Effective Communication Tips in Workfront

Transcript

welcome. Today we’re really gonna be focusing on different communication tips. Hold on one moment.

If you guys are not on mute, I really encourage you to just go on mute just for the short term while we’re doing some introductions and then you guys are more than welcome to come up afterwards.

All right. From an agenda standpoint, so today, like I said, we’re really gonna be focusing most of our time around different communication methods within Workfront, but I’ll kick off with some introductions, some housekeeping, and then we’ll kind of just talk about really just a quick overview of really defining communication. I left some dedicated time for the end for Q&A, but you guys are always more than welcome to raise your hand, come off mute at any point throughout the session. So there’s not really necessarily, you don’t need to wait until the very end to ask your questions and then we’ll just wrap up with a few resources and you guys can be on your way. So from a housekeeping perspective, like I said, if this is your first customer success workshop, we do record these and we will send out a follow-up email this afternoon. So it’s gonna have in your follow-up email, you will get a copy, a link to the recording, you’ll get a link to the slide deck, you’ll get resources that you request throughout the session, so keep an eye out for that later this afternoon. And if there’s anything else you need, you’re always more than welcome to send us an email. And so from an email perspective, hold on one second, I’m not quite sure, everyone is on mute. Yeah, I muted everybody and then so I’m not sure, sorry.

I’m gonna take this, okay. Anyways, like I said, so I’m part of the Customer Success at Scale Team. I am Nicole Vargas. I’ve been with Workfront a little over seven years now. I’ve been part of Customer Success now for about five of those. Otherwise, I was in customer support and training. I am joined with two other colleagues, Leslie is out on leave, she’ll be back sometime in April, and then I’m here with Cynthia. Cynthia, if you want to introduce yourself. Hey everybody, Cynthia Boone. I was a customer for five years, just passed my five years at Adobe Workfront. So this is one of our favorite events to do because it’s so helpful and we get lots of great tips from people. So excited to talk about it. Yes, and excited to have you all here with us this afternoon. Like I said, this is a really, I don’t know that I have 60 minutes worth of content for you, so I really encourage you to, like I said, come off mute, raise your hand. If you have other ideas that you want to share, I would love to add those in and this can be just be a working slide deck that everyone can take advantage of. So if you do have any questions, you’re always more than welcome to send us an email. Cynthia and I are pretty active on the Experience and Community Forum, so you’re always more than welcome to tag us. If you want to connect with us on LinkedIn, whatever works best for you, we’re happy to be a resource for you throughout the year.

