5 Tips for Automating Naming Conventions Using Workfront Fusion

Transcript

So welcome to today’s workshop, five tips for automating naming conventions using Workfront Fusion. I am joined here today by folks in professional services and field engineering. So while this event is being hosted in partnership with Customer Success, by no means are we the experts in this space. And so the session is going to be recorded. So if you don’t have to worry about taking any screenshots or anything, you will get a copy of the recording. You’ll get a link to the slide deck. So keep an eye out for a follow-up email that’ll come this afternoon. I will do my very best to get it out within an hour or two, pending you guys don’t have hundreds of questions. So also from a housekeeping standpoint, question. So you guys are muted by default. You guys, although you do have the option to raise your hand or come on camera or come off mute, but I think it might be best if you guys just post your question in the chat throughout the presentation. We will have ample time at the end for questions. And so I will just collect all of those questions and we’ll kind of jump through them as we go.

Or as I’m sorry, Brian and Ewan finish their presentation. So like I said, post your question in the chat pod. We will get to it after their presentation’s over, but you guys are not here to hear me speak. Although, like I said, I’m part of the Customer Success team with Cynthia and Leslie. You guys are here to hear from Ewan and Brian. So Ewan, if maybe you want to kick off some introductions.

Yeah, hi everybody. My name’s Ewan Rishka. I’m an architect with the Field Engineering team based in Seattle. I’m joined here with Brian, Brian. Oh yeah, thanks. Hey, I’m a principal consultant for Workfront and Fusion. And I know some of the folks on the call here, but I am normally out of Sacramento, California, but now I’m in Tiffin, Ohio. We’re visiting some relatives out here. So good to see everybody. And I hope you enjoy this one. It should be fun. And we’ve got Nicole, Leslie and Cynthia on the line. And they’ll help us out in the chat as we go. And feel free to interact there. I won’t be able to see it until maybe near the end. So I don’t think Brian probably will either. So hopefully we’ll be able to get to your answers later on in the presentation.

We’re going to go ahead and talk about what we’re going to, I mean, we’re basically going to cover some Fusion tips.

We’re going to do this under the context, not just a Fusion, but in general, as far as using applications. We’re going to do this kind of under the context of Workfront. It’s going to be Workfront centric, you know, Fusion based tips, but just want to wrap that up. We should be wrapping up around the end of the hour. So 1 p.m. Eastern time or 10 a.m. Pacific time.

So I want to start off by just making sure that people are thinking about things in a certain way. When we’re talking about naming schemes and we’re talking about setting up objects, if you think about them from the relationship, how do they relate to other things as opposed to just the component that you’re working on? A lot of times you’re given a responsibility, something that you need to do and you focus in on getting that one thing done. When you’re talking about building out your structure and your systems and those sorts of things, if you think about it just from that component, you’re going to miss things that are really important downstream. And so that’s one of the big points that we’re going to be pushing across this. This is based off of some systems thinking, thinking broader than what you’re faced with directly.

Other things that are related to that are exceptions. How do you handle exceptions to the rules? And then I like to think about things from a very circular perspective. So if you think about it from the process, and I’m using a Deming model. So if you’re familiar with Charles Deming, he had this PDCA, Plan, Do, Check Act. If you’ve done any methodology training and stuff, it’s usually incorporated into that.

It’s not linear. The idea is that that’s circular. So think about this from, okay, I’m doing this so I can do something very similar to it again and I can use that information again. And when we think about naming schemes, this all applies because you use reporting, for example, to drive things forward.

When we talk about this from a work front perspective, there’s a relationship with the incoming mechanism. So however you’re getting ideas and you’re getting campaigns, you’re getting objects, how you’re gonna use it downstream. We’re gonna talk a bit about assets and the asset naming structure and how that ties in as we go through this.

And then the other thing to think about is, not just think about it now, but as much as possible, think about it from the future. What you’re gonna need six months down the line, a year down the line, even five years down the line, when it comes to naming schemes, you wanna think about these as long-term needs.

So for tip one, that five-year idea really, really sticks on this. It is sticking to your naming convention. So use your Post-it notes. No, don’t use your Post-it notes.

Avoid having to change a lot of times when you’re dealing with a naming convention. Really build to something that you can maintain long-term. Take the time to think about those related objects and move on forward.

Most of us have stories. If you’ve worked in business, especially if you’ve been a system admin for a while, you have some kind of a story about going into a new workspace or getting access to a new tool that doesn’t have the right kinds of controls and the right kind of schemes in place.

And sometimes you can see the history of a tool that maybe has had three or four naming schemes and there wasn’t some consistency through that. There wasn’t an effort maybe to go back and clean up other objects. So think about these things in that manner.

Build out a naming scheme that makes sense.

