel file well in Excel of course it’s very easy to mix project information with task information with issues you know and things like that so once you start to learn the different object types and the relationships so like on the screen here you’ll see that there’s references and collections references are things that have a one-to-one relationship with the object type and collections are many to one and there’s some pros and cons like with references you can do groupings you can you get one answer back with collections well you have to do collection field for that you can’t do groupings you can’t sort inside a collection field unfortunately so there’s things like that that you’ll start to learn I just find it very once I learned this it really helped me understand Workfront and to really help my people out so familiarizing your this is great and then if you ever do get to integrations whether you build them on your own or use a tool like fusion then it’s just that much easier for you to know what’s going on my next one which is really hard because you know we all have such free time and on our hands but I highly recommend going over the release notes beforehand it really gives you a chance to learn not only what the new enhancements are but to make sure you understand exactly what they are like sometimes you’ll read the feature and you’re like oh yeah it’s supposed to do this and then you realize that that’s not exactly what it does so not only does it give you a chance to look over the features ahead of time but you have a chance now to connect with support or with product to get clarity I have had a few times where I have gone to support and said okay well it says this but this is what I’m experienced so am I doing something wrong or do we maybe have to fix the language and the release notes a little bit and that’s been really helpful it’s also nice because it gives you a preview of something that might potentially be a big issue for your group like for us we use the proofing a lot and so in 20.3 for those using the new work front experience the baseball card or the right-hand panel disappeared they made it to work like with tasks it’s now the summary panel and by default it’s closed I knew that was going to be a big issue for our people because they’re used to always having that just magically appear so I made sure that all my super users knew I put it in we create a newsletter every release to FCBFI the release information I put it in there I did a special announcement like I kind of had that heads up so I knew that that was all going to happen and I we were prepared for it as a team before the release even happened as opposed to the day of and then everybody freaking out where did my right hand panel go so it’s really nice it’s also great to just check with your data set it’s much better now but several years ago I used to find a ton of bugs when I would go through just because our data set is so large I’m in the FCB instance we got a lot of information in there and we found that a lot of things would either break certain things or certain restrictions that maybe product put on to help with performance didn’t really help it was too low of a threshold when it came to using a real instance that’s also just great to check that maybe any custom tools you have or dashboards or reports none of those get broken so it’s really hard I know they used to do it for betas in a release so it’s really easy they would send you a little announcement I’ve kind of been breaking it up I kind of schedule an hour every two to three weeks to kind of go over the release notes again just to see what’s changed or anything so I highly recommend that that’s been great the 20.3 release was my first release when I was by myself and I didn’t spend as much time on it as I normally do and there were some things where I’m like oh wish I would have paid him a little more attention to that um so anyway so I have that tip there and then this one here which of course for all of you that are here on this call hopefully you are members of the community site it’s great place not only to just ask advice if you’ve run into issues but it’s a great way to find out about events like user groups or leaps or training sessions what I’d like to add on top of that something that I try to do again you know with all that free time we have is set aside time to look at the daily or weekly digest depending on what you get and try to either solve an unanswered question or to practice implementing a solution somebody had I can’t tell you how much I have learned from the community side because you have different people working in work friend differently so they’ll ask different questions and it makes you think about the tool differently so when one of your people finally comes to you it’s not so much of oh I don’t think this is possible you know that it’s possible you might not remember exactly how to do it so you have to search but it’s a great way for you to kind of again learn the tool better and I highly recommend this for newer admins it’s a fascinating way to learn the tool especially once you get to like text mode or exist filters because when you first join that’s not something you’re thinking of and it will just prepare you for as your company grows and matures and work front taking it to that next level and again also presents things in a problem in a different light so that you’re like oh wait I’ve always wanted to do something like this and it didn’t work but this workaround is gives me all the information I need and is very helpful