Mastering Email Notifications in Adobe Workfront

Transcript

At a temperature of approximately 185 to 100.

Hey, everybody everyone good morning.

We’ll get settled here in just a 2nd as everyone joins in. So just bear with us for another minute or so and then we’ll get started.

We actually had 350 people sign up. I feel like we all feel the email notification pane.

At least it could be a good therapy session. Nicole.

100%. Yeah.

Like this is one of those where we’ll get a lot of yep, me too’s in the chat.

Just waiting for it. I saw some folks introducing themselves, so feel free to introduce yourself in the chat here. We’ll get started here in about 30 seconds just to let everyone join in. Let us know who you are. Maybe what company where you’re coming from and like I said, we’ll get started here momentarily.

Fabulous.

Right, I’m thinking I’m going to go ahead and get started. So this is you, if you just happen to stumble into today’s meeting today, we’re going to be focused on mastering email notifications in Adobe Workfront. With your customer success team, and so this is the agenda for today’s session. Cynthia and I do not have 60 minutes worth of content to share with you.

And so this will be more of an interactive discussion, but we plan to kind of go through, you know, some introductions of just who we are and our background, and then we’ll talk about the impact and balance of setting up email notifications correctly. Kind of just jump into the different types of notifications that are available and kind of how you can take advantage of each or turn them on and turn them off. And then we’ll just wrap up with some best practices and next steps. And so, like I said, we don’t have 60 minutes of content here. It’s really designed for this to be an open discussion where you guys kind of share what’s working well for you, what’s not working, and then we can collectively, you know, crowdsource some solutions together. And so we are going to be recording the session for the person who had asked, so keep an eye out for a follow-up email this afternoon.

You’ll get a link to the recording. You’ll get a copy of the slide deck. You’ll get a summary of maybe some best practices, recommendations, tips from the chat. We will also be publishing this to Experience League, so if you guys do have any follow-up questions, you’re always more than welcome to just post a reply or comment to the Experience League post.

At some point this afternoon, it should be ideally within, you know, I’m going to say two to three hours, just because we have a meeting right following this.

Yes, this is our, this session is going to be recorded, so just another FYI. And then introduction. So if you guys haven’t joined a Scale Customer Success workshop before, this is your Scale Customer Success team. We host about 80-ish free Workfront events per year for you guys. We’re really just focused on topics that you guys asked us about, and we’ll always pull in resources, you know, from our counterparts in product or development or professional services or whoever, to help with expertise that we don’t have that in space for.

So I am Nicole Vargas. I am a Senior Scale Customer Success Manager. I’m based in Salt Lake City.

I came into Workfront about seven and a half years ago through customer support, and I’ve have bounced around between there, and then I was in training operations, and I’ve kind of been sitting here for the last five or so years with Cynthia and Leslie. So, Cynthia, maybe you’ll go next. Yeah, of course. Hey, I’m Cynthia. I used to be a customer, so some of this stuff today is going to be, hey, these are the mistakes I made as a customer. And I was that for five years and then joined Adobe Workfront five years ago, so I got my 10-year pin, if that was such a thing. Love talking about Workfront. Leslie, do you want to say hey? Yeah. Hey, everybody. I’m Leslie Speer. I’m based in Denver. I’m also a former customer. I’ve been on the Workfront side of things now for a little over four years.

Yeah, I’m going to be mostly hanging out in the chat, but thanks.

Yeah, and just to follow up on what Leslie said, if you guys do have questions, best practices, tips, things you want to talk about, post those in the chat. If you have a question as we go, feel free to just raise your hand or even just pop right off mute and say, hey, question here, or I have an idea to share. This is not a very formal webinar. We really encourage you guys to actually participate in today’s session. And so I’m going to hand it off to Cynthia to kick things off. Yeah, so we are going to talk through all the different email notifications and how to change and modify and all those things. But to me, and again, let’s just start out with, hey, don’t follow my example. When I became a SysAdmin, and to be fair, back in those just like at task days, early Workfront days, all of the emails, I think, were defaulted on, almost all of them. And I didn’t know that, and I didn’t even know where to find them at the time because I inherited an instant. But I want to talk about what that can do in terms of adoption. Like all of this, all of what we’re about to talk about is, you know, in the context of adoption and your communication guidelines and plans, and thinking about how your users actually want to be notified and engaged with, like what are their preferences, how much information is too much information, thinking about like, it’s not just Workfront emails and Workfront notifications that they’re getting. It’s that within all of the other emails and notifications that they’re getting from all the other systems.

And as we talk through this, I would just, my biggest piece of advice is just don’t be me.

Like, less is more. We’ll talk a little bit more about it as we go through it. But just understanding how these notifications work within your organization’s processes, right? And one of the things that Nicole talks about a lot, especially in terms of reporting, but I think it works here too, is what do you want them to do with these notifications? Like, it seems like it would be obvious, but it isn’t. So do you want them to go and check their work? Do you want them to go do something? Getting an email or getting a notification just to get one is just, you know, could be just super overwhelming. So that’s the number one thing. And the number two thing in terms of like, how will you interact with Workfront? Like, are you using proofing or are you using reporting? Do they need all these notifications? Like, sort of make it a strategic decision as you go through these. There is a difference between these global settings and the, you know, group and individual preferences, which we will talk about. And then there is a difference between Workfront and proofing notifications. Like, luckily we’re getting sort of merged. However, we’re still not there yet. So we’ll talk through all of that. But just, you wanted to, everything we’re about to talk about, I just want you to think about in terms of end user adoption and what that can mean in terms of their sentiment with Workfront.