Now, Brian has seen a lot of really interesting examples. And he’s gonna walk us through a little bit of some of these typical naming conventions that you see. We kind of centered in on these five typical components. So unique ID, we’re gonna spend a lot of time talking about that. Brian’s got some great examples that he’s gonna show you. Using some kind of a timing perspective, right? Yeah, these are fun. These are time typical on the left. It’s obviously way more flexible than this, but the unique ID we’ll talk about in a moment, but that’s pretty critical for your naming convention, particularly for things like the example at the bottom right where it says Q325 email. How many emails do you have in Q325, right? That’s not gonna work. You have to have something a little bit more specific or have a unique identifier in there. Quarter month year is pretty important. A lot of folks will put that in there. Some sort of combination. Month isn’t usually as critical as quarter. Year is usually included. Line of business, that’s usually in there as a code or something similar, right? Region, region’s usually a code also, something similar to that. Asset deliverable type at the bottom. Asset deliverable type is also sometimes a code. Sometimes it’s not. You’ll see examples of these on the right. And so you and I, we kind of gathered a few of these examples here of some actual product codes that are kind of modified here and there just to see what they sometimes would look like and kind of take a look at the right. And I’m sure you and you get your favorites in here. I may have one or two favorites, but I think I like the top one maybe the best. It does have unique ID. The BISI might be the code there. What are you thinking? Yeah, no, it’s got a good portion of what I’d be looking for in a naming scheme. It’s a little bit challenging to human read it because you’ve got so many different numbers on it. I kind of like the third from the bottom option. Yep, that’s the next one. Because it’s like trying to keep it as concise as possible.

The second one is scary as all get out.

The second one looks like it’s a combination. It has EU comm COE support. And about halfway down you repeat EOE comm COE support. And the top part looks like graphic design. The bottom part looks like PDF updates. There’s two different things you’re doing in this project and it’s not very good in naming convention to cram these together. I’d probably have in the naming convention it’s a multiple assets, a multi, and then in the forms you’d specify what it is. Or you separate these into two projects because these look like two projects to begin with. You don’t cram these together like this. It’s very confusing.

You kind of start to get the idea of what these might look like and what would work better than others. And one of the other challenges when you look at these too is, okay, if I’m going to use this, if I’m going to connect to this project downstream, what does that look like? Am I going to run into character limits on that second option? And so thinking about some of those things is always useful. How are you going to reference this downstream? Yeah, and so this is a typical breaking it out, but not limited to these things. But this is a typical good looking naming convention that I encounter. You have unique ID, quarter year, line of business, region, asset deliverable type. They’re all separated by underscores. Underscores can help.

It’s a preference. Sometimes dashes, you can put spaces in there. The reason you might do underscores is you might use the same naming convention on an external object, like a folder. Folders in an external system may require no spaces, that kind of thing, right? Some people just have that preference. It really depends on what’s easier on the eyes and how to keep things separate.

Underscore a dash between these things can really help your mind focus on the components. So when I look at a list of projects, I know exactly what all these things are. I know that it’s got a unique ID. I know when it happens. I know that it’s the marketing team, it’s the APAC region and what I’m producing. I can see this right away and understand what exactly we’re doing in this project. And it’s not confusing to all the people that encounter this. So it’s typical stuff, once again, not limited to these items here. It’s going to be unique to your area, but keep an eye on the conventions here.

So this is kind of fun where in Fusion, we can do more, right? You’re going to create these naming conventions automatically, potentially with Fusion. I’ll show you how to do that in a moment. But I don’t go this far, which with the demo today, but you can if you want to, where you can actually say in the request, I’m producing six email assets for this particular project.

Fusion can literally go through one through six and do the naming convention on the bottom left and name individual assets. Why would you want to do that? Because in market, you do need individual assets to be named with their own naming convention when you eventually deploy whatever your marketing asset is. That can actually start with Fusion. That’s really what I’m trying to say here. On the bottom right is a similar example where you could actually get from a Workfront Request form to the bottom right, which also includes localization on the bottom three examples, right? You can also do that if you want to with Fusion. Little bit more advanced, but just something to keep in mind that you can start with your individual asset naming conventions using Fusion and put those in Workfront. I’ve seen really two options for these. You can put, say, the lists in a paragraph text box that would literally look like this kind of stacked item in one paragraph text box. You can also use an object in Workfront like an issue and use individual issues on a project that represent these items that are going to market. And you could put additional fields on those if you want to use them in a different form. All that can be done on back of the Fusion. It’s pretty useful. Just want to just set that as an idea that you might want to do at some point if you want to get that detailed, but that’s all.

