Maximize Fusion with Tips, Tricks, and Release Highlights

Transcript

Welcome to Maximize Fusion Tips, Tricks, and Release Highlights. I’m Leslie Spear. I’m a Customer Success Manager on the Workfront side, and happy to be joined today by Sam Taylor, and he is going to walk us through some awesome latest and greatest in Fusion stuff today. If you want to go to the next slide, Sam.

This is my reminder to make sure it’s recording. We are recording. You will get a copy of the deck and recording later today. We’ll get a follow-up email out to all of you with that information so you’ve got it to reference later.

If you need to, just pay full attention. He’s got a lot of great stuff today. Know that you’ll get the deck notes, all that good stuff later.

With that, I’m going to hand it over to Sam and let him share all this awesome stuff. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. If I haven’t met you yet, Sam Taylor. I’m a Product Manager for Fusion and for also automation and integration. This will cover things beyond just my role covers things beyond just Fusion. Today we’ll focus in on Fusion. By the way, it’s great to see so many familiar names. I think I’ve worked with some of you before and great to see you.

Quick note on just a little context setting here. What we’re doing today is we’re going to be talking about some newer Fusion features that I think might affect the way you approach your workflows as a designer in Fusion, but also as you might change the way your organization governs Fusion and some new tools that will hopefully make both those things go better, both design and governance. Now, I know a lot of people are current Fusion customers based on the registrant, but if you’re not, I want to be sure to let you know there is still a lot of value for you here. There’s some additional webinars that we’ve had in the recent past that might provide some more like first day getting to know the system type of content, but for today you’ll still get a lot of value of new features that should be part of your workflow as you adopt Fusion. And then, of course, those of you who are using it, what we’re hoping is this changes your workflow and your approach and contributes some value based on newer features that were released over the past few months.

A quick note, and this is just to kind of share our perspective and how we’re looking at Fusion these days. So, Fusion has been growing quite a bit and we see a lot of organizations that have over 100 scenarios that they’ve run in the past 30 days, and this is an important data point for us as we think about how we invest in the system, right? And how we invest in it, we want to be sure that Fusion evolves to support growth, growth at that rate, 100 or more active scenarios, and supports not just the growth of the individual scenarios and the performance, the reliability of scenario execution, but also how the designers use the system, and also who governs the system. I think as we grow with automations, there becomes some new types of problems that we need a product to solve, and we hope to make Fusion solve those. One other quick note, of course, a lot of you probably don’t have 100 scenarios yet, but know that these features really do contribute to making that easier for you, make that easier for your growth.

Through this presentation, I’ll present a few things and I’ll jump over and do a demo in some cases, so just know that that’s happening as I switch from slides over to the Fusion product itself.

Now, first one I want to share with you is the new capability called Search and Select. This is intended for the Fusion designers, and it’s really intended to make your design experience easier, and especially easier if you’re working with scenarios that have a lot of modules. To show how this works, I’m currently working with a Fusion scenario here where there’s more modules than appear on the screen, and so if you needed to go in and edit something, especially if, let’s say, this is a scenario you didn’t build, but maybe a colleague built it and you got to go in and edit it, it becomes kind of difficult to find something like, where do we have our PDF module? Also, because a lot of colors are red with our connectors for Adobe products, sometimes that’s a little hard to see visually.

So what we’ve done is add in this new search capability and from the tray, this is a little search icon, you’re able to pop it up. You’re also able to do it with a control-K is launch that on a Windows machine or, I’m sorry, I think both machines are able to do that, and actually do this from just your keyboard. So in this case, I launched the search and select, and then I’m going to look for PDF, and so you’ll notice, one, it filters down so that we can see all of the matches, and then it navigates to one of them, and if I hit enter or if I click on this, it’ll open up the parameters so you can do some configuration. And we’re hoping what this does is this allows you to go through quicker navigation, quicker edits, quicker changes, and really help you deal with the complexity of really big scenarios.

And a quick note, this is part of a work stream where we’re improving the user design experience, so expect for a lot of improvements like this throughout this year and ongoing in the future, and hopefully this creates a new workflow for you that makes it easier to work with those big scenarios.

Okay.

Okay, I’m just going to pop back into that PowerPoint.

A few other updates to share with you around the design experience. First is this new capability. We’ve been calling it Draft and Recover, but it’s basically the idea when you’re working on a scenario, that scenario will be in kind of a draft save state. And the reason we do this is in case, let’s say you have some issue where you’re not connected, maybe you have a browser crash or something like that, we don’t want you to lose work, right, that you’re currently working on. So the idea here is that as you make changes to your Fusion scenario, it’ll save in a draft, and then you’re able to recover that in case you need to come back to it. This also has some performance improvements because we’re doing more stuff almost in a local manner. And just to highlight one little thing about the capability there, you’ll notice, and I’m sorry this is very, very small, but at the bottom of my screen you’ll see the save icon. There’s a little blue icon that indicates there are draft changes that haven’t been saved yet. Okay, so as a designer, you should know at this point that changes have been made, that you need to save, and so it gives you kind of that visual indication as well that changes have been made there.