so even if you don’t know a lot to answer some questions at least trying to implement a solution or some text mode into a fake report or a practice report will help you in the future so setting aside some time for that I highly recommend because I learn I learn a lot more from the community site than I do trying to figure out problems for my own people it’s also makes you look really good because then somebody will come in with a question like I needed to filter on this and you’re like oh I know how to do exists filters now and this is the perfect time to use it so you answer their question in like three minutes and they think you’re awesome so again highly recommend spending time on the community site if you can the last thing that I kind of want to just talk about is for those who are either in a new deployment or for those of you who have been using work friends so well with your group that now another business unit or another group kind of wants to join your instance I am a huge fan obviously of the one global instance I know everybody says they work in silos but eventually people want to come together or share resources or shared reporting you might have executives that say I want to see what everybody’s doing across the network so for that I wanted to kind of include this slide I have done probably about 20 21 deployments now within our instance some perfect some not so perfect um and Kathy and I kind of worked with this alignment arrow and that has been very helpful when it comes to new deployments work front is wonderful the fact it is I find very flexible you can do the same thing a lot of different ways but that can kind of cause a problem if you don’t have a process or a policy or the roles and responsibilities kind of laid out so this is the arrow or the chart that we use the biggest thing is is the agency or business unit even ready for a work front thing so do you have an active executive sponsor so somebody who’s actually going to kick off trainings send out communications if it’s somebody who’s just going to sign a check and then wants to back off that’s not going to be helpful for you at all especially if you’re like me coming in from the corporate side into a local office you know they don’t really care about my opinion so having that executive sponsor is super important and then yeah roles and responsibilities setting specific dates for things that process and by process I don’t mean like the high level like oh it goes from strategy to creative to development to deployment I mean things like how does a project get started because I have find even when you’re working with sneeze or super users if I interview 12 people they’ll have 12 different ways of how a project gets started then that gives you the ability to kind of compromise synchronize get all that down into one process so then when you go to build that out and work front which is going to be your job as the system admin it will make your life so much easier by having all those questions kind of answered ahead of time you can go in and start building out what you need fairly easy for that so kind of wanted to just share that with all of you and that’s it that’s what I have for the ones that I kind of want to share I didn’t want to spend the whole hour talking but I haven’t really been looking at the chat but are there any questions or anything anyone has I jotted a couple of questions down Anthony white while you were given all those really great trick tips and tricks so I can go ahead and read some off for you the first one was do you have tips for finding things in the API Explorer if you want to just kind of circle back to that oh um well so the biggest thing is you to learn the object type that you want first and what’s interesting is there’s way more object types than you think like you’re like oh there’s not that many there’s like programs and projects and tasks and then you’ll go in there and especially for project it’s like project financials project is budget so the first thing the API Explorer taught me was what is even available to you my favorite object type is the assignment object type for those of you that like reports because that breaks everything down for you at the assignee level but that I never would have even known that was a possibility without having to go through this so the first thing the API Explorer just lets you know is what’s even available to you and then you can click into like I put tasks for instance and it shows you what fields are in there that you have access to and then again the biggest thing that I find helpful is the relationships what is those one-to-one relationships that you can reference and then what are those many to one relationships that are tied it’s a great way for you to know so if somebody asks a question I want to have a report on the number of open issues for a user okay well I want to use a report I have to go through so kind of helps you then build those relationships if you’re looking for a very specific thing like what are the children of a task there isn’t really a search feature an API for that it is a bit more of a browsing type tool but what’s nice though is that even if you start with like tasks and then you go to children and then you get to the children the name of the children like it helps you kind of I wish I would have taken the screenshot of it open but when you click one of these it opens up and actually sends you a link to that object type so you can kind of keep going through the process as you go through that so awesome all right well