So the real tip here is set it and don’t forget it, right? If you’re going to get anything out of this tip, figure out what your naming scheme is, set it, and don’t forget what it is. You want to share that with the rest of the team too. And make it hopefully flexible to go across different groups and different departments and so that it works for everybody and everybody can stick to it. Tip two here, use unique identifier. I’m going to go into some examples here. And these are the two examples I’m going to run through. The first one is how do you get a unique reference number using just the default Workfront objects? And the first is a project reference number. You’re going to have a request that’s converted to a project and what happens is you go back into the project after you create it with Fusion and get the newly generated reference number and then you add it to the name. This can be done manually. I see folks do this manually without Fusion. They will create a project and go get the reference number and put it at the beginning of their project name as a unique identifier. That’s also good if you don’t have Fusion, it works great. The second one is a little more complex. Some folks want to control the incrementing number itself. The reference number is not in order. It’s not 34001, 34002. It jumps and it keeps getting higher and higher but it jumps across objects so it’s not consistently in order. Incrementing numbers can be. You have to do that with Fusion though and I’ll show you how to do that. And I’ve got a good example of it. It’s also going to be in the packet. We’ll send the blueprints for Fusion as well. So I’m going to actually jump right in. And the next one, if you like, Euan, this shows the first example. I’m going to go through these actually in a live way here and maybe a little quick. So if this is all recorded, if you need to go back in and see how this is done later, that’s perfectly fine. Real quick note on these. These is a new marketing request. How I’m doing these, there’s three different scenarios that fire from the same queue. If you’re curious how it works, I’m filtering on the queue topic, which is the queue topic. Hey Brian, can you expand your screen a little bit? Yeah, yeah, that’s fine. I’m actually going to go in and out for a sec, but this is the queue topic ID here. If you’re curious how to get the queue topic ID, it’s actually, I have a report. You probably just do a report. This is a report on a particular queue project, and it shows my three queue topics and the ID. So you’d use the ID in the filter here. If this is a little advanced, that’s fine. The main thing I want you to get is the concepts behind this. This is a fairly easy and quick Fusion scenario to go rename it based on the naming commit or the reference number. So this is a marketing request. It comes in, it’s a new item that comes in. This is a miscellaneous action converted to a project. Pretty normal for these. You can put the project name in here. You put the reference number. You can put your category IDs. I may have gotten booted out of Fusion. Let’s see here. It may make me re-sign in. This one right here, get new project reference number. So as soon as I, yeah, it’s working. As soon as I create the new project, I’m actually going to query on that existing project. The results here, that’s the ID from the new project. I’m going to query on the existing new project, get the reference number in the output of here. And then from there, I’m going to use the reference number. There’s the name and reference number coming out of this module. And then I’m going to set the new project name. I usually like to do this in its own module, the set project name, and it’s going to be reference number dash new state name. And then it’s going to update the project with a new name. And that’s really all it does. It creates the project and then it updates with a new reference number. So if I’m going to do this in Workfront, once again, I’m zoomed in quite a bit, hopefully you can see this. I’m going to do a request.

I know I’m moving a little fast, but once again, you can go back to the reporting. This is a marketing request. This is once again, separated on Q topic. For this particular scenario, let’s say test BH 200.

And then the new project name, we’ll talk about this later, but this is actually a field that is, if you put too many characters in it, it warns you. And this is a good thing. If you have things that are going into your naming convention from your form, we’ll talk about that later, but you can limit the characters. My business unit, my region, typical things, right? We’ve seen before in our naming conventions, not using these yet. I’m just showing the project reference number before we get to these. Target due date, it’s coming in on two days, and then a couple extra pieces here. And then I’m going to actually, in order to show the scenario run, I’m going to hit the play button and then hit the submit here. Hopefully it pays attention, picks it up and runs in here.

Sometimes there’s a little bit of delay.

And then this guy.

And in case there is a delay, here’s one I just did. So this is a reference number here, right here, this 101, while we wait for that one to go. This right here uses the 17050. I think it just ran, here it goes.

I can go back to my list, but this is the idea where it gets the reference number, which is located in the overview, 17050. It adds it to the name of the request automatically, which it just did for this one. If I go back to my view here, I’m going to convert it to 17165. Once again, this is not in order, right? It skips. So don’t expect that reference number to be in order.

Yeah, so the reference numbers are shared across different work front items. There is the nice advantage of that, though it’s a system generated number and you’re going to find it through the API, just in the general field. So you don’t need a custom field for it. So there’s an advantage there with using the reference number. You can do it manually. And if you share and go to the next slide real quick, let me explain what the next scenario does. This is the number that you’re creating, which is an incrementing number, which is done with a work front custom field. This one here, pretty important, I’ll slow down a little bit, determine where to store the incrementing number. In this example, I’m using the company object and I’m adding a numeric text field, just as a field there to store my number. I find the company object is a nice place to do this because it usually doesn’t change and there’s usually only one major one that you’re using for your main company. It’s not a bad place to do it. You can store it in other places. To create a fusion endpoint scenario, I’ll show you what that means. The reason you do, excuse me, a fusion endpoint scenario is because there could be multiple fusion scenarios that are trying to do this, that are trying to get the next project number to use in your naming convention. So you don’t want to have individual scenarios, all the scenarios doing that. You want to have one scenario doing it so that those requests would stack up one at a time and you’d never accidentally step on it on itself and use the same number twice. So if you have an individual scenario starting with an endpoint to do this, you always get the next number consistently, even if there’s five fusion scenarios trying to get the next number. I’ll show you how that works. And then I’m going to walk through the request as well, where we’re actually going to do the request. And this is the basic scenario where you see below, it’s just going to get the next number using that blue nod module. It’s going to do the same thing, set the project name and then update the project name with a… What I’m going to do first is show you how this incrementing number works. It’s on the company object. So the company object is here. If you go settings, set up, the companies are in here. And then I have a…

Was it the global to GDP? Is it this one? I don’t know which one I used here. Nope, must be the work front one.