Yeah, and just to echo what Cynthia has shared, we kind of frame this session in the sense of here are some recommendations, ideas, things to consider. There’s not necessarily a one size fits all when it comes to email notifications. It’s not like we can come here and say, like, you must turn this one on, you must turn this one off. Like, that is a hard best practice. That is not the case. And so email notifications, like Cynthia said, is really going to be framed around what works for your organization. What is the intention that you are trying to convey with these email notifications? What’s the action you want people to take? And so what works for one person might not work for the other. And that’s okay. That’s the benefit of, you know, having different processes across teams or groups. And so just keep that in mind as we’re talking today around email notifications.

So when we think about, like, what the balance and you will again, what Nicole just said, like, there’s no one size fits all. But knowing what those notifications are and what triggers, like, that’s the number one, right? So just being, like, actually educated on what they are. And we have links, we’re going to share all the links. It’s going to be great for you to check what those triggers are. But also telling your users what, like, this notification means this because it’s not intuitive. Like, we all know that. Like, some of those things are not very intuitive. You know, in terms of ownership, like, what do you want them to do when they get it? We just talked about that. It’s something we’re going to repeat that a couple of times. I made the decision back in the day, I had a bunch of them on and I left them on and it wasn’t the right approach because it got super confusing. Users didn’t know what they were supposed to do. And they just, and also think about timing. Like, they didn’t know the timing of, okay, I check these things in the morning and I work on this in the afternoon. And so the notifications are not getting, you know, received at the timing that they’re interested in. And in terms of, you know, just reducing that need for meetings, like, the idea behind all those notifications is, hey, I don’t have to meet and talk about it. I’m going to get this notification. I’m going to know exactly what I’m supposed to do with it. And Nicole, I don’t know if you want to add to that.

Yeah, not necessarily. I just, again, just trying to make sure that when these, when your notifications are done right, you’re going to have that balance between, you know, what users know what they’re supposed to do and sort of noise. And so just, again, customize it based on what’s for your needs. But as long as you’re enabled and educated as to what is available and what is going to work for your processes, what users know that they’re supposed to do upon viewing it, then you can find a way to, you know, match out of your processes and drive efficiency. So nothing to really add there, just to sort of echo.

Yeah, and I love that you should, you should copyright that. What’s need, like need to know versus noise.

So when we talk about options, this will be like super fast, at least for me, just for me personally, when I think about the stuff on this slide is just remembering how many places your users are going to get notified. And we don’t even have that mobile app. And yeah, it might be the same notification that they’re getting in the mobile app and in Teams, and they’re still getting it however many times. So just like some of us inherited an instance, and you may not realize that your users have integrated with Slack. So they might be getting notifications in Slack and in Teams and in their email and in wherever else. So that’s my takeaway here. Yeah, and just knowing that each notification serves a different purpose. You know, you know, when we also talk, we’re going to kind of jump into automatic reminders and reminder notifications. These are a little bit different than just a standard in-app notification or an email notification. These are specific to an object in your work for an instance. And so just familiarizing yourself with what’s available, how can users be notified, what is customizable, what’s not, understanding that difference so that users can sort of pick and choose maybe what works for them or what works for your organization. Maybe, you know, you set up some guidelines and restrictions. If you guys have attended a past workshop around 10 communication tips, the very first thing we talk about is building out a communication plan and what different channels within your organization, what they should be used for, what should email be used for, what should Slack be used for, what should Teams be used for, what should Workfront be used for. And so really defining that at an organization or a team or a group or department level first and then saying, okay, based on how we’ve sort of defined these guidelines, let’s now go into each of the notifications and figure out how we can tailor them to match what we need for our users. And so just calling that out if you don’t even have one. I’m not saying you have to, you know, go ahead and write a guideline sheet today, but just something to think about because everyone works a little differently. So just putting that in writing to give people some sort of expectations.

These have a lot of the next few slides have a lot of text on them, and we’re not going to go through all of the text. It’s really just to under, you know, to kind of give you guys this framework and also a takeaway because you’re going to get a copy of this text. The first thing is in-app notifications. And I think if there’s one thing that you should know about in-app notifications is that in-app notifications are not customizable. That’s probably the biggest takeaway from this slide. You’re not going to be able to turn these off in Workfront. And so that little blue square up in your top right corner that has either a one or two or an 80, whatever that might look like, those are not going to be able to be turned off. And so just know that if that’s the channel you want users to go, they’re not going to be able to say, oh, I only want to get notifications for things I’m assigned to or things that have a due date change or things or maybe times that they’ve been tagged in a comment. It’s sort of a, you know, all or nothing approach. Me personally, I’m not a huge in-app notification. If I probably logged into my work for an instance right now, I would probably have 80 because I think that’s the most you can see. Yeah, without actually clicking see more. And so again, you can just maybe part of your enablement plan is letting users know, hey, this is available to you. If it’s not working for you, that’s okay. Let’s find you a different channel or program to match what it is that you need for your needs. So I don’t know if Cynthia, you have anything to say other than maybe you might not use them either, I don’t think. But I don’t. And that was exactly, I’m kind of glad that they changed it to 80 because back when you would be like you have 500 unread notifications because I never checked them. And I just think that goes straight back to what we were saying. And there’s a bunch of comments in the chat about Outlook rules for delete. We can plan for people, like I’m going to do this in-app notification. I’m going to send whatever and your users may make a choice of like I’m not going to read that. And if I get an email, I’m going to automatically delete it. So just remember that.