Okay, so just from a communication standpoint, there’s so many, you know, terms that you can align with effective communication and ineffective communication. And so I really just want to highlight this before we even get started to show the value of, you know, really effective communication, whether that is in a relationship in your personal life, whether that’s in a business or corporate professional life, whatever that might be, there’s so many positive things that can come out of it, whether that is results and productivity and transparency and accuracy. But on the other hand, you’re also going to see with a lack of communication, you’re going to have some missed opportunities. You could have some mistrust within an organization. There could be conflict and defeat. And so there’s sort of this happy ground where you have to, in fine line, what is going to work for us? What works best for us? What are the things that don’t work for us? And how can we improve upon them so that we can sort of eliminate this possibility of, you know, conflict, you know, missed opportunities, whatever that might be. And so I don’t want to spend too much time on this. I just want you to start thinking about what communication means to you and then have that throughout today’s session, think about how you can use these to tap into that word that comes to mind. And so there, before I even get started to share some examples, I want to talk about the end user communications cookbook. And so this came out maybe a little more than a year or two ago, if that. And it is a list of customer submitted examples of all different ways to communicate updates and changes with Workfront across your organization. And so if you haven’t taken a look at this, this is available on the Experiencing Community. I linked it here. We can also put a link in the chat. But it goes through a series of examples, whether that is, you know, creating a Workfront specific like internal site, whether that’s like a SharePoint site that you use to update with FAQs and upcoming events and resources and training and, you know, whatever that might be, you might just have one dedicated page specific to Workfront. You could have a monthly Workfront newsletter. You know, for a while we started off doing Workfront Wednesdays. You could have something similar. Maybe you do a monthly newsletter. Maybe you do a weekly cadence of tips. Maybe you have, you know, a specific Slack or MS Teams channel that you post all Workfront updates in. Maybe it’s, you know, we have a feature teaser that talks about what’s happening in the release. You know, you could have Fusion automations in place. And so I just want you to think outside the box sometimes of all the different ways that you communicate with people, not just through email or Slack. And so, like I said, take advantage of this. There’s so many good customer submitted examples of what’s working for them and some setup instructions for how to even build it within your own Workfront instance if it does require any configuration. So thanks to all of those who submitted some examples for that cookbook. And so this is one of the things I also want to highlight. This used to be a tip, but I sort of pulled it out because I think it comes with the pre-work of different ways to effectively communicate with people. And this is something that I think, even if you don’t even necessarily make a living doc, which I think is a good idea just in and of itself, but it’s at least worth a conversation. And that is, okay, what are all the different channels that are available to you in your organization that people could potentially communicate in? And for, you know, Cynthia and Leslie and I, we kind of mostly stick to Slack, Workfront and email. Those are the three channels that we focus primarily on. And so, okay, let’s talk about, okay, what should we use each channel for and what are the expectations within each channel? Even if it’s a conversation with your boss, like, hey, when I get Slack messages, are those something that I have to respond to within one hour by end of day? When it comes to email, what is your expectation? Is it a zero inbox policy by the end of the day? That’s always what I try and strive for. Like, I have no sort of unread emails, or at least if they are in red, I know that that’s my sort of action item for the morning. Like, just try and put it out on paper to say, like, okay, here are all of the different channels that we offer. Here are the expectations and here are what they should be used for. And then just use that as the starting point of, you know, building out these conversations with your users. And so, just think about it, something to noodle on, and if you already have this in place, even better. Kelly, you talk about the rule of seven and transparently, I don’t know what that is, but if you want to share some more details in the chat, I will absolutely highlight it here or if you want to come off mute. So, a message must be received at least seven times in seven different ways to be effective. There you go. So, it’s not always using the same channel. Love that. Maybe it’s send an email, maybe it’s send to Slack, maybe it’s send a, maybe you just stop by someone’s desk. Like, oftentimes people need constant communication to remember things. So, it’s not a one and done. This is going to be something that you’re going to do over and over again. It’s never ending. Like Leslie says, it’s like laundry and adoption. You know, you’re always going to be doing it. And so, just find what works for you. Think about some of these ideas and just run with it and then work with your users on iterating and changing as needed. So, first thing is first from a tip standpoint, there’s so many different ways, obviously, in Workfront that you can communicate with people. And as an admin, you have the option of leveraging the announcement center. So, the announcement center is sort of like your built-in notification center where you can go in through your setup area and create or go in through your announcements and create basically global-wide communications. And so, because in-app notifications in Workfront cannot be, you know, customized or turned off, you can pretty much guarantee that all of your users are at least going to get an in-app notification. Whether they read that or not, that’s up to them. And if people do have the email notification for like announcement center messages, they’re going to get maybe an email notification as well. And so, this is really just one of those easy ways that are like, hey, we’re going to use the announcement center to send out Workfront-related updates because, like I said, we can sort of guarantee that everyone is going to receive an in-app notification. And so, you can customize these. You can send them to different users, different teams, everyone, but just know that this is an option for you as an admin.

This is something that I want to highlight because I feel like this is fairly new. I know I’ve delivered this workshop in the past and it wasn’t even available at the time. And so, if you have Workfront Fusion, you can automate and send updates. So, anytime you have a Fusion automation in place, basically what you can do is add an update to that trigger. So, for example, like every time your project goes from planning to current, maybe you tag all the project users to say like, hey, everyone get to work. Maybe it’s an update every time something goes from in progress to approved or complete waiting approval to complete. There are different ways that you can use Fusion to automate some of this work for you. And I know that a lot of you maybe don’t have Fusion, but know this could save you some of that manual work. Those two or three minutes add up over the course of your project’s lifespan of how many times you’re consistently doing things that you could potentially do it from an automation standpoint. And so, there are Fusion templates available in the Fusion template library that are pre-built for you. This one says like, you know, work watches when a specific field changes and then auto sends an update. So, this is something that you can just go into the Fusion library, take advantage of, basically download it into install it into your Fusion scenario and then run with it. And then this is something that we talked about last week, Cynthia and I with our team. And, okay, we would love to build out more things in the Fusion library. So, if you have any, and we’re actually going to be posting, our coworker, Jen, is going to be posting something to the community likely later today. But in the meantime, if you have an idea for a Fusion template that you would like to see added to the library, send us an email or even reply to this community post when it goes live later today. And we’re going to work with Jen on getting those built in so that you guys can basically just have a customer submitted instead of like a cookbook that you kind of go find on the community. These are just going to be customer submitted examples of Fusion templates. So, for those who are using it and you have some ideas in place, I really encourage you to take advantage because we’ll do No, just lots of agreement, tons of agreement.

Love it.