This guy, custom forms, incrementing numbers. So this is really all it is. It’s just an incrementing project number. And it’s very specific, it’s next project number, right? I did that on purpose because I don’t want to be confused. If I just say project number, was that the current project number that I’m using? No, this is the next one that I’m using. Next project that’ll get a number will get 6011. That’s how I’ve set this up. Very clear, right? Next project number. If we go back here and I go back to see how this works, this is actually going to work on this endpoint-based scenario. So I’ll walk through what this looks like. This is a webhook endpoint that I call from other scenarios. I’m going to call this URL right here from the other scenarios using that HTTP blue module. I’m also going to say that this is a project request. In case there’s other incrementing numbers I want, maybe I want an incrementing one for my tasks also. This is project specific. So this is the incoming request type. This is going to say project. So, and then it’s going to go up this route if I want to do a project request. If I want to add a task version of this with its own number, I can come down here. Maybe your different departments want their own numbers. I’ve encountered that. They’re going to come down different routes. This is a product request based on that incoming request type. This gets the next project number. You’ll see this in the Fusion scenario. It actually just queries this particular company. And then the output, sometimes you can click on the filter to see what’s coming out of it. You can see the output includes the next project number. It’s just a field on the company that I’ve got in there. And that’s going to be 6011 for this one. Then this is going to increment it. This increments that project number right here. And it’s just a simple formula. It sets in this company, the next project number to that project number plus one. That’s all it does. And then it returns it. It says, I’m going to send back a 200 status. This is a good request. And get the next project number. In order to test these, these guys here, I hit the play button, you can see it. I’m going to duplicate this tab and I’m going to hit the play button on my other test here, naming conventions. And it’s the blue one, 4.1 test scenario four. All this does is it calls that endpoint and it sends the word project. That’s all it does. So if I hit play here, hopefully it comes back pretty quickly. And it hits the endpoint. It actually ran through this whole scenario. It returned my number. And if we did it correctly, the number it returns in the data is 6011. That’s my next number. And it incremented it. So if I hit play again, guess what? The next number is 6012. It just incremented it, 6012. You do this all day. So the scenario that uses this is 2.0 where I’m going to get a new marketing request, convert to project, same thing I did before. Use that exact blue module, sending the word project to that endpoint. Get that next project number, set the name, equals that number dash the name, and then update the new project name. That’s all it does. And so if we go back to, let’s go back to Workfront and we’ll just do a quick request here.

And new project request, I’m at 200. So this is going to be a marketing request. Use this Q topic this time, BHS 200.

And new project name, budget.

That’s not required, but I’ll do it anyway. It’ll say there’s an IT project, region, project goal. And all these are required. Do date is, and test, test, test. And then hit the play button. You don’t actually have to hit the play button on these. If you know Fusion, it’s just for me to see what’s going on when I’m testing.

And hit that and see if it goes right away. And it did this time right away, I love that. And so then it converted it, right? This is my BHS 200 here.

If I refresh this, maybe I should have done 201 just to be less confusing. But it will get the next one, which is 6013. And it creates the naming convention for that. And that’s really the demo for this guy. I know this is pretty fast on going through this. You watch my webinars, I do Google fairly fast, but you can feel free to go back and watch this. And then you’re going to get the blueprints for these also. To get the blueprints, they’re not going to work right away. You might have to fiddle with a couple of these modules to get maybe a template ID or to get the Q topic ID in here. But you get the gist of it on how it works. That’s the whole main point. So hopefully that’s helpful. I’m going to stop here and then go back to the presentation here.

tip three is using a work front form field to drive your conventions. If you imagine all of your conventions are cheap, the line here is your shepherd. So let’s drive your conventions.

One of the big things that we see, and Brian touched on this earlier on the presentation, was using the line of business or business unit code. If you can set these on higher level objects, in this situation, in this example, Brian’s got them on the program, but you can set those on the company. You can set those at the portfolio, some higher level object that you can reference. You can really drive your naming conventions.

Within that, and before we get into too much detail on that, I wanted to talk about special characters because it’s important to understand how special characters go into play. When you’re in Fusion, you can use replaces to replace special characters.

This is broken down from the inside out. So if you think about it, the first replace here is talking about replacing these special characters with an underscore. So you can see that that underscore is located at the end. It’s replacing all of these characters that are highlighted here. And those look a little scary, Euan. So it’s probably not as scary as it looks, but it’s just really just replacing bad characters. And you can literally cut and paste this and use it and just throw your variable in, right? Yeah, definitely. And yeah, so this is the field name is up here. Actually, this should have a close statement on it. This is the field name. So in this situation, you can see this. This is actually one that I recently implemented for handling SharePoint calls, because there are special characters that are not allowed in SharePoint document folders. And so this is an example of how you can replace those characters. When I did that, I researched what characters are problematic, not only on the SharePoint side, but also on the Workfront side. So I could make sure that I was working with both of those. And you’re making remote folders that are particularly fussy about this stuff. And a lot of times you’re making a folder using the naming convention of your project. You really have to replace your characters. This is a good way to do it.