Yes. All right. The next one here is email notifications. And this one we might spend a few minutes on because I feel like a lot of people will have some ideas here. But probably if I were to say what’s one takeaway from email notifications is that you can customize them, but you can do that at both a global level and at a group level. So you kind of have that option. You see I kind of screenshot at the bottom here, this little toggle that you can turn on and say actually enable at the group level. So if you have group administrators who are managing their own groups or departments, they can specify these for their own organization. And so, Cynthia, I don’t know if you have something that is your biggest call out for email notifications. I mean, I will just say like realizing what they did and what they triggered. And I think Monique posted just earlier, like way earlier in the chat about like some of them do the same things. And so then you’re sort of double and double hitting your users. So like for me, this article and I just posted it, it’ll obviously be here on this page when you get the slide deck. But the full list of available email notifications go through them, look at them and go, oh, is that what that’s supposed to do? Because that’s not the you know, that’s not what I want to be tagging them with.

Absolutely. Go look. And I will also say the cool thing now, because Nicole, you mentioned like what you know, what’s by default that are on. They were they were like defaulted. I think all of them were defaulted on back in the day. We didn’t have like an inactive or not. I think that’s customer feedback that changed that because they were all. So just imagine my users. I had all of them on. We’ll go through we’ll go through some of the email notifications that maybe you should have on. Maybe the ones that you could potentially turn off will go through some recommendations around this. But I wanted to. Someone had asked in the chat or someone posted in the chat like your users use in-app notifications. Like that’s what they rely on. You know, it’s kind of this surprise. And I think one of the things when we’re talking about the difference between in-app notifications and email notifications is that in-app notifications. So that little blue icon. That is not a comprehensive list of all notifications in Workfront. And so just leaving that out there again. Email notifications is going to give you that full list that you can pick and choose. In-app notifications is going to be a select handful of notifications. And so if you are relying on email or in-app notifications, just know that not everything is going to be triggering an alert. So you might want to just review the list of email verse in-app and then figure out, OK, what’s what am I missing that maybe I need to build a dashboard for? Or maybe those are the email notifications I need to turn on. So just FYI, if you are using in-app, it’s not going to be that comprehensive list.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So y’all know that I’m like the main one, right? I used this. Would I recommend that you use this? Probably not. If you want to make friends.

OK, so the automatic reminders. As you can see from the screenshot, like you can have you can turn them on and say like, OK, I did like one day after it’s due.

But you can do like to their manager or to their manager’s manager. Now, you do have to have all that set up in Workfront. Like this is your people manager, the hierarchy and all of that. And I did. And if you turn this on, this is a global setting.

So throw that out there, too. So like you’re turning on that everyone will get a late like you’re late. Their manager is going to be like this person’s late. Their manager’s manager’s going to get everybody’s late. So I just I have used it. I probably used it from a place of frustration, but I have used it when I felt like we’re not we’re not getting any traction. People aren’t really paying attention. And it got attention really fast. So that’s my feedback on that one.

Yeah. And we’re not saying that these are things that should be 100 percent turned on like this is an option for you. You know, someone had said, oh, I turn this on and no one liked it. And I’m not sure why these are being set. Again, you don’t have to turn these up an option for you if you find that, you know, every time, you know, tasks are just constantly being late. Maybe it’s OK, let’s set up automatic reminders for a week and we’re going to set it to a user’s manager.

It could be something temporary, a temporary fix or a temporary like, hey, guys, I don’t want to do this. Forcing me into that space. OK, totally optional. If this is not working for your process, your flow, your organization, you don’t even have to turn them on.

Same thing with reminder notifications, reminder notifications, although you can.

Sort of customize these in some senses, you know, you can customize the subject, the body, the HTML. It’s still going to be associated for all objects in your system. And so just again, keeping that in mind, these have a little bit of a different schedule in terms of how they’re triggered. But you can create different reminder notifications if you do want to customize, you know, certain tailored communications based on, you know, tasks. Like, hey, reminder, your task is due in three days or something along those lines.

I just like and I’m checking the chat like here’s what I would say, like especially for like the last one, you know, and this one.

You know, the reminder notifications, they take a little work and testing and they still like, you know, just like Nicole said, these are global settings. So we’re always like, hey, remember every time you make a choice here, like it is a global setting. And if you’re going to put the work into it, I just want to make sure that it matches your communication strategy before you go through all the effort to try to build some sort of customized reminder notification that only like one small team might need. But you’re turning it on globally. So, I mean, that’s just my only feedback is like some of these things. And I mean, think about the one that we just talked about on the last slide. I’ve never met any customer that ever used that more than a day. I used it for like a week just because I was angry. Nobody would answer. You know, nobody was doing anything or updating. But just like I find very few customers that use some of these things for that reason because they are global. So I just want that out there. Yeah, I mean, I mean the whole enchilada, as they say. So, it’s everyone. It is all users.

Monique, I love Patty, Cynthia too. Sorry, I just have to say.

When we talk about integrations, you know, we always talk about meeting your users where they work. And so if you want to go the route of having users receive work front email or work front notifications in Slack or MS Teams, you can configure these integrations.

Mostly in the sense of, OK, all notifications are going to be enabled by default on your Slack side. They’re going to be delivered through a work front Slack channel. And you can sort of customize what you want turned on and off. MS Teams, you’re not going to receive all but only a select number of notifications. So again, calling that out very similar to your in-app notifications. You’re going to get them in that work front bot channel. And just know that there might be like a short, you know, up to five minute delay. So these are just things that, again, if your users are like, I don’t like in-app notifications, I don’t like email notifications, I want to work in work front. And in my Slack channel, OK, maybe it’s like a combination of a dashboard in work front plus some Slack notifications. And so just finding ways to figure out what works for your users and then build processes to ensure that they’re sort of in the know.