All right, so I’m gonna tap into you here, but I just wanna highlight that. When we talk about meeting your users where they are, everyone has different channels and methods in the way that they like to communicate or work in Workfront. And there are native integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams that you can use so that people don’t always have to go into Workfront to receive notifications or to create tasks or submit requests, whatever that might be. So finding ways to make your users lives just a little bit easier, especially from a change management perspective, leveraging built-in integrations like Slack and MS Teams can be a game changer. So Cynthia, I know you have some ideas or thoughts on this. Yeah, absolutely. And what we’ve put on the slide is sort of what you are able to do with your integrations. And I mean, a couple of things just to point out, like especially the fact that you can add updates from Slack like you don’t have to log in to Workfront, you can just add your updates. And then especially from Teams, you can technically submit requests from Teams. So just some things there. And the reason that we bring up the integrations is that they are fairly straightforward in order to just get them integrated. And also what you can do with them is, it’s just a couple of sort of entry-level things to Workfront, but most of your users, that’s what they need. And the way Nicole phrases this is like integrate to meet your users where they work. So it really goes back to that first slide of like, how did your users want to be, like what time of day do they wanna be communicated with? How do they want, what’s the mechanism of that communication? But also one of the things we did wanna point out is these two particular systems offer your users and you some additional functionality. So don’t not integrate because, oh, well, I mean, I can push them announcement center messages, but yeah, but you could also do an act here to channel in Slack and absolutely like get everyone’s attention. Hey, there’s something going on, or hey, we have a new project. Like you could really get people’s attention. For the Teams integration, when you’re thinking about Teams, like there’s SharePoint, there’s the whole like with the Teams, the pages, yes, there’s instant messaging, but there’s also documentation and things that you can actually put out there. And one of the best examples in that cookbook that we were talking about, Lindsey Dink actually shares all of, she has a newsletter, she has a SharePoint page, she has all these things that she did with her Teams integration. So it’s not just about, when we talk about these integrations, it’s not just about like how we’re communicating, but what types of information you can communicate using the pinning feature or the SharePoint feature depending on the system. So I know there’s a bunch of things in chat.

Yes, I am actually posting something in there now for people who are asking about using not, this is supported for classic and they’re using sort of the updated version of MS Teams. I believe that’s coming. We can confirm with the product team that will be something that Cynthia and I will take as an action item and look to include in the followup email. But I did post a link to the released webinar that we hosted about two weeks ago with the product team. And one of the product managers, Ben, posted a comment in there around MS Teams saying, because someone had asked saying, I know this isn’t fully related, but I wanted to share some feedback on the work that the Workfront MS Teams app has some limited capabilities. And he said, it will expand to do more. We are in a strategic partnership with Microsoft to deliver more than a Teams app.

And so you can just, I’m gonna leave that. If you have more questions around that, you’re always more than welcome to just reply to Ben because he’s a product manager over that. But Cynthia and I will do our best to get some more information on, okay, will it support sort of the new version of Teams First just classic? So we’ll take that as an action item.

Samantha, you have a question? I’m just gonna pause because it was on this slide here. Nicole, you mentioned that Workfront system notifications go to everyone, which I knew, but can users turn this off in any way? In-app notifications cannot be turned off. This is probably a very popular suggestion out on the idea space.

Only email notifications can be configured and turned off. So it really all depends, like I said, on how your users work, at least for Cynthia and I. Like, I think we’re both on the same page on this. Neither of us leverage in-app notifications, and that’s just a personal preference, mostly because not all notifications trigger in-app notifications. And so for me, okay, if I want everything to be, you know, an all-encompassing, I’m just gonna use email. And so if I were to log into my personal Workfront instance right now, I’d probably have like 75 notifications. So like I said, it’s really up to you, your users, how they wanna work, but no, they cannot be turned off or customized.

All right.

Speaking of notifications, activating and deactivating global email notifications. So when you go in your setup area, you’re gonna go to set up email notifications, and then, or email and then notifications. And this is gonna be the list of all the different email notifications that are available to be turned on or activated or deactivated from a global perspective. So just know that when you activate these, you’re gonna activate it for all users across your instance. And when you deactivate it, you’re simply deactivating it for all users across your system. Keep in mind that users, when you activate it, what that means is that one, it turns it on for all users in their personal Workfront instance in their profile. However, a user can still go into their personal Workfront profile, like by clicking, I think it’s their avatar, and they can actually turn off notifications. So even if you have it activated, yes, it temporarily activates it for all users, but users still have the option to go and turn that off in their profile. So just know that this might be maybe an enablement conversation with your users, like, hey, these are the ones that are required to be turned on from an instant perspective. These are the ones that I recommend you have on, maybe you set them to daily, whatever that might be, but users do have the option to control it in their own profile. The other thing I wanna highlight is there are, when we talk about missed or unwanted email notifications, I always call out just because these are things that I feel like are important to people, and they don’t always realize that they’re either activated by default or deactivated by default. And so an issue is added to a project I’m on, this is on by default, this is activated when you create a new Workfront instance. And transparently, if you wanna have this on, that’s great. If that works for you, if that’s the notification that you trigger, but just know if you’re on a project and there’s like thousands of issues being submitted, like say you’re associated with a request queue, or say you have a project that people are submitting, change orders or bugs or whatever, you probably don’t want this on, because if you’re just a user who happens to be added to a task in that project, you don’t necessarily wanna get email notifications every time a new issue that is sort of unrelated to you is being added. So if that’s up to you, like I said, up to you, but I would recommend turning that off if you’re not and use a different notification or let you know that there’s gonna be new issues being added.