Alright, now another enhancement, we’ve added in this get details button to error handling, and if you click on this, anytime you’re doing an error, and I’ll just create an error real quick, you have really two levels of error logs. So we click on this and we get our highest level, okay, and sometimes this is just the most recent API response. That’s a lot of the cases you see these errors, but there might be other error messages. But you need to dig into those further, okay, and a lot of times when we’re doing this through our developer tool, which is a little separate experience currently, more on that later, and so now we’ve got this nice click path where you get details and it will open up the error so you can see the actual request and response. So in this case, we give you the API details in there. Okay, that’s that right there is probably the most common way of troubleshooting. Oh, and I just had a question there I think I’ll try and answer there. One is when you’re in the draft, the draft isn’t saved in a place that’s like found separately than the current experience. The main difference here is as you’re designing, it’s in a draft state and kind of saved in that state, and then when you save it appears out here on the right to the scenarios and all of that. So there’s no separate place you have to recover. This is more about how the save experience works. Now, the draft feature is really designed for one individual user, so it doesn’t allow multiple designers working on the same scenario simultaneously. So you’ll still have right now definitely a case where you would want really one person working on the scenario at the time. There may be some features in the future there that help with that more collaborative experience.

Let me switch back to our presentation.

One other thing I wanted to highlight here about the design experience. A lot of times we talk about transformation. So we’re integrating between two systems, we get data from source, we need to send it to a destination and there’s some transformation to translate different values and transform data so that it works in the destination system. Now historically, you use the mapping panel so that you can make changes to the data using IML functions or what we call in the mapping panel the functions there or with some of the other modules. And this works pretty well, you know, and it fits a lot of needs, but we’ve introduced this JSON-ADA connector. Now the JSON-ADA connector is its own connector. I’m just going to highlight this here.

So you’re able to access it here. And the JSON-ADA allows us to build expressions I’m just going to show this highlight so you know what I mean by expressions here that allow you to act on data using the JSON-ADA conventions. And the JSON-ADA conventions work really well for transforming JSON data. So if you get any output that’s just a big JSON file and you need to manipulate it, you need to change something in the arrays, you need to transform maybe one section of the array, do a search and replace and so forth, those are areas where it’s almost easier to do this than it would be to produce the same kind of changes in the mapping panel. And so the primary place I would see this being valuable, I saw that question there, is sometimes you get an output from an HTTP module that’s just a data package and so if it’s not fully parsed and you get just a package where it’s a collection of all the data that the API gave you an output and you need to select some subset of that data and maybe change it, that would be a real paradigm use case for JSON-ADA. Now, in addition to that, we see a lot of people using this creatively to do a lot more transformations than just an output from a JSON. In fact, we see people putting data into the JSON format so they can manipulate with JSON-ADA and then have a different output.

This topic deserves its own presentation and I have good news for you, that happened a couple of months ago and it’s called Making JSON Sing. And that’s a webinar that’s a full hour. We don’t have time today to go through a lot of examples of this particular capability, but that JSON-ADA webinar would be a great place for you to see a lot of examples there. And give me just one moment, I’ll post that into the chat so people have an easy access to that.

I can grab that if you want. Oh, Nicole got it. Thank you, Nicole. Oh, Nicole, awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. So someone had just asked around, I don’t know if you had already answered this, but I’m going to just ask it anyways because there’s a few people who up liked it, is would you use this instead of parsing? In some cases you might. And where it would be is, do you want more control? When we just do an automatic parsing, we parse based on the JSON structure. But if you want to get some subset of that entire JSON structure payload that’s being sent here, being pulled from an API, that’s when JSON-ADA might be better. And that is dump the entire JSON object into JSON-ADA and then use an expression to pull the data you want in the structure you want.

But it’s really a matter of how much of that parsing do you want to be customized? If you really want to customize a lot of control, JSON-ADA all day long.

And a quick note here, and this is more just like how I use this personally, JSON-ADA is a complex type of convention. So I don’t know how to write the expressions like that off the top of my head, but this is really good use of your AI tools. So whatever tools you’re using as far as like co-pilot or open AI and all of those, JSON-ADA is not an Adobe Workfront thing. It is a known standard and all of those tools will give you advice on expressions. Kind of like when we use regular expressions, that used to be really, really hard, but AI has made those a lot easier. Very similar with JSON-ADA.

Now another new capability that we’ve introduced that have changed the game a little bit for Fusion designers is chain scenarios. Now quick note on timing of this, we had a beta for this late last year. This has been released to everybody in our last quarter. I think that was like end of November, December type of time frame. Oh, end of November actually, to be precise there. And what chain scenarios allows you to do is to create sub-scenarios or child scenarios and then in those, you are able to build reusable logic. So instead of having all of your automation in a single scenario, or a lot of our customers were sending data through web hooks, sending data through web hooks to connect different scenarios, instead of doing that, we build a capability of sub-scenarios that makes it really performant and reliable for you to connect multiple scenarios together. Now quick note, why would you do that? Main reason is reusability. So if you have a pattern that you are using across multiple scenarios, then all you need to do is add in a child scenario and reuse that. So I have some examples in the next slide, but the basic concept here is being able to reuse the same logic across multiple scenarios.