Yeah, I mean, to me, these things are the way you lean into what users actually want.

You could obviously use email notifications. You can do that. But if there’s a better way to help them work, absolutely use it, find it, love it.

And for the people who are asking about new teams, some people are saying it’s been working with us for new teams, some folks haven’t. Maybe that’s something the people that it is working for, if you guys maybe want to try and connect with some of the folks where it isn’t working. I know that there’s also some discussion with our product team that we will try and bring them forefront to a session to talk about some of these integrations and what that looks like in the future for work front. And so as things progress and probably the next month or two, we’ll also probably hold a session should anything come up. Yeah, we’re tracking that and working with product. You know that. Actually, it was Nicole that started it. You also should know that. Everyone knows. She is our advocate. And there’s probably like a 150 response Slack thread going on right now. So it’s in the works. Yeah, definitely.

All right.

I’ll maybe jump, I’ll maybe kickstart this and then Cynthia, I’ll hand it off to you. So again, when we’re talking about notifications, not a one size fits all, totally customizable, but on the email notifications that should be deactivated or should be activated, despite being set to inactive by default, these are just a few of them. The ones that we called out and even just from Cynthia’s experience is the first one, you’re going to see it labeled as current project status change to product team. You probably know it as a project I’m on becomes active. And the reason behind we saying turn this one on is because if you as a project manager or an admin are creating projects and setting all of your assignments while the project is in a planning status, when you swap that status to current, unless you have this email notification turned on at the global level, then users will not be notified that they have been assigned a task. We’re on the flip side. If you assign a task while the project is in current, that’s a different email notification. So again, this one’s focused on making assignments while the project’s in planning, flipping that to current and then notifying users in sort of one single email saying like, you’ve been assigned this set of tasks versus here are 18 tasks that you’ve been assigned while the project’s in current and then that person gets 18 emails.

I’m assigned to an issue. That one’s not on by default. So if you are using request queues or you’re leveraging the issue functionality and work front, if you are being assigned to an issue, you probably want to be notified so you can actually take action on that. If you’re using predecessors for your project timelines, all of my, all predecessors of my tasks are complete. This could be something that, again, you might not even use, so you could just turn this one off. But if for some, I know someone had asked about can start in the chat at some point.

This is going to trigger that notification to say like, hey, yep, your task is ready to start now that all predecessors have been completed. So you can always turn that one on. And then if you’re using time sheets, this could be something to just as a call out, my time sheet has been reopened. And so for whatever reason, that just gives that user an action like, hey, you might need to go in and resubmit your hours for that week. And so if you’re not using, if you’re not having your users log time, no worries, just disregard that. And Cynthia, I feel like you have some experience with some of these notifications, so I’ll hand it to you.

So I would say that, so any status changes, okay, unless your users are, and I mean, and some of y’all may have like users that are very, very engaged with Workfront.

Most of my users, when they would get the status change, like, oh, you know, your task is ready to, you know, it’s now current or whatever, they were super annoyed, number one. Number two, they were going to do the work when they wanted to do it. And that includes like work item comments. Like unless there were directed comment, that can get super messy. I’m not saying, so just want to go back to what Nicole said, like, I’m not saying, these are not like hard and fast rules. I’m just saying that these are the ones that absolutely annoyed my users. And yeah, so anytime that the, oh my gosh, anytime that a project status would change, because as project managers, I’m like, I’m putting it in planning, I’m putting it in current, I’m putting it in planning, I’m putting it in current, and they just lost their mind when they would get all of these things. Plan completion date changes. And again, unless your users are super engaged, that’s more of a project manager notification, right? Not an end user one. And then object sharing. I understand why they have the object sharing so that if you get shared an object, you can go straight to it. Except again, I’m going to point everybody back to this idea of you’re probably in meetings, you’re doing, like you probably work front, your users do their work front work at a certain time of the day, and then they do all of their work, and then they go maybe back into work front later. So if they’re getting hit with emails throughout the day, like, and especially for, oh, this object has been shared with you, I would just, I would just stand down on that one. So that to me is one to really think about. The bonus one is absolutely from Monique. She thinks I don’t, I don’t listen to her, but I do. The send emails from work front when a comment is made on a proof.

It’s under set up and like that right there. Like everybody’s going to get double, triple emails if you have that turned on. So turn that off. Go in there, like if you did, if you, if you do anything today, go into set up and check and make sure that things are. So that would be my feedback on that. Yeah, I realize that maybe should have put a screenshot in there. So I’m, I’ll just jump into a test, like a work front instance and just show you guys because this is a huge call out if you are using the proving functionality under your set up email. You’re, it’s not going to, you’re not going to find it under your email notifications, which is not always super intuitive. But if you go to this review and approval, you’re going to want to uncheck this box. This is so you’re not getting duplicate notifications from both work front and proof. So this is what we were talking about around your proofing notifications.