And these are the following two are the ones that are deactivated by default, but I encourage you to activate them. The first one is a project I’m on becomes active. And so this is referring to, for most admins, you’re probably creating projects and assigning tasks when a project is in a planning status. You’re probably not doing it when it’s in a current status, just because that will trigger hundreds of notifications to everyone. They’ll basically get one notification for every task they’re assigned to. If you activate a project I’m on becomes active, what it means is that when a project goes from current to planning, or I’m sorry, planning to current, it will trigger one notification to everyone who’s been assigned. You know, say like, Cynthia, here are all the tasks that you’ve been assigned. So it’s like one email for say five to 50 tasks assignments versus getting one email per task assignment. So I really encourage you to turn that one on. And then someone comments on a thread I’m in. I think this one is also really invaluable, especially from a communication standpoint. You know, if you are tagged in a comment and someone replies to it and doesn’t necessarily tag you back, you want to make sure that you’re still getting notified. And so I would recommend turning that on from a global perspective so that users have the option to turn it on or off in their personal profile.

Any questions? Yes, so Sam was, I think she said she was asking about this area and whether users can turn this off. And the answer is yes, they can.

So just, I mean, yeah, go ahead, Nicole. Hold on, let me, I will just show you here. So when, so this is me, I’m in a test drive here. Like if I were to, you know, go into my setup, email and notifications, and I’m just going to turn one on just to show you.

Okay, I’m assigned to an issue, issue assignment to issue, okay. So now, when I go to my profile, I think it was this one, I’m assigned an issue. Is that the one I just turned on? I think it was.

Users can still turn that off. So just know, like, yes, you’re turning it on globally. You’re basically giving people the option now to either activate it or deactivate it in their personal profile. Users might not know that they can do this. So you can let them know like, hey, you can customize your email notifications in your profile.

So just maybe again, it may be it’s just an enablement conversation of, hey, there are required email notifications that everyone has to have on in their personal profile. Everything else could be either set to daily or turned off.

So that is a little bit about that. Oh, did that answer your question? Just to make sure. Yeah, and I did. Thanks for the mic.

Specifically what I was asking for within that, because I’ve done this like a million times where you just showed us, specifically in the back of the house system admin part of setting those up, is there anything specifically for the system-wide notifications to where it’s, or is that it’s just always on and we as system admins don’t even see it? I just don’t want someone to turn it off and may send everything out through the notifications and they not get it.

I don’t know that I’m following. So your in-app notification, this little blue, it’s probably blue check box if you have any, those cannot be turned off.

Okay, there’s not anything. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Yeah, there’s not anything in the back of the house that turns it on or off. I’m fearful that someone turned that sucker off before I got here. And I’m like, I don’t remember it, but I don’t know if we’ve had any additional in the last five or six years that I’m not aware of. No, in-app notifications cannot be turned off.

Just know that not all actions or trigger, I guess not all actions trigger an in-app notification.

So maybe some of those haven’t been triggered, the ones that do trigger an in-app notification. But if for any reason, Smith, if you’re like, hey, it’s been like a week and I have zero in-app notifications, and maybe you’re thinking like, is this working? Definitely contact customer support and be like, hey, I haven’t received a single in-app notification in days or weeks. And they can maybe take a look and see if anything’s causing that.

I’m good with that. What I was hoping is like, when you go into your notifications and you want to send a system-wide, hey, there’s something new coming out for Fusion. Wonderful, da, da, da, da, da. I wanted to know if other users could accidentally turn that off to where when I send a system-wide notification that they’re not getting it. So they will always get an in-app notification, always. Whether they look at it or not is another story. Whether they look at it or not. However, a user can go into their notifications and I think it’s under miscellaneous, yes. A user can turn off a message is sent to the Announcement Center. They can turn that off. So they could potentially not receive an email.

That’s what I was looking for. Which one does it hook to? A message is sent to an Announcement Center. Okay, perfect. That’s the one I’m making sure that is on for everyone.

Yeah, and I know Kelly mentioned it. I know Monique does this too. So Kelly and Monique also, and I did the same thing. I would schedule quarterly or every six months to go in and bulk update everyone’s email notifications because they would turn them all off and I would go in regularly and turn a couple back on. And a lot of us do that because they just people turn stuff off. So yeah.

Yeah, I think that is, it could just be one of those things that you do on a quarterly basis sort of like audit or cleanup efforts. It might just be like, hey, let’s just go on and turn on these, basically deactivate them and then reactivate them so that you don’t have to go through those conversations with multiple users being like, hey, did you get my notification? You can pretty much say, yep, that’s been activated. And then everyone would have to manually go into their profile. So other things. So, okay, this speaks just exactly to that.

