Understanding Unified Approvals - Direction, Reporting, and What’s Next

Transcript

Welcome to Understanding Unified Approvals, Direction Reporting, and What’s Next.

Just a quick reminder, a little bit of housekeeping in this session is being recorded. We’ll be following up with an email later today that has the recording, the slides, and any notes or links that we need to share out from the chat or anywhere else. Just know that that is coming so you don’t have to feverishly take notes. You can watch the demos, watch the presentation, and soak it in and know that you’re going to get everything later for reference.

Really quick, this is your scale customer success team. I’m Leslie Spear, Cynthia and Nicole are with me as well today. We love connecting with you all. We do about 80 events per year. So feel free to connect with us, check out that experience link event page to find more of what’s going on. And then wanted to introduce our speaker today. Mike, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah. Hey, I’m Mike. I’ve been a product manager for about 10 years and I’ve bounced around technology companies, worked with a lot of big tech companies, and found myself at Adobe, which is the best of all of them. So I work on the content and approvals team. So uploading assets, adding approvals, integration with other Adobe products. And that’s also going to be our focus today.

As a personal note, I grew up in Pennsylvania, went to undergrad in Idaho, went to graduate school in Utah, lived in Texas. So I bounced around a lot and currently living in Utah with my wife and two kids.

Awesome. I’m going to stop sharing so you can share your screen. Awesome.

Okay. Today we’re going to talk about the history of Workfront, where we’re at, all of the things that are going on, but I really want to focus on the future of Workfront. So there’s this transition happening with Workfront, with Frame.io, many of you have heard about it, and we’re going to dig into all the details today. And I’m going to show you a live production environment, what’s available for you as of a week ago, really.

So I am going to share some roadmap things today. The roadmap things, I mean, this is kind of a public webinar, but the roadmaps are subject to change. I just wanted to be super clear that some of the things that I’m going to show you may not be delivered in that timeline because we’re focused on your feedback, we’re focused on quality, and as things come up, features that customers really want, we sometimes will prioritize that over what’s on our ideal roadmap. So making that a super clear disclaimer that what you see in the roadmap may not actually hit that timeline.

Okay, so let’s talk about Workfront.

Well, a little bit about the history. So there are a couple of things here to level set on as we talk about the history of Workfront, review and approval. So review is the act of providing feedback on an asset. You annotate things, you make comments, you do markups. It’s really about the collaboration during the creative process. And then there’s the approval. That’s the formal decision. So the statuses within an approval are what I’m showing on screen here. So notified, approved, opened, approved, needs work and reviewed. And these are the things that, this is the record that a stakeholder has signed off, right? So you add someone as an approver and this is a formal record that is tracked that this thing was approved or it was not approved. They’re related, but they are distinct. And understanding the differences here and understanding kind of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Workfront started with just approvals. This was Workfront is, it actually started back in 2001 and Lehigh, Utah, it’s still in Lehigh, Utah. So it’s a technology and a platform that has existed for quite a while, but it started with approvals and a way to track formal decisions on work, but it did not have a native review surface. So around 10 years ago, July, 2015 is when Workfront acquired a technology called ProofHQ. And at the time that was the best in class proofing tool and it brought both review and approval capabilities into the Workfront ecosystem. And for its time, it was ahead of the curve. It was absolutely amazing. Customers love ProofHQ and some are still using it and they still love it. The challenge though, was that ProofHQ and Workfront were two separate systems. So two databases, two login experiences, two places to manage work and customers had to operate across both of those platforms. So as the integration matured between those two platforms a new set of problems emerged that became impossible for us to ignore.

There was that duplicated user database. So managing users across two systems created a bit of an administrative headache and some inconsistency.

And then there’s multiple approvals engines. So ProofHQ had one, Workfront had one and they had their own logic and it was confusing because they didn’t speak the same language.

There’s some product apps like workflows that neither system could handle well on their own and bridging them required workarounds. And these first three issues created some technical bets. So you can imagine as we’re trying to integrate these platforms, some of these older systems aren’t being used anymore but there are some people who are still using them and it was just really difficult to keep both platforms running together. And it still is, both of them still exist and they’re still living.

Workfront actually stopped selling this standalone ProofHQ quite a while ago, 2017, 2018 timeframe is when we stopped actively selling it but you can continue to renew your license if you’re using it.