So, again, not going to go through this whole slide. This is more of a high level key takeaways if you want to review this. But mostly we’re just talking about, okay, if you want to go the route of setting up email notifications at the global level, what are some pros and cons? If you want to go up the route of setting it at a group level, sort of what are the pros and cons? And maybe we’ll even ask some folks here on the call, you know, how they’re structuring their email notifications to match. So if you think about it at the global level, okay, one, from a consistency standpoint, you don’t have to worry. Everyone in the organization has the option for the same email notifications. You can control email notifications from a standardization, you know, standpoint. And also, from a simplicity and efficiency standpoint, if you only have to manage one set of email notifications rather than going group by group, this is going to be a whole lot easier for you to manage in your day to day. On the flip side, if you set them up at the global level, you’re going to give users the option or potentially, you know, if you’re activating a handful of them. Users may receive too many irrelevant alerts, you know, where we talk about having noise in your inbox, you don’t really want that. And then the lack of customization. Granted, users can turn email notifications off in their personal profile. We’ll get and we’ll talk about that in just a second. But again, if it depending on the different needs of your teams or groups, that’s just something to call out.

Yeah, just highlight it real quickly. So for group emails, we put that on there because not everybody’s using group administration, even if you don’t have group admins, group administration is super handy. And this is one of the ways it is handy is that you can have specific email event notifications for groups. However, what we’ve got here, just as a reminder, is like the challenges is we are all like we are all members of different groups. So that’s there can be inconsistency. It’s why, why are they getting this and I’m getting that or maybe I’m getting all of them by accident. And then, of course, the maintenance overhead of that. Like, you’re going to want to document from a group standpoint, the decisions that you make. I’ve made the decision that this group is going to have, you know, these notifications of this group are, you know, they’re going to have different ones. So just absolutely gives you flexibility, but just again, kind of going back to that communication strategy, how do you want people to get information? Yeah.

I do have a screenshot for the bulk here in a second. So that’s why I. Yes. All right. So when we’re talking about next steps here.

First and foremost, ask your users what’s working. This isn’t a set it and forget it. This is set it. See what’s working, what’s not working, and then adjust as needed. And so if you want to ask people on a quarterly basis, yearly basis, whatever that looks like to say, like, hey, are you getting the notifications that you need for your job? Are there things that you’re missing that maybe need to be turned on or maybe we need to build a dashboard for? Ask. That’s the best thing you can do. Your users will feel a little bit more involved that their opinion is being taken into consideration. So just do yourself a favor and see what’s working.

Maybe you want to cover the second one because I feel like you probably did this.

So, yeah, turn. And that’s why I have the screenshot. I know that I’m not the only one that would do this. I would just randomly go in and return on notifications like, you know, just pull up a user report or especially like, you know, you’re talking to somebody like, I don’t ever get notifications. I’m like, all right, let me log in as you turn them all off. That’s why you don’t get anything. So I absolutely did this on a regular basis, just randomly. And, you know, sometimes I blame Workfront. That’s OK. You can blame like, why am I getting these notifications again? I’m not sure. Workfront made a change and it was actually me that went in and made their changes. So I highly recommend that.

Yeah, I mean, if you’re doing any sort of like audit every part of your, you know, every quarter, every six months, whatever that looks like, just go in because when you activate them at the global level, it’s going to by default turn that on for every person in their personal profile. So that person will need to then go back and manually turn it off. So it could be a win win. Consider using Daily Digest versus email. So, again, if people are like, I’m getting way too many email notifications from Workfront, maybe they’re relying on in-app notifications or Slack or Teams, whatever that looks like. Some email notifications in a person’s profile allows them to set it for if they want just like a daily summary, basically, Daily Digest. So if you’re like, OK, maybe every day you just get an email with all of the notifications that trigger during that day, you know, maybe you’re only getting one email from Workfront. And so but just keep that in mind that if you’re asking people to like take action on something when you tag them in a comment or you assign them to a task, they’re going to get that until their Daily Digest goes out unless they’re using maybe in-app notifications. And so this could be something that maybe project managers or maybe a little bit more high level, we are just getting that summary. So just something else to think about.

And if you don’t, so we did not always have this. So those of you that are newer to Workfront, this like and I know they already put it in the chat, sort of the flitter at the end of the email, like I don’t stop getting emails of this type.

Folks, we did not always have that. And it’s it’s brilliant. It’s amazing. So if they don’t want to get email notifications, just they can click that. It’ll take them there and then they can turn it off. That is the most brilliant thing ever, because I know a lot of us remember having to go in and show people how to turn them off versus having that option. So it’s a really good one. The next one here is if you get an email notification and I’m talking about either you or your users, if you kind of enable them to say like, hey, if you get an email notification, you’re like, I don’t need this email rather than delete it. If they click on stop emails of this type and I could probably try and find an example in my inbox and Monique does. Yeah. Oh, so perfect. Yeah. Excuse me. What they can do is when they click stop emails of this type at the bottom of that email, what will happen is they’ll be automatically redirected into Workfront. It’ll open their profile, open their notification settings, they’ll turn off the email notification and it’ll highlight the the row and say basically this was turned off. And so, again, it’s just something that you can let your users know that it’s and it’s not a, oh, I don’t want it for this task. It’s a global setting. So if you turn this off, it’s going to be turned off for all of your work items. But just know that you can kind of put some of that work into their hands to say like, OK, I as an admin. But if all of your users are like, I don’t need this email notification, then you can actually go in and obviously to your global notifications and turn that off.

So we have the if they aren’t working, try something different. But I will say this, like there’s been a lot of chat just recently here about like, oh, my users saying they didn’t get it. You know, whether it be I’ve turned them back on or maybe they have an Outlook rule that they’re deleting. But one of these I do want to and we don’t have this on the slide, but just occurred to me as we’re talking like one of the things that I would say is think about your office hours. We get a lot of questions about, you know, what should I be talking about during office hours? You could I think a lot of people don’t even it’s like noise, like here’s an external email and they’re just deleting it. They’re not even reading that it’s from work front about something that they need to do. So in terms of your communication and your enabling of your users, show them what the emails look like. Like I know that seems a little bit extra, but that I used to do that office hours all the time. Like this is what the emails look like that tell you you’re supposed to start work or hey, do you have an outlook? Like we would talk through what these email notifications were in office hours. So it’s just an idea throwing it out there.