Reminder notifications, or I’m sorry, repeating deliveries as reminders. So if there are things, especially as an admin, if they’re like, hey, there are things that I need to do on a quarterly basis, whether that is from an audit or cleanup perspective, or maybe it’s a weekly report to users and managers that show like late tasks, whatever it is, schedule those reports as automatic reminders. Take advantage of that feature within the reporting area. When you go to a report and you go to report actions, there’s an option for send report. You can set up automatic deliveries, repeating deliveries. You can always do them one at a time if you would like, but there is that option to say, okay, send these on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, daily basis so that you don’t have to worry about them. It just sort of auto sends in the background. And like I said, if there are things you as an admin need to take advantage of, or that you have to remind yourself like, oh, every quarter I want to look at like exception reports to see if we’re missing any custom fields on submitted issues or projects. Like, okay, maybe that’s just a report that you just auto send to yourself every quarter so that you don’t have to remember, and like I said, a calendar reminder. It’s just something that just sends it to you. You just take a look at it, take some action, and then go on with your day. So you don’t always have to use reports as sort of like this visual aid. I always talk about using reports to drive action. And so this is one of those really great ways to one, communicate with people and get them to do something as from a reminder perspective.

So another thing to think about is automatic reminders and reminder notifications. These are available in your setup area also under the emails tab.

The thing I want to highlight though is these are global. So it’s not like you can turn them on and off for specific projects. If you turn them on, it’s going to be on for all projects, all tasks, all issues, all time sheets, whatever.

For your instance, if you turn them off, it’s going to be deactivated for all objects in your instance. So just keep that in mind. When we are talking about things in your setup area, those are global settings. So your automatic reminders are going to trigger when things are due, when they’re late, when they’re nearing their planned completion date, you can customize it to say like, okay, send it two days before the planned completion date, send it to the user, send it to the user’s manager, whatever that might be. These could be your late reminders.

You can also change the content or the subject line for your automatic reminders. Your reminder notifications, similar to automatic reminders, begin 24 hours after the specified date and all the criteria is met. So whatever criteria you have set up in your setup area is what will trigger that notification. And then you can even create custom email templates with reminder notifications. So just know that these are available to you. Again, another way of sort of just automating that backend works that you’re not having to constantly remind people of things that are late or nearing your planned completion date, you just let the system do the work for you and one less thing to take off of your plate.

I’m going to pause here and just see if anyone has any questions.

And speaking of communication, just really quickly, I know it says you can’t use your mic. I just did that because I couldn’t mute everybody earlier. So just raise your hand and we’ll give you mic access.

That’s why it says no one can use their mic. I couldn’t.

Someone had extra special Teams access. I couldn’t mute.

All right.

This is something that I also, I think is important. And again, when we talk about communication, I feel like the first six tips are always, I feel like it’s me talking to you and you talking to your users. It’s like, okay, I need you to do this. These are the things that I need turned on. Also, you need to make sure that there’s also that two-way street for them to communicate back with you as an admin. And so whether that is linking something on your internal site, there’s an option to create a system admin work front request queue where people can funnel all of their work front questions to you.

And then you can get notified of these questions, changes, report builds that might be needed, whatever.

And just really keeping something like this really simple. This is an example that Cynthia had done in the past and it simply just says, ask for work front help. And it’s like, something’s not working. Something is, I need more access to something. I need more training, whatever it might be. When you’re creating this request, you set it up to automatically route to you as an admin or your team of admins. You probably want to add a project description, which is that gray text box on the right-hand side. That’s what’s going to auto populate in your request queue. You want to have really simple custom forms, keep it easy for your users to be able to share feedback, ask questions to you. And then also consider adding the link. You can get direct links to a request queue, consider adding that to your email signature or putting it on your SharePoint page or whatever that might be. Maybe you have an automated response every time someone asks you for work front related to something. It’s like, hey, please, would you mind submitting this to this formal request so I can track it? And so just think about something, find a way that your users can not only ask you questions, but a way for you to actually act on those questions and requests, but also be able to track that work for you as an admin, because that’s always important. Being able to say here all the things that I’m doing outside of just process optimization and adoption and creating users and managing everything that goes on in the system. These are also all the other requests that I’m constantly being asked.

Tip number eight is delegating work while you’re out. I know this feature sort of has limited functionality. I know people are always asking for like, okay, is there your reporting coming out so I can actually pull these into reports? And that’s something I actually reached out to the product team on Friday. Was hoping I was gonna get a quick answer, but I will follow up with them today and see if I can get a clearer timeline if this is something on the short-term roadmap.

But there is an option when you go in your setup area under your tasks and issues to allow people to delegate their tasks and issues. And so if someone’s gonna be out of office or someone’s gonna go on maternity leave, whatever that is, you can say, okay, let’s have you just delegate your work and this can show up on a user’s work list. They just need to make sure to just check that box under the dropdown.

So when you’re delegating your tasks and issue, you can delegate tasks, issues, and task, basically approvals, like task approvals, issue approvals. You’re not gonna be able to delegate proofs quite yet, although I imagine you guys are probably gonna ask that and maybe that’s something that I have to ask the product team as well, because I know what the new proof approvals, that’s probably something that they’re thinking about. And so you can, and when someone goes into their, my tasks, my work, my issues widget, they can go in and say, okay, delegate this to this specific user. I want it to start on this day. This is the day I want it to end. If you don’t put an end date, it’ll just end, it’ll only give them basically access for that single day. So today.