Now some examples to help illustrate this for you. Now I already mentioned reusable logic as a general category. Shared error handling is a pattern I am seeing arise in a lot of people. Shared validation workflows and then really long running scenarios. I am going to give a few precise examples, but those four categories have been helpful for us navigating and suggesting where chain scenarios can be used. So let me give you a couple of examples to help you think of the art of the possible with this new capability. First of all, if you have a compliance validation, if every time you send an asset to maybe your archive system, there are a few steps it goes through to validate and make sure that it meets your compliance.

Those steps tend to be the same and instead of producing them on every asset workflow, you can build one scenario that covers that compliance validation and then reuse it for all your asset workflows. Another benefit here, it is easier to maintain because you are only maintaining that logic in one place. And then I think for compliance teams, being able to show an auditor, we do this type of compliance validation through automation in one way and it is always consistent. That is a really great story for compliance. Another example, reusing for error handling. One of the things, especially as you grow and you have 100 automations or 50 automations, error handling becomes a big deal. You need to know when scenarios error, you need to be able to send that to people, you need to be able to alert them, and often times you have the same approach for error handling. And in fact, I would recommend if you don’t have the same approach, that might be a good way for you to improve governance, is to have one way of reporting error handling across all fusion scenarios. And then once you define that one way, put it in a scenario, add that as a sub-scenario anywhere you do error handling, and your system will be so much more consistent for error handling. Another note here is we’ve got high volume scenarios. Sometimes we’ll hit fusion’s 40 minute execution time. And some of you may know fusion executions get stopped at 40 minutes. This is to protect the system, protect your instance. There’s a lot of great reasons to do this from a system design perspective. But there’s some high volume assets and think maybe like a web page or something like that that has thousands of assets that might go over a 40 minute execution. The interesting thing to note about a child scenario is when fusion runs the child scenario, the main scenario is paused and that doesn’t count towards the 40 minute limit. So let’s say you have something in a large asset workflow, you could go over that 40 minute limit, divide your logic, put it in some sub-scenarios, and as those sub-scenarios run, they don’t count towards that limit and you can run much longer. Now overall, I probably wouldn’t recommend having a lot of like multi-hour fusion scenarios, but there are some cases for it. And for those edge cases, this is a great approach to do it is with the new chain scenarios.

Another thing that’s kind of nice is breaking up, you know, a lot of times we’re doing content workflow. We have multiple stages and we repeat the same logic. And one that we’re preparing for a summit presentation on is how do we do a PDF conversion on assets? So you have files that will come from all sorts of directions, all sorts of format, and maybe part of your asset for review and approval, you convert all those to PDF. We see that quite a bit. Putting that PDF in a sub-scenario so that every time you get a file, you need to convert it. Actually, a file or more than one file and you need logic to convert that one or many into a PDF for the asset, put that in a separate scenario. That way you can reuse it. This is also nice, and I have a last one here, in a multi-dams scenario where you’re working with multiple dams and maybe your asset workflow looks the same, but you have conditional logic that sends it to different dams or dams with different types of authentication and so forth. Being able to break those into sub-scenarios and then put those in your main scenarios under conditional logic makes it a lot easier. A lot easier to build, a lot easier to maintain, and then of course a lot easier to grow as you grow those asset workflows. So those are just some ideas. There’s actually, it’s one of the big challenges here is there’s just a lot of things. This is kind of one of those greenfield capabilities.

But note that we will have a summit session where we are demonstrating some of these and we’ll give you that PDF chain scenario as a sub-scenario that you’d be able to use. And then it looks like we have some more interest in this. So as Nicole mentioned, I think we might have some more opportunity to build some more of those out and share those with people.

Great. And then of course I’d encourage everyone to give that a try. Hopefully this saves you a bunch of time.

And then one other thing kind of related to the design experience specifically, as you have more and more scenarios, more and more scenarios, one of your big problems is how do we monitor all these applications, right? All this automation across 60, 70, 100 scenarios. And one of the patterns that we’re seeing emerge that we want to support better and better is sending Fusion data to an alerting system, to like a new relic or there’s many, many different systems that allow you to do monitoring for applications. And these tend to be something that you develop more for custom applications, but as we all know, these Fusion scenarios a lot of times are solving the type of problems that custom software could. So it’s very smart for us to also follow this pattern of sending to application monitoring. Now, right now we don’t have any connectors for application monitoring, not yet. There are a few that we’re considering planning for. Always good to hear feedback, by the way, if you’re interested in those connectors, but you can connect to those with HTTP connectors and then we’ve added in some new variables for alerting. And specifically, I put those in the screenshot here, you get it now in the mapping panel, the scenario ID, and you also get when it was triggered. That’s that trigger timestamp. A lot of times when we send a piece of data over to an application monitor, we want to shed what scenario it is, when it started, how long it’s been running, did it pass certain steps, and you can send all that data using Fusion for your application monitoring.

So yeah, a couple of new mapping panning variables. Know that we’re probably investing in connectors and other capabilities there. Would love to hear your feedback on whether like a new relic connector is something that’s interesting. And then one of the things on this, I would recommend this connect back to chain scenarios. What we’re doing when we’re building this alerting when we’re working with some customers is we’re building a sub-scenario that handles it and then we add it to all of our scenarios we need to monitor. So it’s really good use of chain scenarios as well. By the way, if you’re interested in chain scenarios, but you’re like, I’m not really sure what a use case is quite yet, this might be a really good one. Just do your own monitoring and forwarding log data to the monitoring system.