one more question here but please keep keep asking questions in the chat this isn’t the last time to ask them do you have users that are in multiple groups and are there any red flags in doing that also do your groups equal your resource pools it’s a great question so so for the first one we do have people that are in multiple groups actually Dina who is on the user group today which I’m so excited about she’s on like four different ones because she she oversees all of Europe so so yes you can definitely have people multiple ones I do like to keep the home group their home office or where they’re actually based or who they’re tied to in our financial system but they can be a part of multiple groups it tends to be the group admins or maybe some super users we have two agencies that work really close together so their super users help out on both of their agencies so they have that so yes now my workers my project managers those tend to only be in one group because they belong to just one agency they might help out another group or another agency but I just keep them in that one group as for the resource pools so for us we do have a one-to-one relationship with the resource pool in the group we did it that way so originally we were going to try departments the problem is is that we needed every department’s resource pool on every project and that was too hard to keep that compliance up and we really weren’t filtering by resource pools we were filtering more by group so yes we built the one-to-one relationship so we do have those there but yeah we kind of stuck it with the group just because if we did it by departments we then had to make sure we added every department to every project and the compliance on that to make sure that happened was just too difficult to maintain all right thank you so much for those thorough answers on again keep keep plugging away in the group chat with any any more questions we’re gonna take a brief moment here to actually switch to our first user group sorry breakout session this is the user group so give me one second to pull up the slide you okay so our first question that we’re gonna discuss in the in the first breakout session is what is your favorite system admin life hack I really hope that everyone has an answer to this you know even if you’re not a system administrator definitely get into the conversation and I learned some new things from from all the other participants in the user group breakout session so in a couple of seconds you’re gonna see your screen switch you’re gonna have you’ll be put into a breakout session group if you need to ask any questions there’s an ask for help button down at the bottom you can also choose to leave the breakout room and that’ll put you back in the kind of empty main room that’ll just have the couple of hosts in and I think we’re gonna have about 10 10 minutes in this session so should be 10 minutes of really great conversation and with some magic from Kristen’s and she’s gonna get us into these rooms yeah hi everybody I’m gonna go ahead and open up the breakout rooms your screens will refresh automatically and you will just be moved into the rooms like I said you’re not Anthony mentioned or sorry Andrew mentioned you’re not missing anything missing anything here in the main room I will be here by myself but if you do have any questions certainly let us know and the the question is going to be what are your favorite system admin life hacks and we actually have about 15 to 20 minutes so we’ll have a decent amount of time so I’ll be back here in just a little bit you admin it’ll give us some detail anybody I can go so my name is I’m semi Peters I I’m a system admin for fidelity investments been an admin for almost three years one thing that I wish I had known when first becoming admin is not to delete custom fields on forms because that blows away any historical reporting so kind of had to learn that the hard way so I wish that I would have known either you know to put them out on a separate like admin type form or hide them on the existing form so that would have been nice to to know and not have to go back and update all those projects that’s that’s a critical one and actually dad on to that one of the things that we I was like terrified to update the custom form but yeah inside you can do a section that then only admins can see and then you can move those archive field so we now have archive filled sections on forms so nobody else sees them but me if I need them because I like kept the form the same and I would just put like a little description feel like don’t fill out this we don’t need it anymore so yeah be yeah yeah same here right old hat for for everyone here but in addition to semis life hack I wish I would have known not to delete users I found out through a colleague who deleted a bunch of users and then we lost all their data so yeah yeah disable disable disable the first breakout room I was in that was one topic we all kind of talked about was just throttle back on the permissions to delete for all the access levels that will put you in a good spot straightaway so you’re not in that position yeah we actually have for projects now a status that just says needs to be deleted and we have an API call that checks it because some people were deleting projects that were a hundred percent complete thinking they needed to do that as opposed to just make it complete so we have yeah we’ve gotten rid of all the delete functionality Wow this is all this is probably my favorite user group that I’ve attended because I’m