And what else to think about? That person will get the same permissions that you had on that object. So if you had contribute access to a task and you delegate it to Cynthia, Cynthia will also get contribute access to that task. She’s not gonna get any sort of extra permission that you didn’t have. So just know that this is something available to you. Like I said, the reporting is a little bit limited, but we’ll see if we can get some ideas on a roadmap on if this is coming for you guys to take advantage of.

The other thing is reporting. You know me, I’m always gonna put something in here around reporting.

And I think that there’s so much that people are not using reporting for when it comes to communication. And so you can talk about all the things like, okay, what are the things that I need to have in place for my data to be visible in a report? Like, have I created the necessary custom forms and attach them to their appropriate work items? Are you creating calculated custom fields to automate some of these triggers for you? Like, did you even know that you can capture the date and time of a status change? And I put an example in there for you of what you can do. So you can say like, okay, I wanna see the date and time that this project moved to on hold so that you can use that from a reporting perspective. This is one, this next bullet here that I think gets overlooked. And it is, are you aware of what actions fields, native fields and custom fields are available are being tracked in your update feeds? And I’ll show you guys in just a second. When you go into your setup interface and then update feeds, there is a list of all different actions that can trigger a system, basically a system update. The other things you can do is go into your field library and actually pick and choose the fields that you want to track and add those so that those are the fields that when something changes, when a date changes, when a new user is assigned, whatever that is, that gets added to the update, your system activity in your update stream. So be sure to check that out. And I will show you in just a second.

The other thing is no internal interior reports. These, I feel like a lot of times people are like, I just stick to my basic project task issue, user report. So you can scroll down your list of all different type of report options. There are options for note reports and journal entry reports. They are a little bit trickier, transparently when it comes to pulling updates, but you can use those to pull system updates, system triggers, system actions. You just kind of have to know what to select. And there are so many examples on the community forum. I actually came across a few of them when I was looking the other day. So if you are looking for some examples on journal interior reports, definitely take advantage of what’s already out there on the community forum. When we’re talking about notes, there is a field for last note, note text, or last updated date, last updated by. These are fields that you can add to your reports, whether that’s your project report, your issue report, your task report, whatever it is, just to see most recent activity. I think that this is good to just know, okay, what are people doing? What are the things that are frequently happening? If you, as say a project manager, need to have a Friday status meeting, maybe that’s something that you post an update, or maybe you create yourself your own custom forum field for like project status update that you can then pull into your reports. And so, and just in case someone else posts an update that you want to make sure it’s always yours.

Audit logs. Another thing that kind of gets a little bit overlooked, like you can track user trigger changes in the system over the past 90 days using audit logs. So when you go into your setup and then you scroll all the way down to, God, what is that the way at the bottom? Like preference, setup system preferences, or set up system audit logs, you can actually take a look and see, you know, who has logged in, who hasn’t logged in, what permissions or access level has changed. And so these are just things to just be aware of as an admin. Like these are, there’s so many options for you to think about, okay, how do I understand what’s happening across the system? You just might need to look in a few different places. And so I have one example here, and I’ll jump into a test drive just to show you. So you can create a note report when I talked about journal entry and note reports, you can create a note report to see all of the comments that you’ve been tagged in. So maybe this is something that if people, you know, when they log into Workfront, they see like a MyWork dashboard, this could be one of those reports that’s added on there of like, hey, here are all of the updates that this person has been tagged in using wildcard filters. And that way they don’t have to actually go through one by one email notifications. They can sort of just see this laundry list of like, here are all the things that maybe I’ve been tagged in in the last week or the last month or all time. Whatever that is, and you can sort of group it by source. And when I say source, it really just means the object that that update was posted to.

And so I will just jump into an instance to just show you a few of those things, and then I will wrap it up. So I only have like two more slides, I promise.

All right, first thing is I will just show you those two areas in setup that I talked about, the update feeds and the audit logs.

So the first one is the update feed. So when you scroll down to interface and then update feeds, these are the actions. The first screen is going to be the actions that you want to look at is, okay, see if any of these are turned on or off that maybe you want activated to show up in your system activity. The other thing is your tracked field. So if there’s a certain custom field that you’re like, I’m going to actually track some of these in the update feed area, you can go in and say add a project field, and then I don’t, I’m just going to choose this because I know this is a calculated.

Oh, no, no. Which I probably don’t know if I even, I’m trying to think of a custom field.

Date needed, let’s see, okay.

Either way, not sure why that’s not giving me an option, but just know that these are all the different custom fields that I might’ve already had that tracked that you can add to your system activity to be able to track in the update feeds. And then if you are like, oh, what’s in the preferences section? This is where you can allow images just from, if you’re wondering, okay, why didn’t you click on that? That’s just where you can find that setting. The audit logs are going to be found system and then audit logs. So this is, like I said, that 90-day user trigger changes.