Apologies, we actually do have one more.

This one actually does move to governance. Never mind.

A lot of our tools, we talk about Fusion and Fusion Designer, and that’s a lot of our training content. We also need to be able to support managing the instance and the people who work in Fusion. So there’s a few new capabilities. You may have seen these released in the last year, but as I’ve talked with customers, I realize that not everybody knew about these, so we want to be sure to highlight them in this webinar. Now first overall, all Fusion tables, what I mean by tables is you have the left navigation, in fact, I’m just going to move over to the application to show you. Over here on the left navigation, we have a lot of concepts that we work with. A really important one is connections.

And so we talk about these tables, of course there’s some interesting data here and some good information, but these are really about managing an instance or managing a team in Fusion and being able to manage the resources that are accessed and that are used inside that instance. And connections is one of the most important ones.

Overall, in our design of the table views, we’ve added in a search, so if I want to look for anything that says AJO, I can just type that in, we’ll search for AJO. We also have sorting, so you’ll see each of those columns we can sort and change the sorting, and then if you want to change the columns that are available, there’s some here, okay, that we’re able to choose and you can choose to hide some, so in some cases maybe somebody doesn’t use the environment variable and you can hide those for you.

So that availability of selecting fields, sorting, and then also searching, that’s available anywhere, there’s tables on this left-hand side on these resources, and then we’ve added in a few new specific features on resources that I think could be important to you.

One note before I show one of those, overall, we’re looking at making these table views much more of an investment on our end to make those easier to use, make them data rich, and make them actionable. Speaking of actionable, one of the problems that frustrated me, you might be in my category as well that this frustrated is, you couldn’t come from a connection here and find all the scenarios that use it, and so that ended up creating a lot of problems for us, because if you needed to update a connection that might affect 50 scenarios, it was very difficult to figure out which ones use it. Now you select the connection, so I select like this AJO, and you’ll see down here there’s a pop-up window that we are able to fetch active scenarios. Let me select a different one that might be a little more interesting. There we go, at least one error. But this shows you all active scenarios that use that connection. So if you are rotating credentials, now it’s a lot easier to know which scenarios are affected by those, and let’s say that you have somebody who you need to off-board and you need to change credentials, it’s a lot easier to see which scenarios are there. And hopefully you all appreciate that. I know after taking some calls and working through that, I definitely appreciated this new feature.

Okay, another one of these features that we have a lot of enhancements for is webhooks, and let me look at it now. I’m going to talk about one of these capabilities here, and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about some other webhook changes and event subscription changes. We’ve actually had a lot of investment in that area last year, and a lot of things I think will be fun to show you. One new capability, though, I want to highlight on this page is priority.

Now, with your webhooks, this is incoming traffic. This could be done from a lot of different systems, and oftentimes what we’ve found is the first in and first out strategy for prioritizing these events just wasn’t enough. So you might have one event-driven workflow where a user clicks on something and they’re kind of waiting for that action to happen. That’s a much higher priority than maybe you’re doing some updates on your metadata, and it only needs to run every once in a while infrequently. There’s no user waiting for it. Putting those in the same queue and competing for priorities was a real problem. So what we did is we added these priorities, and you’re able to set low, medium, and high on individual webhooks. So your most important ones, you’re able to set to high.

Your very most important ones. And then low, medium, high. We’re just basically if we see a request to execute come in, process the highs first, mediums next, the lows next. And you would expect the lows to delay if you have really high volume with your high priority months. But the most important thing is you wouldn’t be dealing with a queue with your high priority months. Now quick note on the rollout on this. This was rolled out where everything is a low priority, so they’re all treated the same still. Nothing changed about your system when this was released. But you have an opportunity now, and this is released to everybody, to go in and set a high priority to your very most important queues. And for me, the first ones I would think about are user ones. So anywhere where you have user workflows where a user might do an action and other users are waiting or that user is waiting, probably good ones for high priority.

Let me turn back to the slides for a moment.

Oh yeah, please. Someone had a question in the chat, and I feel like since you’re on the product team, I’m going to ask it because it’s a roadmap type of question. And it is, will date and time stamps ever become a feature of the Fusion UI? Date and time stamp.

Maybe we can get clarification on where that is, where they’re expecting that. Okay, I’ll get some more information. Let me see if I can look at that one because we should definitely be displaying that. It should be in the mapping panel and it should be in the activity logs, which we’ll cover a little bit later. But yeah, let’s figure out where that part of the application we can probably address that.