Oh, these are fun. So this is an example, and I’ll show you what this looks like in Workfront in a minute, but of different fields that we’re using to create the naming convention. So that on the left here, the business unit is actually a program type ahead field. Those are actually your programs that come up in that list. And the user may not have any idea that that’s a program type ahead. It just shows you a list. The region one is an abbreviated single select dropdown. All it is, it really just has MBA and APAC and stuff in there. On the far right, you can see a single select dropdown with the values in there, which you can also do, right? You can do this as a single select dropdown that has the values. And Fusion can actually see those incoming values. So the human would see accounting, customer service, human resources. That’s what the human sees. Fusion sees the incoming ACT, CS, and HR. So you use those in your naming convention. And then folks should be familiar with what ACT, CS, and HR mean in order for it to really be effective so you can see right away what that project is, right? And so you’ll see in a moment, Fusion’s doing this. This is using data indicators, which is fun. And hopefully you can click on that at the bottom there, which actually shows you how to do these, which is fun. But you can see the formulas in here. On the one on the left, the quarter, this is a pretty basic thing, right? Format the target due date. The target due date is an incoming field. And just put a Q there, and you want quarter, that ends up in a one, two, three, four. On the right, you want the year, format, date, now, YY. That ends up in just a two-digit year, but you can have a four-digit year, whatever. And the tokens for date and time parsing is really useful if you haven’t seen this on the bottom. And this is for nerds like you and me, really get a kick out of the tokens for date and time parsing so you know you’re really into Fusion if you really enjoy that kind of thing. And it’s not coming up. So the link should work for you when you receive the deck. We can throw it into the chat as well. So sorry about that. But this site is super useful when you’re dealing with those. And it can be, the thing that I always forget on this stuff is how simple it really can be. Like this quarter function is so simple. Like, oh, I just can hit Q. Okay, yeah, that’s pretty easy. Yes, that’s it. A Q, quarters in there, one, two, three, four. And you might have to put a Q in front of it in the name if you want Q three, but that’s it, right? Yeah. Cool.

Tip four is limiting the total name length.

You know, this lion here is measuring his whiskers here. He’s trying to, you know, how long should that length be, like the name be? Sometimes you end up with names that can be extremely long if they’re human entered. What this tip is recommending is to reduce that length.

And so you can do this actually within in Workfront.

And you use the validation rules. So a lot of people have asked, okay, how do you use validation rules? This particular call actually reduces the size of the name to make sure that you’re reducing it. In addition, you can do this in Fusion. And it’s basically a very similar kind of call. You can. The only issue with Fusion is it’s no longer controlled by humans. So it’s nice in this case to put it in the form if you can and say, because it’ll bark at you and say, the new project name must be 15 characters or fewer, right? Right in the form. As opposed to Fusion, we’ll literally just cut it off at 15 characters and keep going, right? And so, you know, it’s kind of your choice, right? Use the shift left mindset. Think about things earlier on in the process. That’s why this is probably a better practice.

Cool. I’m gonna jump into the next one, so let’s overview real quick here. This is actually gonna add the full naming convention, this next one. And you can see here are the things that are going into it. The quarter we talked about, the year, the project reference number, going back to the first example for that. The business unit code is coming from the type ahead, right? The region is coming from that dropdown menu. And then the new project name is the 15 character limit. I don’t have the asset or deliverable type in here, which might also be a dropdown menu. That’s pretty common for these, right? But this one is just using the 15 character one. And then just update the project. The next thing it’s doing is also going and getting the child tasks and putting the project reference number on the child tasks, which I’ve seen some folks do, because it can be useful. I’ll show you why in a few minutes. But I’m gonna jump in and show this one as well. This is the next scenario here, which is before we do that, let me show you a couple of things on the project. This is the program level form, and it really just has the business unit. The business unit does have, as I showed before, it does have the values in here. You can also go get the value off of the program level, which I am doing in the scenario. So the Fusion can go parse the type ahead field, go to the program and get information off of it. That’s what it shows you doing. This is actually a calculated field that shows you what is the code. And it’s pretty basic. It just says, show me this field. And it turns out that if you just show the field here and the calculation for this field, it shows you the value. So if you look at the list of programs, it’ll actually show you, open this in a new tab. This is actually the marketing workflow that shows you the list of the programs here. And then that’s the code, right? So sometimes it’s nice to see the code so you can familiarize yourself with these right next to the unit.

All right, so then this other one as I mentioned, the new project name has the validation on it. The validation is under the logic. The logic it’s right here, display skip, this is a validation. That’s right from the deck, right? That’s how you put that on there.

These are all required. The business unit is the type ahead field. It’s a program type ahead field and it’s filtered on this particular portfolio. Or it’s actually just saying this particular field, which is that business unit is not blank. So you could put it in different portfolios.

The region is just a required dropdown menu, right? These are the main ones that we’re using here. So I’m going to do another request.

Oh, actually let’s look at the scenario. I haven’t done that yet. So here’s the scenario. A couple of things on the scenario. This guy right here is parsing the incoming type ahead field. This is a program type ahead field, this business unit that’s coming in. Don’t need a data structure if that’s required and it’ll come out and it’ll look like ID, name and object code coming out of there. And then you can use those later on. This one’s getting the program info. If I want to get additional, once I parse this, I have the ID, I can go get additional information from this program once I get that ID out of here. Yeah, and here I’m going to go get the code, right? Then I always do this. I always set the naming convention variables. This is pretty important where this is showing you all the formulas and where they come from. As we showed earlier, the format date of the year, this is formatting a required date field from the intake form, required date field. Project reference number we talked about, I’m going to get that earlier. Program ID, we parsed the regions, the pull-down menu, the business unit code is coming from the program. And then I’m removing spaces and replacing them with underscores, that’s all I’m doing here. So I’ve settled these because you can come back later and say, well, this one doesn’t look right. What happened? They should all appear here because then you get to take all these and assemble them in your new name. Here’s my new name. You can see the quarters just one through four. So I forced the Q in there for the quarter and I’ve got quarter year, right? Quarter year, reference number, quarter year, business unit code region, new name, remove spaces. Updating the name.