really soaking up every everything that everyone’s saying when I I’m gonna swing it over to Monique I see your hand is raised love to hear what you would have loved to learn as a new system admin yeah I mean all of that stuff about deleting is awesome but one of the things that I I’ve been an admin for five years now and one of the things that I wish I knew early on was what Anthony had mentioned of the difference between assignments and assigned to especially when it comes to task reports and project reports and all of those because it took us embarrassingly too long to figure out that and was like this should work why isn’t this working how can people know what they’re all on the same task if it only shows one person so definitely double check your your views and make sure that you’re filtering on assignments and not assigned to and that’ll save you a lot of headache especially when you’re trying to make like things assigned to me reports and things like that oh so Monique with assignments is that just everyone that’s assigned to a particular task versus assigned to is just a single person yeah so assigned to is the task owner and you’re probably looking at me like tasks don’t have owners what are you talking about in work front when you look at that list of assignments there’s a little dot next to one person and they are the primary assignee or the task owner whichever phrase you want to use it they mean the same thing but if you don’t make a conscious effort to like say I’m gonna make you know you the task owner that it’s whoever’s name you type in first is who is that person so definitely we make sure that you use assignments instead of assigned to and that should take care of everything for you perfect thank you and to add on to that there’s two different ones there’s assignment roles and assignment users so if you’re looking for art directors make sure you do the assignment roles not assignment user role ID because that only then works if the person there’s a real person not a role so yeah that that took a long time to figure out too all right super helpful a Darryl Marsh you’re up thank you again Monique one thing that I wish we would have thought more well let’s first off I I’m in a sys admin for a little over a year now one thing that I wish that there were people before me I wish we had a better naming convention when it comes to custom fields so everybody kind of wants to see the same thing so the more kind of departments that use work front they all tended to use the same names so if you look up custom fields you might see you know five you know dates for completion or something like that so that’s really confusing so if you’re looking for something specific like in a report you have to kind of you know pick one of those five and hope that’s the one you’re looking for as opposed you know to having a better naming convention for those fields so we’re changing it now but we wish we would have known some of that in the beginning yeah just a piggyback after what you said Darryl one of the things that I do because we have a thousand plus fields in there is if I’m not sure I’ll make a report that pulls every possible option with my filters just to figure out which one is the one that we’re using I also have a report of custom fields which in work front they’re called parameters but I have a parameter report where it lists out which forms it’s used on and then I also have a forms report which is called a category that lists out what fields are there so I kind of cross-reference those if I’m not sure which ones are being used by what group of people yeah great great great great thank you Darryl Peter Reese you’re up so actually I’m kind of piggybacking on Darryl’s point about custom fields just making sure that I’ve been an admin for a little over two years and I wish that I’d been more forceful in for my own use and for other people’s uses of making sure we had naming conventions for objects tightened up because we’ve got a lot of we’re an agency and so we have a lot of client portfolios so I’ve out belatedly started going okay your portfolio is gonna have you know the NW prefix so all of your custom form fields are gonna start with that prefix so we know that you know their date computer computer custom completion date or budget member date that’s that clients field so nobody else should use it so there’s not a confusion about who’s using what fields that would’ve been something that really helpful and then another point I wish I started a governance group earlier I’m kind of ramping that up now as we push into a larger rollout but just making sure that as I’m kind of the main admin that everything’s not just I’m not making all the decisions and not responsible for everything and making sure that I’m bringing people from other disciplines who are using work front getting their perspective about you know how their their departments may work and what information they might need just to make sure that the system is built in a way that is going to be best for the whole company and not not just what I think even though what I think is obviously the most important and correct thing making sure there’s other people’s buy-in on on how the best way to make the system work great great point Peter anyone I mean anyone else want to piggyback off of Peters all right well thanks again Ronald Erie please give us thoughts so one of the things that I wish I had known when we were first deploying our instance is just generally the overall methodology of using custom calculations because at the time we