Again, I’m going to test drive, so I don’t know that I’ve had many changes, but if I were to change, say, like an access level for a user, it would show up here. If I added them to a failed login, whatever, maybe you shared an object. So this is where you can sort of pick and choose. You can choose it by user, different log types.

I know people have asked about exporting these, so you can export these if you are interested. Just know, like I said, it’s only that 90-day timeframe.

And then from your note report. I put the text mode in because it does require a little bit of text mode, but I gave it to you, so you don’t have to worry. So this is going to be something that I will just show you guys how to do this, because it’s pretty straightforward. It’s just a filter of tags. This is using the wildcard filter for dollar sign, dollar sign, user ID, which is simply the logged in user.

So what you would do is just go to your reports area and just create a new note report. So just know that this is a scrollable list. If you are like, I didn’t even know that.

And then this is where you would go and add your filter that I just, that I’ll give to you. And then the grouping is in here as well. So this is your grouping that you would use to group it, like I said, by source, which is that object in which the comment was posted on. So one more slide, and then I will open it up to questions.

And this is really just a wrap up, honestly. The first thing is really just, especially from a collaboration standpoint, there’s so much expertise out there that I’m not, obviously I didn’t give you every possible imaginable idea out there, leverage the Work Friend community. There is such an incredible team of people that are so willing to help you.

And share other ideas, share what’s worked for them, what hasn’t worked for them. And so take advantage of the community and these events whenever possible.

There is just free text note out there. If you have questions, if you’re new and you’re like, I don’t even know where to go, post your question, people will respond, and then you can sort of, go back and forth and get some more ideas. Like I said, there’s also the events, like Cynthia and I, we host a handful of events every year for Work Friend customers. There are other teams across the Adobe Work Friend ecosystem like that. I know there’s one coming up on a Work Friend, I think it’s this week, Work Friend, Wake Up With Work Friend, Ask Me Anything. So there are teams, our adoption marketing team, every once in a while hosts webinars that you can take advantage of. So these are sort of interactive sessions that if you have questions around Work Friend, go and ask. People are more than willing to help. There is a Work Friend monthly customer newsletter that will give you updates. Like sometimes it’ll share some free text mode, like, hey, did you even know this was out there? There’s always some customer events that have happened in the past that are worth you rewatching if you haven’t. Then there’s the idea space on the community forum. If you have things that you would like to see, added to the Work Friend platform, then all of these feature enhancements, like go on the idea space and start upliking things, commenting, I know our community manager, John, is working really hard with the product team to have, I think it’s a six month cadence where they go in and review the most popular ideas and then start looking to add those to the Work Friend roadmap.

And then Vicky, for your question, I will share with you, you can find any event, free event on the events page on Experience League if you just go right on the top header, that’s where you can find all Work Friend events and user groups. This is something I want to call out. If you guys are sort of those experienced, tenured Work Friend admins, you were probably familiar with these in the past, they are coming back for Work Friend.

Julie is leading this program and is going to be launching the User Group Program in I think seven cities, that Bay Area, Seattle, Salt Lake, Chicago, New York City, London and Washington, DC. She is looking for User Group leaders to help lead these sessions. These are customer led, so in order for them to actually take place, we do need to have customer volunteers. I listed a few different criteria out on the slide here. Obviously, you must live in that area, you must be sort of an experienced admin and you just have to have a passion for helping others, which I know everyone on this call is here to do. So if you are interested in becoming a User Group leader, actually, let me see if I can, so I feel like, oh, there’s a link for the events.

We’ll all call that out again in the follow-up email if you are interested. There are other perks that come with being a User Group leader. It’s not just you getting to say I lead User Groups, I’m pretty sure you get some type of conversations with product or swag or something along those lines.

So if you are in any of those seven- Did you want me to put the link in? In the chat? Oh, yeah, maybe let’s have you do that.

If you are in any of those seven cities that I mentioned, it’s listed on the screen here and are interested, please submit that form and Julia will reach out to you with more information. When I say, are these groups virtual or in-person, I believe she’s looking at doing in-person, which is why you have to reside in the city in which the User Group is taking place, because these are going to be sort of like networking, like small group networking conversations that you guys will meet up at a certain area. There are some virtual opportunities, I don’t know what the plan is for that just yet.

And I think that’s all I have for you. I think I have one more slide.

Okay, Q&A, I’ll get to that in just a second. Adobe Summit. Adobe Summit is happening mid-March in Vegas as always.