But if they’re not working, you can always build out reports and dashboards. You all know I love a report and dashboard. That’s what I preferred anyway. There is the home workspace. They can go out to home instead of worrying about all those notifications. You can schedule report deliveries. I did that all the time. Weekly, I asked people when they actually checked their work front work. And that’s when they would get their report delivery. And then so many great tips happening in the chat right now about leveraging integrations in Fusion. Absolutely. Highly recommend that.

There’s one thing in the chat here that transparently I was not aware of. So this is news to me, and I think it’s something that everyone should be aware of that. If users are not getting emails from work front, you’ve kind of gone through your troubleshooting steps. You’ve logged in as them. You’ve confirmed the email notification is on in their profile. Maybe you trigger an action that should trigger it. You go have them check their inbox and they don’t get it. There seems to be a block list that work front support. Maybe this was news to me. Maybe you guys not news to you guys. But just calling that out in case you haven’t seen this. You can always reach out to customer support and say, hey, my users not receiving this notification. If they’re on this list, they can probably get removed. But you might want to try that before going to your IT team. But depending on which is faster, maybe wherever you get a faster response. But something to think about. It seems like a few folks have been able to solve some of their problems that way. So just calling that out. And just so you know, especially for you all. OK, I’m just going to go from financial services, but from the regulated. If your IT is extra security conscious, every time that they introduce a new server, all work front emails would get blocked. So I would go through this easily once a quarter. Like everyone just stopped getting emails and then I have to go back through IT. And like, can you please make sure that these work for it? And I have I mean, basically I had an email with all of the different ways that the emails could come in and I would serve it back up to IT. So if that happens to you, like that’s also like a server issue internally. Happened all the time.

For Jennifer’s question around talk to leveraging integrations in Fusion, what we’re really talking about is, again, maybe some of those Slack and Teams integrations. And when we talk about Fusion, there are ways in Fusion and it’s not saying that Fusion is going to trigger a different type of notification. It still might trigger an email notification. But what you can do is say like, OK, every time I know someone had asked, like, if you submit a request, can is there a way to like automatically send a note to someone else? Like so you can leverage Fusion to say like, OK, every time a request is submitted through this queue automatically add a comment that sends a notification to person A or every time a project. You know, status goes to complete or complete pending approval to or to complete, you know, trigger a different notification to let someone know.

And so we’re not saying that that’s necessarily a different type of notification. It’s just a way to maybe automate some of the notifications in your work for an instance so that you’re not having to manually type out comments or trigger work assignment emails. So just leveraging that from from an integration standpoint.

I think we have one more slide here and then we’ll kind of open it up to some folks for questions. And if you have any best practices to share, we’ll also try and pull all those together into our follow up. But just last but not least, these are our key takeaways. So review the global email, especially email, email notifications, because they are so customizable and you can turn them on and turn them off. To understand the purpose of each one that’s going to give you the name, the description and let you know, you know, is this set to active by default or inactive by default? And then figure out if that works for your organization or not. Cynthia, I’ll let you kind of jump through the next few. Yeah. And, you know, we talked about it, but less is more. Don’t be mean. Just turn them all off, except for maybe directed and just see what happened. Like, see what’s going to work for your users and, you know, really talk to them. We talked about the proof notifications and work front. Make sure that’s unchecked. But then that idea of checking in with your users regularly. And that should be that should be always like survey them if you want to. Or just again, office hours at like ask them, don’t watch me work. There’s a bunch of different ways that you can engage with your users. I would highly recommend that you do it. I know none of us have the system admin as their full time job. I didn’t. But if you can do it quarterly, that would be great. Half year would be yearly at the minimum. But check in with your users to see how they’re they’re dealing with their notifications. How does it help them work? Do they look at them at all? And that’s going to help you drive your decision making. Last piece here. Regularly bulk edit your user notifications. That was me going, you know, I’m going to turn all these things back on and you can do it in a user report. So that’s what the screenshot is. I literally pulled up a user report, selected all hit, you know, bulk edit. And then you can turn things on and off as much as you’d like. So highly recommend that as well. We have a few slides just to wrap up and then, like I said, we’ll open it up. We’ll come back to the Q&A just so that you guys have an FYI on what’s coming down the pipeline for Workfront.

If you guys aren’t familiar about the user group program, these are basically, you know, workshops, webinars. You know, they can be in person, potentially opportunities for you to network and collaborate with your peers. There’s a handful of cities and regions that have launched and more are launching on a regular basis. And so be sure to just check out the Workfront user group page. It’s going to be separate from the events page, which is not great. I know that they’re working on sort of combining the two of them. So it’s sort of that single space for you to go and find events related to Workfront. But if there’s a city or a region that you’re like, oh, I don’t see that and I’d love to start one, you can absolutely fill out a form and reach out to Julie, who leads the user group program, to get that set up for your city. This one is a huge new opportunity for Workfront admin. So if you are an experienced admin, typically they say around five years of expertise and are interested in becoming an Adobe Workfront champion, this program is launching this year for the very first time for Workfront. I know they are having an informational session on May 15th. I think a few folks have had some issues with registering.