were creating custom fields and then we were using custom calculations in our reporting that actually limited us to some of the things that we could do and so what we trans transferred or started doing instead was we started making those calculations in custom fields on custom forms and then pulling those fields into the reports and that made it a lot easier to manipulate the data in ways that we wanted to manipulate it that we couldn’t do as easily or as robustly when we were just doing those calculations on the report and sometimes we couldn’t even do those calculations on the report if it was in a group or something like that so whatever calculations you may want to do put even if you need to hide them and put them in an admin only section put them on your form and then you can report them in your reports from the form that’s great I really like that one has there been any experiences with that sort of knowledge or lack thereof in the past well the one thing I just wanted to add on to that make sure and something that I like to do is make sure you run the report then using your permissions so that they can then see those fields because since they’re admin only only admins can see them and I also do this for any report that it requires an executive or a whole group it’s better to use it with your permissions because nothing can be hidden from you as the system admin so even if they don’t have access to it they’ll at least see the information they can’t click into it until they get access but at least they know it exists in the system and they’re not missing information so they trust the data a little more than thinking oh wait there’s stuff missing here so workfronts not accurate so I do a lot of reporting where it’s using my permissions to elevate it so they make sure they see everything Awesome. And Anthony just asking from there what happens when you leave the business? All of the reports report up and down. So like when Kathy Haven leaves me and then all the reports don’t work? Yeah then you have to go in and you have to change all of them. Yes yes yes luckily you can do a report that says running as permissions and see who it’s run as so you can change it the only one you can’t do is calendars Calendars it doesn’t even matter who it is whoever creates the calendar it’s tied to their account so if they leave you have to copy and redo the calendar but yes when a system admin leaves you have to go to all those reports and change it that’s really sad. Sorry it’s not fun. Actually we figured out a way around that if you don’t mind using up a yeah I know a little bit of job security you’ll let that go you don’t have to tell anybody else about this. Use it if you want to. If you don’t mind using up an account we created just a generic admin account for just that kind of thing. So it’s an admin account that technically doesn’t belong to anybody but it owns portfolios and you know if you need access rights on a report you give it that access. Right so it’s not tied to an actual person who may leave the company. If I could just actually make a comment about that we actually do something very similar not particularly for admin accounts but for any particular usage of reporting or anything like that we have a number of fake users that we’ve created specifically for purposes of reporting or project ownership and things of that nature. So yeah that’s that’s also a very good idea. Awesome very helpful. I have a question more I just have a question for folks on on the call here. We collect a lot of metadata right so we collect a lot of information and one of the challenges that we have is actually getting users to go into the forums and actually provide us with the information. I don’t know if anyone else on this call faces similar challenges and if so like are there any are there any tips or workarounds that you’ve implemented that we could try to take advantage of without having to bring in like a third party tool? We have a double check dashboard that we use of course getting people to look at the double check dashboard is interesting but what it does is it’s just a bunch of mini reports that says like projects that don’t have a portfolio or projects that are missing a job number you know things like that. It’s very clear very specific what you need to do to whatever item appears in that report and then sometimes you can bulk edit it you know to fill it out but we’ve kind of done that so just shows you all the little things that we have either if it’s important or it’s just advisory like hey here’s projects that are 100% complete that are still current do they really need to be that way. But yeah we have very specific it’s unfortunately has like 12 different reports on the dashboard but it’s just everything that they need to do to be in compliance. Got it thank you. We do something similar as well Anthony but for mine it’s actually creative facing so it’s for the actual designers to fill in and they know that this dashboard should always be empty so if something shows up there’s something wrong and then to kind of dangle that carrot a lot of times before holiday will get out early but what we’ll do is the team lead or the project manager will actually look at their report and make sure that they don’t have anything open there and if they do they can’t leave early. Until they have it filled in so usually right before a holiday our data is good to go.

Anything else it’s the wild west. Awesome thank you we’ve got about three more raised hands here Zuleika Anthony and then Denise will wrap it up.