I’ll show you why this is important in a minute, but I’m going to get all the child tasks, which is I’m actually filtering this on anything where the number of children is zero for this new project. So create the new project, find all the child tasks, and then I’m going to add that reference number to the child task name right here. Use the project reference number space, the name of the original task name, and that’s really all it’s doing. So this is a good technique for some folks who like to put the reference number on the tasks, which can be helpful in some situations. So let’s do this again. I’m going to go through my requests and then new request. This is a, let’s go with a marketing request, third one, and we’ll fill this out quickly. We’ll do Brian Test 202, new product name, same as this, budget, and of course, once again, if I keep typing, it’ll warn me and say your 15 character warning there, we just saw that, budget’s not required. This is business unit, let’s do a favorite marketing here. Region is Japan.

Project goal, these aren’t required. Target due date is required and it’s pretty important because we’re getting stuff out of that. We’re getting quarter and year out of that. And then that’s it. So let’s hit the play button and see if this guy comes in.

There it goes.

And all the way through and it updated. And then this guy found four tasks and updated the task name on the four tasks. So go back here, I should see my 202. It should have the new project in here now.

And convert it to this. There’s my, this looks a little bigger. There’s my reference number. There’s my Q425. There’s my marketing. There’s my region. There’s my name that’s underscore spaced, right? That’s my naming convention, right? Also, you’ll note that I have these reference numbers, the project reference number and the task. The task also has its own reference number. I don’t put that on here. I could if I wanted to, I don’t. I put the project reference number. So folks are looking at a task list in some interface that doesn’t show the project, which does happen. You can see which one that is, right? And that’s it. And if I assign this to myself, it actually would show up in a moment. And I’ll show you where that shows up in Photoshop. So we’re gonna keep moving here.

That’s a demo of this scenario, which is pretty useful. It shows the full naming convention and how to construct all that from different objects that are coming in from the request in the program. And you can jump back in there, you. So our next tip is balancing human browsing and AI discoverability. And so this is about making your naming scheme. So it works for both, you know, the reality that we’re living in now is that we live with AI and there’s some advantages there, but there’s also some complications. So making sure that you account for those things.

And we’re gonna switch back to Brian here in a second. He’s gonna show a little bit about how this relates to other tools. And he’s got a very specific example here. Yeah, so remember I assigned this task right here. We’ll see if it works, but I’ve signed this 17095 task one to myself in Photoshop and all the Creative Suite tools and most of the Creative Suite tools. You do have the work front plugin here, which does show you the task list. And sometimes you might encounter external systems. It’s a little hard to read. I can’t zoom in too much more, but you can see there’s the task name and task name and task name. If I refresh this guy, it should show the new one as well. It should show me anything that’s assigned to me. Oh, where the project is current. So if it doesn’t do this, I can flip this to current and it should show me in the task list in theory for the live demo. It may take a minute to get in there. But the idea is you’ve got the task name in here in a remote system. You might also see a task list in work front that also has the same situation where you only see the name of the task and you don’t see the project number. So that’s really why folks would do this to put the project reference number on the task.

And you’d see that here. It’s not showing up on it for some reason, but normally that would pop right in there.

So that’s really all I want to show you on that. Just keep in mind that that could be useful. It’s very, very easy to put those on the tasks. Yeah, I can take a couple minutes to show up there.

All right, I’m going to take back over and…

So just a couple more things on searching and browsing. Start your object name with the most useful thing, thing that your organization is useful.

Set it on both, that works for both work front and any of the referencing systems. So Brian just showed an example in Photoshop.

The creatives that are working in Photoshop will know that, hey, we’re looking for the specific reference number, right? It’s pretty easy to see that in that naming scheme that, okay, this is the thing I’m attaching onto. This is the thing that that project manager person told me to do stuff with. And it did show up. It took about five more seconds. Of course.

I’m just happy that your other Fusion Flows happened while you were working on it.

Put all the naming components into their own fields. Brian showed this in his examples where you have the different naming components all in that form. You can actually, now that you can use, if you’re using native fields, you can actually use the new capability in Workfront to pull the native field into the same form. So if you want to capture it all in the same form section, you can have all the fields that make up your name in one spot.

It makes it really easy to look at from an administration perspective.

One of the things we like to highlight here is you don’t necessarily need to rely on the name. In fact, we recommend not using the name for reporting filters and prompts. Use the components. So use the regions, use the business unit, use those sorts of things that you have from those other fields. It relates to the tip above it. And then add the details. Make sure you have details that are included in there. So it works for both humans and AI. So when your tools, we’ve got one in our system, for example. We have these three fields that are used for every engagement that we have. Those three fields are referenced by our AI tools. And so they help generate the output documents that we create for some of our engagements. And so making sure that you’re thinking about the way that those are used and then build those into your AI tools.

So general takeaways.

Use a naming scheme that includes unique identifiers. And stick to that. Keep to it.

Use the custom fields in Workfront or if you’re using other systems, same policy applies.