I think you have a couple more weeks to get that $100 discount. If you are attending Adobe Summit, Cynthia and I are in the process of building out a business case to get ourselves there. So if you are going to be in attendance, honestly, could you let us know? Feel free to just post in the chat or like thumbs up, I don’t know, however, maybe just post in the chat saying I’ll be there, because we’re trying to work on finding a way of getting those like networking, breakfasts, lunches together. We just have to put together a business case to say what our value is that we’ll bring and the customers that we can pull together. So we would love to know who’s gonna be there so that we can share that back with our leadership. Look at the chat. Amazing, I am seeing literally it’s so many names and I just love knowing that you guys are all gonna be there and I really, really hope that Cynthia and I get to be there to not only meet some of you and see some familiar faces, but also to just get you guys together to just talk about Workfront, because I know we’re all in the same boat of our passion for Workfront. So lastly, I’m gonna be done speaking here in just a second is the free events. Like I said, these are all available on the events page on Experience League. Free to sign up, anyone can attend. So we hope to see you at more events later this month. There’s gonna be a text only event in the community forum coming in February. There’s also a handful of other events we’re working on for February. We’ll try and get those posted as soon as we can. But similar to the Fusion templates, if there is a topic that you would love to see us talk about, maybe you wanna partner with us, whatever, let us know, send us an email and say like, hey, could you please add Workfront planning? Or could you please add resource management? Like whatever it is to your list of topics. And then we will work on adding that to our calendar of events for Q2.

With that- Really quickly, so Brittany asked the question, if someone can’t make the event, will there be a recording? Nicole and I say this all the time, register right now for the virtual summit right now, because the way that they start pushing out recordings is usually through whoever’s registered. They do that for Skill Exchange. They do that for Max. So just do me a favor and go register. If you’re not sure if you can make it in person to summit, please just go register for the online version so that you can like get all the notifications because we want you to be able to get, as the recordings are starting to come out, we want you to be able to get those.

We record all of our events. So there’s, like I said, there’s different teams across Adobe Workfront that host events. Cynthia, Leslie and I, we always record our events. Every single event we do is recorded. It just might not always be emailed. And the reason for that is some of our events, for example, things that are like anything labeled, typically a Connect, which is like a Workfront Collective, an Admin Chat. Those are the ones, because there’s really no formal agenda, they’re sort of open discussions, bring your question, and let’s collectively solve these problems. We don’t typically share recordings with people who aren’t there because we really want to make sure that there’s a safe space for people to ask their questions. But if you missed it and you’re like, hey, I really was interested in X topic, let us know and we’re happy to send it. For the most part, we record everything and try and publish everything to Experience League, although we might be moving to like the actual on-demand events recording page to be confirmed. But for now, stick to the Community Forum. If you go to the Discussions area, you’ll find a handful of our recordings. And if you don’t see it, send us an email.

And we can go from there. I don’t know what this is transparently that I just clicked on and now it’s showing my screen.

Margaret just shared a link to Adobe Summit Registration.

Oh, it says Adobe Summit is okay for employees. I thought maybe this was like a Google Doc for everyone putting their names of what they’re attending and I get really excited.

All right, I think that’s all I have. Yes, there is gonna be, if you have some feedback on today’s session, please complete a survey, a short survey before you go. Cynthia will post a link to that in the chat. Otherwise, I have seven minutes and we are happy to just open it up for questions for anyone who wants to raise their hand. So, Samantha. Yeah, you mentioned earlier on the back of the house settings to show when a project went on hold and I’m trying to find that. Yes, so in order to do that, you have to create a calculated custom field to track your status change dates. This is an example right here. Oh, hold on, let me just stop getting out of presentation mode.

This is an example right here. If you actually click on this blog, and again, you guys are gonna have this link, save time, it’ll walk you through step-by-step instructions. What you do is you create a field, a calculated custom field. So you would call it, say, date of planning or date of whatever you wanna call it. You don’t add any sort of calculation. You just create it so that it appears in the field library and then you go in and add your calculation. And so if you just follow those instructions, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s simply just like you add your status key and then you add your if statement.

But always let us know if you run into any issues, Samantha.

Thanks.

Yes, Kelly.

When you were sharing about the tips on notifications, I couldn’t remember, I think it cut out. Were you saying to turn off or turn on the projects I’m on notification? Hold on, let me just share my screen. Turn on the projects I’m on become active. Turn that on. Turn it on, okay. Yes, that will trigger when a project goes from planning to current. That will trigger basically task one, task assignment notification versus one for every task. Yeah, that’s what I was. I was just curious which one you said. Oh, yep. Thank you.

I’m trying to do your poll for this. I’m trying to do this as I’m typing.

Any other questions while Cynthia tries to do a poll here? Okay, let’s see if this works.

It worked? Look at that.

I didn’t even have the app in my teams.

Look at that. I know you can do it. Thanks. Thanks for having faith in me.

Yes, please. Yeah, take a minute, fill out the poll. Before you leave, fill out the survey to just share some feedback. It’s anonymous, so you can be honest.

And yeah, honestly, at this point, if you guys don’t have any other questions, you are free to drop. Like I said, there’ll be other events later this week and later this month and into February. We’ll be able to get to you at some more customer success workshops. Otherwise, have a great rest of your Tuesday. We’ll be in touch and send us an email if anything comes up. Keep an eye out for a follow-up email later today.

And yeah, honestly, thank you guys so much. We’ll be in touch.