And a big part of our event subscription updates has been this v2 move. Now hopefully this was actually a really easy, painless move for you. There are some cases where you had to do a manual update, we built like a little tool to do an upgrade inside Fusion. But for the most part, we found this to be a pretty easy transition. But a few things about this transition that are going to be beneficial for you to understand. First thing is, on our end, just to be very transparent, we’ve brought together the teams that work on event subscriptions and Fusion into kind of the same organizational area. And this allows us to have closer collaboration. So we’ve had some really great engineering teams working on event subscriptions and Fusion, but we didn’t always collaborate as closely as we could. So we’ve combined those organizationally. What this means to you is just there’s less friction between those two capabilities and a lot quicker, like if we release a new capability with event subscriptions at WordFront, that’s going to be in the Fusion connector. And we’re going to plan the same release for it and the same capabilities. We’re also using Fusion data and our Fusion interactions to improve event subscriptions. And just connecting those two teams has improved that process. Now the move to the v2, this means that event subscriptions are a lot more consistent, they’re reliable, they’re even higher delivery success rates, they’re faster, and this opens up a lot of new capabilities that we can build into event subscriptions as well. So expect more changes to that, but know that v2 move shouldn’t show you improved performance and reliability for event subs.

Now we talked through this one, I apologize, I’m the ordering a little bit, I should have went the other way, but this is just highlighting the priorities is one of those newer capabilities. Another new capability with our webhooks, this webhooks in general, is the ability to add in security. So you’re able to add in an authorization key, you’re able to add that into the webhook itself, and then be able to use that to verify that traffic is coming from a source that can authenticate. Now this allows you to build this basic auth in here to add security to webhooks, and this is in addition to IP controls, and then you can also do custom validation using the existing tool, that’s not a new capability. So anyway, this should add in an extra security layer for those of you who are using webhooks, and this can be quite requested by quite a few customers. One other note that I’d add here is when you use a webhook key here, you might be able to do that, you might be able to reuse that same key in your HTTP request.

Oh, and a quick note on the ability to edit webhooks, some webhooks are currently editable, some are not, and it’s really based on the technology that Fusion integrates with. And I think there’s actually a key here, and you’d be able to see which ones are editable here, and like this one, work front, not editable. And that—quick note, that’s on the implementation of event subscriptions. Yeah, exactly, Kelly, is that that’s not currently an editable one. That’s the kind of feedback, though, that we’ll be sharing with the event subscriptions team and see what’s possible there. But there are just some technologies, work front among them, where they don’t allow us to go in and edit, we have to resubscribe. And that’s why you don’t see that edit capability.

So, in addition to auth, next capability we wanted to take a look at is the activity logs. I’m going to switch over here in just a moment. But quick note, this should give you access data, this should give you change data, update data, basically really comprehensive logs for what users are doing inside Fusion. And this is a newer capability, this was released last year, and is part of—but it’s available for you right now, and should give you an idea of what you need to do for auditing. And a lot of times we just need to know how we can audit what users are doing, and then other times that’s data that helps us understand what may have changed, like when did a connection change, when was a data store edited, and so forth. Now the activity logs are available from your organization overview.

Click that. Okay, the organization overview. I’ll just browse this a little bit slowly here.

Well that’s loading, is this an instance-based or team-based log? Instance-based, this would be organization log. Yep, and it’s a good question too, because who is intended for is intended for organization admin.

And, but for people who are interested a little bit more in that teams-level administration, we have a capability in the near future I’ll mention on the last slide that’ll be very interesting to you. That’s access groups that give you more control. Ooh, awesome.

I’ll just, I’m running just a little bit slow here. We’ll just take a look at these logs here. That is available on your organization page, and then you’ll just navigate to activity logs. I may have to stop sharing for just one moment and refresh. There we go.

I’ll just ask for that. Sharing recently has created some browser performance issues on my end. So there’s activity logs, you’re able to filter the data.

Okay, and a quick note on that question on which level, org or team, here’s an area where you could focus in on team. It’s still the org admin that has the access and able to filter, but you can see the data from that perspective.

And then you’re able to export this, either CSV or Excel, which would be a good idea for longer time frames. And another nice note, activity logs will be available with the Fusion API release. And we will have a release, I believe this week, for the Fusion API, and we’ll have some additional releases throughout the year. More on that in a couple of slides.

One other update, and I don’t have a lot to demo here, but this is a change, and you see this change with a lot of different APIs that we work with, but it also has like a real governance change and an approach to governance. A lot of times when we do automation, we have individual users authenticate, and then your automation is kind of acting on behalf of the user. So it’s like a user impersonation type of approach. A technical account is a little bit different. A technical account represents a system like Fusion, and the idea of a technical account is it represents that system’s integration or that automation, and it can be accessible by multiple humans that work with it. And these technical accounts, a lot of us have used those historically in Fusion. We have tried to make that easier and easier, and we see it being adopted by more API products. So first of all, Workfront last year, we added the capability. This was with the most recent Workfront connector so that you can add in technical accounts. So instead of associating your authentication with a single user that has to have like a login and be traded as a user there, you’re now able to do that through a technical account. Same with Workfront Planning, and that was a release just this month. And Microsoft had a similar change, I think that was back in October, and then Slack has had a similar change that was also in the fall of last year. Now other products already have, other API products to be precise, already have technical account capabilities, and we see it more and more. And Microsoft and Slack both reflected changes in the way they approached identity to support those technical accounts better. So a couple of takeaways here. One, overall, when you’re planning your connections and your authentication for automation and integration, probably be thinking about technical accounts. Sometimes you do automate on behalf of individual users, but a lot of times you just want authentication to represent the system, fusion, fusion integrations. Second part here is you might pay attention as we make further releases here, we may have other connectors that need to be updated to add in that capability for using technical accounts. So I’d keep an eye out for that and know that where possible, we’ll support both accounts and we will add on those capabilities as we interact with whatever that API product is. And then overall, our recommendations is lean towards these technical accounts. You’ll also notice this at Adobe with Adobe Developer Console is credentials are moving more towards that platform and that a lot of the credentials that we prefer to use for automation and integration are OAuth server to server type of credentials.