This guidance that we’re talking about today is really about thinking systemically. It’s about thinking about the relations between different things. And so having those in separate fields really makes a big difference. You’re gonna wanna use this for reporting prompts and any future changes that come down the path. It’s very, very, we see this mistake where folks wanna use the project name in their report. So the project name contains EMEA, right? That’s a terrible way to filter on a region. You should have the region in there as a custom field, and if you can’t do it from the incoming form, you have the user do it or you have Fusion do it, get that data in there that’s going into your naming convention as individual fields. It’s really important for reporting and other things in these AI prompts.

And this last tip is kind of the key to the whole thing. Use your automation, use Fusion to automate your naming scheme. Really get rid of those human errors that you have in naming schemes.

If you’ve ever been in an environment that didn’t have a naming scheme and you see the way that it gets applied manually, people interpret things differently. They’ll put capital letters in different places, they’ll misspell things, they’ll add those things. If you use Fusion for this, you can set those standards and they can always be the same. So downstream, any other application that you’re using to reference those items, you can have something that’s really well-structured.

And can be interpreted by machines too. So like if you’re having a system downstream, another automation downstream that’s capturing that item, you don’t have those human errors that go, oh, except for that one case, yeah. So start automating.

One more thing on that case is if you do have say multiple regions, put multi in the naming convention and then have another, I’ll see, just like multi, there’s a checkbox list that shows up, select your checkbox list instead of your single select. That’s a good way to handle the naming convention. So then you can get the multi out of a different field.

That’s a good call. Great suggestion.

We are going, I just lost, there we go.

We’re into the Q&A now.

As I understand, there’s a lot of things in chat. I’m gonna actually stop sharing for a minute so I can actually look at the chat and see if there’s anything that hasn’t been answered. I saw a lot of conversation there. I tried to pull everything into a doc offline and then I kind of pulled together some of the unanswered questions. So I think there’s about six or seven. So I might try and rapid fire these at you guys. But I just wanted to say thank you first and foremost. I know that you guys covered a lot of information and people in the chat were commenting and like, wow, this is really fast. But I think traditionally when you watch webinars, you like to watch them on two speed. I feel like this is one of those webinars you’re gonna need to watch on like 0.25 speed to get some of all of that information. And so I’m gonna try and rapid fire these six or seven questions if you guys are okay with that.

First question came in, oh. I go fast on a few stuff on purpose. Just I know it’s going fast, so I apologize for that. But that’s on purpose so that we can get through everything and you can go watch the recording. So thanks for the call out there. Yeah.

Yeah, honestly, it’s just a lot of information and I think it’s, but it’s a lot of good inspiration. So first question is a watch event can only be done by a system admin. So if you’re a group admin, you can’t use this module. Any workarounds, recommendations for that? Yeah, you can set those up as watch records in most situations. They just take, they’re gonna take a little while longer to trigger. Typically in Fusion, that’s a five minute restriction there. You might have to do more on the filtering on those in order to get to the right attribute. In addition to that, start looking at tech accounts for Workfront is one thing I would recommend because you can set those so they’re a little bit more restricted, a little bit more controlled. It’s using OAuth server to server connections.

Okay, hopefully that answered your question. Okay, again, more questions here. So I’m gonna go quick.

Is there a possibility of generating duplicate unique IDs for two projects? You could, depending on how you wanna use it. You might do that for tasks, for instance. I would put them on different objects. I wouldn’t put one, two unique IDs on the same project because that would screw up your reporting. But if you have other things that are repeating objects, like a task or an issue, that’s probably ideal for that kind of thing. But you could do that second scenario I showed you where it has the reference, where it’s not the reference number, but you’re going to get your own unique identifier. That can be used anything whenever you want. So if you have two good places to put that, you can go for that and just do that with Fusion or even you can do it manually in some cases.

Okay, where are we here? Are you able to make the webhook based off of a decision instead of always assigning the unique number? Yeah, that’s just a router. A decision referring to like a field. Yeah, it’s just a router. So if you have say the yes, no field in the Fusion scenario, you say go up this route. If that field is yes, go down this route. If that’s no and you have two different routes and it’s just a filter on each route, right? And so if it goes up the yes route, it doesn’t. Yeah, and you can kick off the scenario with a webhook based off of field changes. So you could do that. You could say if this equals yes, kick off the scenario, but not if it equals no, right? All right, question. How can the custom webhooks be secure? Or how can we make custom webhooks more secure? You can create your own authentication in there. It’s a little trickier way to do it. I probably want to talk to like an implementation consultant about that one. If you should, meaning there are different ways to do it depending on how you want to handle it. You can kind of create your own authentication method where it has to authenticate against this particular ID that’s coming in from this other system. And if it doesn’t authenticate, it doesn’t pass, it just stops or it sends a note or does something like that. But you can also do IP restrictions automatically on those. So if that helps, but there’s no automatic authentication on those, you have to kind of create your own. Euan, do you guys want to go into that? Yeah, well, this is also in line with what our product team is thinking. The new chain scenarios that’s coming out here in this quarter. So look for those in your environment soon.

That’ll accommodate for that need. Chain scenarios are going to replace that webhook endpoint thing. It’s going to be a built-in version of that, which is nice. Currently can’t quite do that. It’s in beta.