Obviously please keep the conversation going you know afterwards in our discussion boards but Zuleika and Anthony and then Denise about two minutes each so. Yeah so going on what they were talking about a report of the dashboard I’ve actually built in a lot of my fields that have to be completed into my view so I’ve done some conditional formatting if it displays yellow or red it means it’s a required field that needs to be completed. So we’ve definitely used that and another thing and I’ve done that per landing page so they have it on the task view they have that on the project view they have it on like as many views as possible we created a dashboard that we call the project audit dashboard and anything that displays there. That has a yellow color they have to complete we do we did pull out to make sure that they are aware of the assignment versus the sign to because we wanted them to know the difference so they actually the report actually pulls both fields and then the other thing I wish I would have known more. Before this whole system admin stuff happened is templates. I think we build our templates a little bit too late in the process. So if you’re starting off new templates are key and it will definitely get your people more involved in wanting to use the tool. So if you have the right information in there, it’ll be easier transition for new people. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing Zalika. Denise Moore, you’re up. Well, mine is more about you guys should all be very thankful. I have been an admin for over seven years back when it was that task. Some of you might be in the same boat, but we didn’t have the ascent training. We didn’t have the kind of community page. We had people that come out a week at a time. It took a very long time to get up to speed. So I love the idea that Workfront continues to grow that and change that make the trainings better and Just kind of keeping an eye on what’s coming up. So if you are building something that potentially you’re not backing yourself into a corner that when this new fancy shiny tool gets released that you have to kind of tear that down and rebuild that so keep an eye on those kind of release notes is my suggestion. So that you have an idea of what’s coming up and start to prepare for how you might want to take advantage of those things and and maybe in some cases. Do it sooner rather than later so that you don’t continue to make it more difficult for yourself and for the other users when either that thing is turned off or you’re just not able to take advantage of all the bells and whistles because of a particular way it was built. To begin with, so I’m very thankful that Workfront has continued to make all those things better. Thank you for sharing today’s we’re really grateful that you were able to join us to and let us know, you know, Anthony Pernice I think I did skip over you with your raised hand. I’m so sorry. You’re our last one here. Yeah, just kind of goes back a bit to to some governance governance stuff but looking at your the fields in your in your forms. We have a number of divisions within Healthcare Consultancy Group that operate somewhat independently and as a result, we all follow the same, you know, the every job as a job number, but we all had our own versions of the custom form with job number job and oh job numbers. Every permutation thereof you want to build a report and it’s wait, which one was it again? So having a sort of, you know, governance committee having people communicate that kind of thing. And concentrate on the fields that everyone is going to have in common make use of that. That said, when you decide to deprecate things if you’re going to delete a form, delete the fields in the form if they’re not being used.

The system will show you what what forms fields are being used in if it’s blank get rid of it.

Wonderful. Yeah. Thank you, Anthony. All right, I’m going to go ahead and throw my slides up on here real quick. One moment. While you’re doing that, Andrew, I also just wanted to give a little bit of a shout out to Monique Evans. This brainchild of this system admin best practices that was her idea. She had shared it as feedback at the end of another user group. And so round of applause. Thank you, Monique. This clearly worked out really well. So I think we’ll probably be doing these more often. This was not a one off for sure. Absolutely. I agree. Chef Monique, thank you for joining today. What are you cooking up back there by the way? It’s from Ratatouille. So it’s just hanging out. Nice. Great. Yeah. So thanks for always as always like I’ve seen you in these user groups many times and I always feel a little bit better when you’re here because I’m like, well, if something comes up Monique’s gonna answer it for the group. But you know, in terms of keeping this conversation going everyone like thanks for joining right now. I hope you all learned as much as I did. And we want to keep hearing from you. So take the conversations up to one.workfront.com. We love hearing that. It’s where you’re able to collaborate with similar industries or departments. This is where you can harness the power of your peers. And that’s a great plug into Innovations Lab, formerly known as Idea Exchange. I know that for this group specifically system administrators, that’s probably a really powerful tool for you. So check the leaderboard, see what ideas are getting upvoted and and then you’ll know where we’re work funds heading with you. And you’ll also be able to learn about upcoming events. So, you know, hopefully we’ll have some in person events at some point in the future and we hope to see you and meet you all in person. I know I can’t wait to to meet some people. So, yeah, thank you again. There should be a poll that popped up on your screen here. We really would love to hear your feedback on on today’s user group and a little little bit of information on how you can help. And a little look into what’s coming up for the rest of this fall season. There’s a few more user groups. Please go ahead and register for any that are interesting to you or that you want to learn more about. And coming soon. We’ve also we’re going to be covering topics like reporting to executives and integrations and process automation. So lots to look forward to. It doesn’t end here by any means. So again, thank you all so much for joining. Thank you from the bottom of our work front hearts. Everyone have a great rest of your week.

Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Bye.