I’m going to check on a couple questions.

Sam, there were a couple questions in the chat or Q&A.

Are there plans to add login actions to the activity log? Let me check on that. If not, that’s a good suggestion.

And then the other question was around will the activity log provide granular information, for example like user open scenario and edited module three? Or is it just actions? More like actions. And even though it’s an ugly word, CRUD actions, so like add, edit, delete, those type of actions. It wouldn’t be like user interaction type level of data.

Okay, thank you.

I also see Chris had a question on the technical account. Yes, there is. The most recent Workfront Connector release is a good link for that. That one specifically addresses the Workfront technical account. The other ones like the Microsoft would be on the Microsoft connection and Figma on the Figma one. And those typically show up in two places. We update the release notes, letting you know a new capability came out, and then our documentation team will update the actual connector as well. So you’ll see that in two places. What I’d suggest, and this is one of the challenges we hope to get better and better at, how do we let you know what’s released to make sure you got the best info for it? Your best place today to see that freshest information is the Fusion release page. And there is a Fusion specific release page. We also try and make sure those things are covered in the quarterly release presentations as well. But if I was monitoring an instance and I want to see new capabilities, that’s where I would check those release notes.

Now, this performance monitoring dashboard is a newer dashboard. We’re going to be deploying this to everyone. We have had multiple customers that we’ve developed this for newer ones. Sorry, for addressing specific problems the customers have. Went through a few iterations. We think this performance dashboard is in a really good place. We’ll be deploying this to everybody. Current plans for that is actually next week. So you can plan on looking towards the end of the week or the week after. Now, main thing here, when you’re dealing with a Fusion instance, the scenario monitoring tools are insufficient for you to manage. Especially if you’re talking about 50, 100 scenarios. It’s just impossible to use some of the existing dashboards and capabilities. So we wanted to give like an instance overview. And this will allow you to see important data for managing the entire instance of Fusion. And this should alert you to potential performance problems and into unusual patterns you might want to address. So let me switch over to a demo. Take a look at that.

So here’s my performance dashboard.

And first thing I want to highlight here is the executions waiting to be processed.

This is basically the queue. And what I mean by a queue here is your executions in your instance get queued up, they get passed on to the Fusion engine. Of course, Fusion engine has scalability, has all sorts of parallel processing type of capabilities so that we can deal with queues. But sometimes, and especially if you’re seeing a performance problem, you might get a queue that gets built up. Now in my case I have only a little signal of slight delays. That’s probably when a real heavy thing started loading. But you’ll notice on my x-axis or at least I’ll point it out, that’s a number one. So here on the y-axis, that’s only one execution being delayed. And you’ll notice here that we don’t even reach that. These are very slight delays. But if you saw one or fifty or five hundred in the y-axis, and that’s where you saw the chart leading up to, that indicates that you might have delays in your system. And that means you have executions waiting to be processed. Vast majority of time, that’s because of a webhook backlog. And that’s because maybe we have a big event happen, or maybe a new scenario comes online and there’s recursive logic in that, and that creates delays in your instance. So first of all, I’ve used this performance dashboard to see if there’s any delays. And if you were in the system and maybe you noticed something on the front end and you’re wondering, hey, are my automations delayed? You can come here and answer that question pretty quickly. Now, other capabilities, we have executions per scenario. And this will kind of break down for you based on a time slice, which scenarios have the most executions. Now from here, you can actually open the scenario directly. Now, same here with the durations of the execution. And just to give you an example here about how I might use this practically, I come in here and look, everything there looks pretty normal, pretty regular, and I don’t have any delays. But I do have this weird little blip here in the duration of executions.

The 83491 ended up running really long. So I would open the scenario from here and be able to dig into that outlier. So you’re able to see patterns here, see things that are interesting to you, and then open the scenarios directly from the system to be able to dig into those. So this should give you a whole new way of managing your instance and getting visibility into either delays, duration, heavy duration, or executions that a high number of executions per scenario. That’s another thing. If you saw this, but it was in the executions per scenario, that indicates one of your scenarios had a high volume event. Maybe the big influx of data or change in selection logic or something like that.

So hopefully that performance let’s see, and then a question there, is performance metric automatically part of Fusion? Yeah, this would be automatically part, this is part of Fusion and would be released to you for most customers next week, unless you already have it.

Sam, is there a way to elevate this data into Workfront for folks that don’t have Fusion access, but maybe it’s an executive that wants to see some of this? Is there a good way to share that or eventually build it in Workfront? That’s an interesting idea. I’ll put that in here. There is not currently, but I could definitely see that being pretty awesome as being able to see that. Especially, there’s probably a subset of Workfront admin who don’t use Fusion as much, and so those admin having access to that data too would be really great. Let’s see, and then we’ll explore that and see what’s possible there. Awesome, thank you.