I think the team is working on it. But just know that you might want to block off sometime on the 15th. Applications open on May 8th. They’ll close June 10th. And so this is just a really fantastic opportunity for you to get a little bit closer to the inside scoop of the Adobe Workfront world, closer to product, closer to some of your peers, some swag, the executive, I’m sorry, the Adobe Champion Forum, which is an exclusive networking opportunity for you. So fantastic opportunity for you as experienced admins to join this champion program. And then a whole slew of events happening at the end of this month or throughout this month and into June.

There is a session happening tomorrow. If you have questions around Workfront proof, there are, I believe, three of our Adobe Experienced Community Advisors that are going to be leading that. So it’s a text only event. Think of it as like a Reddit thread where you post a question and then during this one hour time period, these three folks will be answering your question. So great opportunity to get your proofing questions answered by your peers. If you’re using Fusion, there’s going to be, and you probably have heard of event subscriptions moving to V2. They’re going to be doing a session in partnership with software development, software engineering. That’ll be more of like an open Q&A to ask your questions around making sure that your Fusion series are not interrupted during that upgrade. There’s a few of our peers here, DSW and Western Governors doing a session in mid-May around creative ways of managing resources in Workfront. So how they’re, you know, managing resources without using the Workload Balancer or the Resource Planner, how they’ve kind of done it using maybe like reports and custom forms. So that’s a bit of a unique session. Cynthia is partnering with Product at the end of May for a session on Workfront planning. She’ll also be doing a session on Data Connect, which is sort of the, you know, how you can pull your data out of Workfront into like a Power BI or Tableau tool for some good insights. And then last but not least of the early June, one of our peers on sort of the sales side, Cafe Team, we call them, it’s going to be doing a session on auditing and aligning your Workfront instance. And so with that, I believe that was my last slide. So I think we can just open it up to questions for the next 10 or so minutes. And then you guys can hopefully get everything you need before you go. So I am just going to stop sharing my screen here and we’ll open it up to Q&A. Or if you guys just have some best practices or what’s working for you that you want to share with everyone on the call, we’re all ears.

There was one in the chat about, we were told users with contributor license cannot depend on consistent notifications despite settings. I hadn’t heard that. However, this was just my two cents. Like back in the day when it was request or reviewer, that’s who I scheduled reports for. First of all, I didn’t want them necessarily seeing every single thing. They didn’t need to see every single thing.

So that would be my work around if that’s the case, if somehow they’re not getting every single notification. That would be my work around, schedule a report, build them one that has everything that they need to see and then just have it drop into their inbox.

That’s just my thought.

I was just going to echo that I used scheduled reports for a lot of things because email notifications were a little wonky for us back in the day. So I think that’s a great idea. I know there was a lot of conversation in the chat early on and later on about doing the customized emails and maybe not having great success getting the object links to pull in. I don’t know if you guys know of any resources we can include in the follow up email, but I’m happy to dig around or if you want to talk to any of that now. Just the one that I sent has HTML examples. However, so here’s what I’ll say about this. And it looks like Bill has done it. I never had a lot of success because again, these are global emails that didn’t always trigger and didn’t always have what I needed in there. I’m going to say that that’s user error.

But it’s absolutely available. If you are a WIS in HTML, you can absolutely build out your own custom event notifications, really.

So I don’t know if anybody’s done it and done it successfully and wants to share that, but the functionality does exist.

Yeah.

I’m also just going to quickly call out that I put a link to the survey just because in case people want to drop. We put a link to a survey. It’s totally anonymous. We read through every single comment that you guys share. So if you just can take a minute to fill that out before you leave, we would really appreciate that.

Does anyone have a question that they want to maybe ask aloud? I have a question, actually two. You talked about group notifications or the system notifications and putting them on both levels. Does one trump the other? And then, so if I have system notifications set up, but then a particular group wants different notifications or doesn’t want notifications. Does one trump the other? So I know on the one side, like if you’re locking them, like where the group can’t make changes, that definitely trumps at the system at the global level. Now, if you have them turned on at the global level and you want to turn them off at the group level, I’ve never actually tested that. Have you tested that, Nicole? No, Mike, that tells me that if you turn something on at the global level, it’s going to trump any group level notification.

Does anyone, I’m assuming some folks here on the call have probably used that functionality before I can speak to that. When I’ve turned on something globally, I’ve gone back through all the groups that didn’t request that and just turned it off for those groups until they came back and asked for it. And that’s good. Okay. And it let you like turn it off. Okay, so that’s really good. But it did, if I turn it on globally, it does turn it on globally for all groups. I just went in and turned it back off for the ones that didn’t need it. Okay, so that’s good. Okay, fabulous. And Matt, did you want to answer or share that or did you have a separate question? Hey, guys, thanks for doing this. It’s a different question. I was interested in that user report for auditing notification settings.

Yeah, bulk editing that one because I’m trying to break it down by, so I’m a group admin. I don’t have system admin access, which is a good and a bad thing because that much free reign and I’d be like, hey, everyone gets reminders, right? You’d be me. Exactly right. And I’d be like, well, you want to work front, here’s work front. Good luck. But no, I’m a serious point. I’m trying to break it down by department who are some teams love getting information and some don’t. And I’m like, I don’t want to have to go through 20, 30 different things. I’d rather bulk edit. So is there, could you bring that back up or give me a little bit more info? I’ve got it up. I’ll share my screen and then we can think there. And if there’s another question, I’ll bring this up.