All right. Thank you guys. All right, three more questions, so I’ll go fast. When using date indicators, will the queue for quarter entry date take into account the quarters, like custom quarter that customers have established in their setup area? Or is it always going to default to like traditional quarters, you know, January, February, March type of thing? The default queue thing that I showed you is just the default quarters. You’d have to do something more clever for quarters that are unique to your environment, which happens all the time. You can do it a bunch of different ways, including a data store or a switch and definitely Fusion can handle that. It takes a little bit more thought, that’s all.

All right, thank you, Brian. And okay, where else am I here? Are there any limitations when renaming documents, for example, images assets to match the brand’s naming convention that would be based on the asset description under document details? If I need to read that again, I can.

I think it depends where your documents are stored in the file type, perhaps. I don’t think I’ve run into problems with the file types necessarily there, but where they’re stored, you might run into some bottlenecks. Any thoughts there, Brian? It’s based on the description. I mean, like 500 characters, you wouldn’t want that in a file name, but you can certainly apply your product naming convention or your product reference numbers and that kind of stuff to a document name. That’s a common thing. You go rename the document when it’s uploaded, you add some custom forms to the document when it’s uploaded. That’s a pretty common Fusion scenario.

You might have to do more of that refinement with the removes. So based off of you have another criteria that you might have to accommodate for. Yeah, and have Fusion cut the characters to 20 characters from the description and then use that, right? Okay, thank you guys for some ideas. And last question, sorry if you covered this, but can we retroactively affect existing projects with these scenarios or are they only projects moving forward? Yes. Yeah, you can bulk edit.

You’re gonna wanna start with a search trigger and then you can have that effect. We have an example. So for anybody who’s looking for another model for naming schemes, we have a sequential numbering template that you might look at. It’s in the template library in Fusion. So there’s actually four or five of them and they handle different objects.

Feel free to reference those. They’ve got some great material in there as well.

This model that Brian showed is a little bit more robust.

It’s more complete.

So you’ve got two models to work with there. Yeah, you can also set that first number, the 6,000. You can set that to whatever you want. Start at 12,000, whatever you wanna do. When I’m doing those updates in areas where I’ve got a whole bunch of existing projects and I wanna go update a naming convention, I would do something in the custom form on the project that indicates that I’ve already done it, that it’s already updated. So then imagine I’m getting 12,000 projects, right? Then I go through and do 600 and then something blows up and the Fusion scenario crashes and everything’s done. Well, I don’t know which ones I’ve already done. So if I go back to the beginning, I’m gonna add another number to the front of those project numbers, right? Unless I do something clever to figure out if I’ve already done it. So what I do is I’ll go update the project and also update a field on the project that says this one’s done. And so the original search just goes against the top 200 that haven’t been done yet. It just goes through and updates those.

All right, so, oh, I’m just gonna highlight one more thing. And then Leslie had posted a link to a survey. It’s an anonymous survey. Please share your feedback. It’s pinned to your chat pod. Please be sure to just share any and I’ll recommend, or I’m sorry, feedback there before you wrap up. I’ll be sure to pass those along to Euan and Brian.

You guys will get a copy of those. It’s a zip file with a bunch of JSON files that Brian and Euan walked through today. So keep an eye out for that as part of your follow-up email as well. But yeah, Euan, if you wanna wrap, I can either run through these resources or you can.

Yeah, these are just included in the deck that you’ll receive. So there’s a number of great guidance on here, Experience League links, tutorials, trainings, and those sorts of things. Really good resources for this.

And I’m gonna let Nicole talk about these.

Yeah, no worries. So from an upcoming events perspective for people who are interested in learning more about Fusion, we’re gonna be partnering with Schneider Electric in early December to see how they’re using Fusion. We’re also looking to do something, well, I missed the 2026, so I’m missing the two in January after January, but coming January 2026, you guys will see something on Workfront Fusion at Belger that we’re doing in partnership with product. And then there are a handful of events available to you on the Experience League communities, soon on the On Demand Events page that if you are interested in learning how different organizations, other customers, just some inspiration in general with different ways that you can use Fusion, there’s so many different On Demand Events that you can watch that are available to you on demand, so at your own leisure.

I don’t know what else I have. Oh, these are more of just upcoming events, not necessarily Fusion related, but like I said, there are everything’s on the Events page on Experience League, you’ll see something around Workfront Planning, you’ll see Next Level Data Collection in partnership with some folks around like external lookup fields. So if that’s something of interest to you, we have our Admin 101 series. But most importantly, save the date, your Q1 Workfront release is happening in January, so we’re going to be doing a release webinar with product on the 8th. So just save that date, we haven’t spun that up yet, but know that that’s coming. And I feel like there might be one more slide, nope, perfect, this is the end, top of the hour. If you guys didn’t hear your feedback, please do. Otherwise, a huge thank you to Brian and you, and this was absolutely fantastic. I feel like people have so many ideas and something else to just rewatch to inspire themselves further with Fusion. So thank you guys for taking the time to share your expertise today.

Appreciate it and watch us in replay. And at 0.25 speed, I think that’s the best tip that we had there. All right, thank you guys. Have a good rest of your day, keeping out for a follow-up email and we’ll see you soon. Bye everyone.