There was a question about filtering by teams. This is really more of an instance level thing, so we don’t currently have filtering by teams, but that might be something that’s interesting for us to add in the future.

And Subir, if you don’t mind, maybe explain your use case a little bit more. Either here in the chat or you can just email me. I think you got my email address. I’d love to hear more about how you’re using that with teams. This is another area, like I introduced, we have customers with over 100 scenarios. A lot of times there it’s multiple teams, and we want to get better at that multiple team use cases. I’d love to get a little more color on your needs there.

If you’re not able to currently see that, the performance dashboard will be released to everybody next week.

What you might do is maybe just put in a reminder to be able to do that. Be able to check that out next week. That will be available for you.

Okay, let me pop back over to our presentation.

Good, I think we’ll even have some time for questions, but I want to cover kind of what’s next. You know, we started out this presentation with we’re looking at some of the problems with Fusion a little bit differently, which is customers having over 100 scenarios, customers working with multiple teams. It’s really common for me to work with customers that have their own work they do, partners they work with, and professional services from Adobe they work with, all in the same instance. We want to be much better at those areas. So these areas where we’re going to be investing our backlog in, and I wanted to share some of those areas with you today, but know that these are ongoing conversations. Please monitor the release webinars, our releases, and we’ll probably look for some more opportunities to dive deeper on these capabilities.

Now, the first area is around that developer experience, and the first one we’re pretty excited about is the API, the Fusion API. And the Fusion API, well released for that, it might even be later today, or in the next couple days, we have our first release for it. And what you’ll see with the Fusion API is you’ll have these capabilities to start pulling in Fusion data using the API. And initially, logs is going to be most important one, so if you have any requirements where you need to forward some logs, that first release is going to be useful for you. In addition, our next set of releases, we’re going to look for more controls about scenarios, access to Blueprints, access to Execution History, and other capabilities that will help you manage connections, data stores, data structures, and other things in a lot more automated way. What we expect with this, we have a release in this quarter, we’ll have a release in the second quarter for us, and releases throughout the year. So, I would expect us to have very comprehensive API by the end of the year, and you’ll see that come in chunks each quarter basically. Now, a couple quick notes here. These are new APIs. There are some API usage that can be done with unpublished APIs with Fusion. If you currently use those, we should probably chat and discuss, because we want to make sure, one, that the updated APIs cover your needs, but also, if there’s any unmet needs, we cover those as well. So, we’re engaged pretty heavily with some customers, and if you’re doing any API, or you want to do any API automation, it’d be great to hear from you. Also under developer experience, the ability to execute custom code. So, right now, if you wanted to run like a script, right, maybe you want to do something in JavaScript, and it’s much easier to do it there than it is to build it in a mapping panel, or one of the existing Fusion capabilities, and you’re a developer comfortable, and you’re just like, boy, I wish I could write some code for it. We’re going to be building in a custom code module that allows you to execute custom code. We’re doing this in conjunction with the Adobe Developer Console team, the team that runs the developer experience for Adobe, because that’s ultimately where the executions will be happening, is in an app builder runtime environment, Adobe App Builder, to be precise there.

So, a couple of notes here. One, if you or some of your team members are a traditional developer, you know how to code, that’s where you’re feeling really comfortable, we hope this makes that easier for you. The second part of this is this is one of the ways that we’re being further integrated with the Adobe developer experience. So, those of you who want to do a lot of customizations, or want to build like maybe your own custom, almost custom apps, and how they behave with Workfront or with Fusion, this is a good thing for you to be tapped into, is understand the Adobe developer experience, understand Adobe App Builder and that capability, and then keep an eye on how we further integrate and make that better and better. And you’ve probably already seen this integration with the fact that credentials are managed through Adobe developer experience. And we feel as a team, aligning on that makes it much easier for you to work across Adobe products. And then another developer experience related change, where you have the Adobe developer tool, sorry, the Fusion developer tool that is. Right now, it’s a separate experience in a way. So, here I am, oh, a quick note here, the draft and save, that was the saved draft, that’s why I’m seeing that message. So, that’s kind of a nice thing to happen there. Now, our developer tool is available here, as we come in here, we open dev tool, it’s also available from a right click. Okay, so you can control it here, open dev tool. But it opens up in the bottom, in a tray, and it’s got some few capabilities, all of that fun stuff. Now, this is a separate experience, it has some interesting capabilities, by the way, like focus on a module and these. We are integrating all of these capabilities into the design tool itself. So, I expect in a year, you won’t ever have to open this, because those capabilities will be part of the designer themselves. We’re also using that as an opportunity to make some improvements, so expect to see some there.