So I did have another question. You had mentioned that there’s something coming up for data connect. Is data connect something that you have to purchase and work front or is that something that is just available if we have the ultimate plan? It is available with ultimate. It is an add on for select and prime. So if you do have ultimate and you’re interested in learning more about data connect that session, I believe it’s on the events page on experience. Like it is. Yeah, I thought I just didn’t know if it because we have the ultimate plan. We have the ultimate plan. And I do see it. I do see it in setup, but I wasn’t sure. Like, did we have to purchase it? Just like, you know, work from planning. We just purchased. So it’s available to us to do that. Perfect. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. You’ll definitely want to attend that because Matt’s going to go through a bunch of good, like new stuff. So that’s going to be good.

He’s our expert. Yeah, we’ve been thinking about how can we run reports or put some of this data into Power BI to make pretty reports. So this will be great. Thank you. That’s the one thing right. Haven’t had pretty reports. That’s that was one of my big complaints. Why can’t they be prettier? Like I’m sorry. Absolutely. Okay, so I have a user report. Now everybody’s got their favorite user report. And if you don’t like Matt, you should totally build out your favorite user report with like every single thing that you want to know about that user. And so then you’re just literally like, I’m going to just select all. I’m going to click the pencil.

And then we’re going to wait because we’re on a live.

Hello. There it goes. Okay. And then I could literally make a bunch of changes, but you know, I can go to notifications and I can just start.

I’m going to turn all this off. I’m going to turn everything off. I’m going to turn everything on. And you can just like literally go through whatever you want to do. So hopefully that helps you to answer the question. Thank you. That’s great. Yep.

Awesome.

Stop sharing.

Oh, go ahead, Leslie. I was going to see if Bill wanted to come off mute to talk about his question. He was asking about customized notifications about the trigger.

I don’t know how to default the flag to true. I don’t know if Nicole does. No support does.

That might be a good support question.

If you’re saying that you have a trigger and by default it’s being set to false and you want it to set to true instead, my gut says no because that’s not really a native functionality to say like, okay, if this is true, that would probably be a better question for support. I can look into it and try and find an answer for you and put it in the follow up, Bill. But if it by default is being set to false, I don’t think there’s even a setting under like the setup area that would say, you know, like how you can change, you know, your percent complete of a project. I don’t even think that’s a setting in the setup area.

But I love that you have a report. Like it just warms my heart to give a report that tells you like, okay, I’m going to start everything. It’s awesome.

It’s a great workaround.

Yeah, it looks like Skort told him no as well.

Sorry, Bill. If you also post something on the ideas based on experience. I know our community manager, John, he works with product for them to review all of the ideas. I believe it’s on a biannual basis. Is that correct? I think that’s correct. Every six months. And so what they do is they look at the most up liked or liked suggestions and they will review them in their product meeting. So that could be something for you to add there, Bill. And then we can always put it in the follow up. And Lindsay put the link in the chat. Thank you, Lindsay’s. If you want to put that in there. And then Lynn. Sorry, we were both talking. What was your question, Lynn? Oh, no, this was just something completely separate. I wanted to ask, is there any events scheduled or would you consider, if not an event scheduled for Adobe admins who need to make changes to maybe an existing an existing instance of Workfront? And what is affected when you make those changes? Because I’ve been getting into this and, you know, we need to kind of revamp our setup that was done 10 years ago. But we’re also kind of worried about, OK, if we start moving things or changing names or doing things, what is it going to affect? How is it going to affect the data or the groups or the people that are already in there? So is there anything that I could attend or look into to get those answers? Yes. There’s a short answer. Go ahead. What immediately came to mind was a session that I want to say. Yeah, Lindsay and Jen did last year and it was around reorgs for Workfront. And it talks a lot about, you know, even if you’re not going through a reorg, it’s still like, OK, how will naming conventions and how will if I adjust certain settings in Workfront impact, you know, current processes or workflows in place? So that would be that’s my first session, although I’m trying to think of how we would put all of that together in 60 minutes for conversation. I think that would have to be a series of, you know, kind of walking through different areas of Workfront that could be impacted. Like, let’s talk about, you know, projects, just the projects area, you know, project settings that we can look at tasks and then users. And so I think it’s something for us to consider and we have a backlog of topics that people have requested. And so we can we can try and pull something together if the reorg session doesn’t. Yeah, it’s a good one. It’s a good idea. And Lindsay, Lindsay put in there to put it in the community. A lot of us have been through this. Like I had to do it. I had to I inherited my instance. I also had to re like rebuild it multiple times. So many of us have been through this. So she her recommendation was to pop it into the community. Like, hey, does anyone have any best practices for this? And all the community advisors I know will jump on that and then we can promote it as well. So like, yes. The answer is yes. We can do all the things. Perfect. That’s that’s great. And the session that you’re talking about, too, I’ll go ahead and I’ll post it. But the session, too, that you’re talking about reorg, I just do a search out there. We’ll put it in the wonderful email. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. That would be a good ask me anything event. Oh, that’s a good one. You’re right.

That’d be a good one to compile, like brainstorm all the things and then compile it into something. We’ll take that and noodle on your something. Thanks, everybody. We are two minutes over time. We appreciate everyone’s time today. Recommendations or questions. Such great content today. And we hope you guys found some value and some ideas and recommendations to move forward with in your own work for an instance. And so we will send a follow up email. Like I said, it’ll probably be in about two to three hours just because we have some back to back meetings coming up. But keep an eye out for that. And then if you guys do have anything that comes up, you’re always more than welcome to reply to the email that the community posts and we’ll get you taken care of. But hope to see you at some more sessions in May and have a great rest of your day.

Thanks, everybody.