A few other things I want to highlight for you, currently we have a model of teams that allows you to have some roles and some control over users and access. We’re going to be releasing much more precise controls. So, for example, if you want an environment where some users don’t have right access to connections, but do have read access, you can set those up, you can control those. We’re doing this a lot to support multiple environments for better automation lifecycle support and environment promotion type of capabilities, but this should make it easier for you to govern and control users access, for you to be able to work with multiple teams. So, maybe you work with a third party and you want to have real precise control over what they do in your environment, that is our intention on that release. So, we’re looking at that closer to the middle of the year that we’ll be releasing that, but please keep an eye out for that. And then this additional monitoring and alerting, the new tools that we’ve had, like the performance dashboard, we’ve got some additional dashboards that will replace that for organizations, scenarios, and a few other places. So, keep an eye out as we add in those richer experiences. A couple other things, one, with artificial intelligence, Fusion, we have seen some experiments, we’ve started working with people on MCP, on other agentic type of workflows, and we’re interested in continually investing in this. Now, I mentioned it here, one, if you are looking at an experiment, maybe you have an MCP and you’re like, yeah, we want to give this a try with the Fusion automation, we have some capabilities there, we’re going to be releasing an agentic connector, and we’d also like to partner and work with people closely. So, if you have an AI project where you’re doing some MCP work, let’s connect. You can collect either through our TAM, my email address was also shared in this chat, please reach out. We’d love to collaborate with you. We, of course, recognize that AI will be a big part of automation in the future, and we want to partner with you on that future. And speaking of partners, I would highlight for you that the Adobe Exchange, where you can get Workfront add-ons, there’s one available for Fusion called Fusion Center of Excellence, and we actually have multiple partners that are working on different apps that help you support Fusion, Workfront apps to be precise, Workfront maybe planning apps in the near future. So, just keep an eye on those and know that add-ons might be a part of your Fusion future and wasn’t really something we did in the past.

I apologize, Lisa, that’s going to leave us a couple more minutes, but that should be it, other than answering questions.

There’s been a lot of questions, but someone had just asked, oh, maybe Euan maybe just answered that, will we have the ability to customize access for users who can create scenarios to not allow them to add new connections? Sounds like… Yep, Euan is exactly right.

That’s a great example, too. That’s the exact example we use in a lot of conversations internally. We want to support that.

I can include Sam’s email in our follow-up email. I think it’s just samt.aobe.com. Do you want to go to the next slide? We’ll run through these super quick.

I did drop a survey in the chat. It is pinned. We would love your feedback on today’s session. If you have ideas of things you’d love to learn more about Fusion, we’re all ears. We can bring Sam back and talk some more. So, we would love your feedback there. It’s anonymous, so please take a look. Euan had dropped, there are three labs, I believe, at Summit this year for Fusion. So, if you are really wanting to learn Fusion, this might be a great opportunity. And the reason I love calling this out now is there is an early bird discount that is through February 13th that you can save $300 on your in-person pass, which is how you have access to those labs. I don’t believe the labs are made available for the online sessions. So, if this is a priority for you to learn, that’s a great way to go about it.

And then the next slide has our upcoming events. These are available on experienceleague.aobe.com slash events.

Lots of great stuff coming up in February. There’s another Fusion session on February 17th about creating branded PDFs. If you want to check that out. I did want to call out there’s two in-person events. One in Seattle, one in Atlanta. And those are work, there are a couple different products, but the ones we have linked here for Workfront. So, if you are interested in that, there is a link there. So, yeah. Thank you for your expertise today, Sam. I don’t know if you were over time, but I don’t know if you want to hang out or… I can hang out for just a moment in case, but thank you everyone for your attendance. Really do appreciate it. Thanks for growing with us. We’re very happy about Fusion growth.

I did see a question in the Q&A. I don’t know if you want to try and answer quick.

If they’re trying to copy information from Workfront planning to Workfront workflow, is there a set of modules they should focus on that can help them? Absolutely. So, Denise, the most common ones, there’s a connector specifically to planning and specific for Workfront. And those are the ones that you would want to use there. And probably the trick is making sure that you get the right data coming in from planning and being able to identify that by the record type. Once you’re able to get that data in, it’s a matter of just mapping it and then continually making sure that the data is transformed so it will work in the workflow or the other way from workflow into planning. We’ll highlight for you, I do think that we will probably have some additional connector enhancements for planning in the future, but that would probably be towards the end of this year. So that set of modules that’s currently available, be the ones you want to work with today. Awesome.

I don’t know if anyone wants to raise their hand, we can try and do a quick round of, if there are any questions.

Yeah, Rauhitesh? Would there be a possibility of using AI directly built in within Fusion so that for any kind of code creation, semantics, etc. we could just poke at AI and help us program with thin Fusion. If there is a roadmap that kind of points at that to help us pave our way into the future. Yeah, there is a roadmap that way and this is also an area you may have noticed when you registered, we asked this question to get a sense of what people were interested in, so we appreciate that feedback. But yeah, what we would expect initially is our AI integrated experience would be about discovery and managing your Fusion scenarios. So answering questions like why am I receiving a delay? Where, what Fusion scenarios are active? What has recently been disabled? All of those about managing multiple scenarios and then even optimizing them. That will be our first area. Generation is on our roadmap, but would probably come a little bit later than those capabilities.

Probably one other thing to note there is we also integrate with Agent Orchestrator. So if you’re following any of that work, Fusion would be one of the resources available through the Agent Orchestrator agents.

Awesome. I don’t see any other hands up, so I’m going to take that as a sign that we did pretty well. Thank you all for your time today. Sam, thank you for sharing this. I know there was a lot of excitement in the chat, so we’ll try and gather up some notes and share the recording and the deck later today. Thanks everyone. Thanks for your time everybody. Take care. Have a great day. Bye.