But even after we integrated these systems together the multiple approval engines problem persisted. So in Workfront itself, there were the two separate approval systems, Approval approval and Document approval and each had different interfaces and different behavior depending on what type of asset was being reviewed. And you can see I’m showing examples of proof approvals, what they look like. So approved, approved changes, changes required versus document approvals which is approved changes and reject.

So this is what unified approvals solves. You may have heard unified approvals. Most of you are probably on unified approvals. It is a single approval experience powered by one engine with consistent decision options. So it’s approve or needs work regardless of the asset type. So it’s one experience for everyone. And we’re not just maintaining unified approvals. We’re actively building on unified approvals. This is the intended unified approvals engine for multiple surfaces.

But this is only half of the story, right? So unified approvals is just half of the piece. We still need that review portion. So the challenges that we just walked through two systems, two approval experiences is too much friction. They all point to the same solution. And this is the future of the work front that we’re talking about today.

Unified review is Frame.io. If you’re not familiar with Frame.io, here’s just a little bit of background. Here’s why it matters. Frame.io was founded in 2014 and it was built from the ground up for one purpose which was making creative review and collaboration as fast and frictionless as possible. It became the go-to platform for video and creative teams at some of the world’s largest studios, agencies and brands. The reason people love it is because it was purpose built for creatives. It was not adapted from a project management tool. It’s frame accurate commenting on video, pixel level annotations on images, real-time collaboration, clean versioning. It was designed to match how creative teams actually work. So Adobe acquired Frame.io in 2021. And the fact that Workfront now uses Frame.io as a review surface is a genuinely significant unlock. You’re not getting a viewer that was built as an actress. You’re getting one of the best creative review platforms ever built. It is natively integrated with Workfront. So annotations, comments, versioning, this is all gonna be in one place, all within Workfront.

Together these two things, we call them unified review and approval. You’re gonna hear me say that throughout the course of this presentation is that this is unified review and approval. It is that approval engine and it is the review in one place. So consistency and efficiency across both experiences, that’s the destination, this is where we’re going. So today’s session, I’ll show you what this looks like in practice. I’m gonna demo this for you. And then I’m gonna talk about what this means for the future of proofing in Workfront.

But before I jump to the demo, let’s talk about proofing. This is the screenshot that I took of proofing. If this doesn’t look familiar to you, you’re probably not on Workfront proof. So there are a lot of different names for it. Proof HQ was rebranded to Workfront proof. Sometimes it’s also referred to as standalone proof. This is the same system I was referring to that Workfront acquired back in 2015.

That standalone product, this is eventually going away. So if you’re affected by this, you would receive multiple communications from Adobe by now. If this is the first you’re hearing of it, this is that there’s a low likelihood that it applies to you. And I just wanna make this abundantly clear before we move forward so we’re not causing confusion. This is what I’m referring to when I say standalone proof or Workfront proof.

And the deprecation timeline is as follows.

Again, this should not be a surprise announcement. We’ve been communicating this for several years and Adobe stopped selling this in 2017 actively. The renewals have been discontinued as of January 1st, 2026. If you renewed before that date, you have a contract to continue to use Proof HQ until you’re, or standalone proof or Workfront proof, until your contract ends. And then when that ends, we will no longer be using this platform because we’re moving to the future of Workfront.

Okay.

So without further ado, let’s jump into the demo and I’m actually gonna pause for any questions. I know that was a lot of history and kind of bringing people up to speed. Let me check to see if there are any questions that we need to address.

I think we’re doing okay so far. Cool.

All right, let’s get into it.

Okay. So we have, in this integration, the integration does require a contractual event. So if you have questions about how to get on any of these features, please talk to your Adobe rep and we’ll make sure we get you sorted out.

There’s a lot of newness here and I’m gonna walk through all of this newness. But that said, you will have, as an admin, I wanna show you how we can kind of ease into this transition.

So if we go here, this is your hamburger menu and we go to setup.

Admins will have the option to go under system and then under preferences.

And then you’re gonna see this thing right here called storage preferences. So storage preferences lets you pick between legacy Workfront, your existing Workflows, all of the stuff that you have is there. You can also choose Adobe Enterprise, which is all of the new features. This is the integration between Workfront and Frame. Adobe Enterprise is the single storage layer that’s gonna store all of your assets. So it’s stored in one place and Workfront pulls from those assets from Adobe Enterprise storage, Frame pulls from them, other surfaces can pull from Adobe Enterprise as well. This is really the engine that powers this integration is Adobe Enterprise. So you can pick your default as a legacy Workfront or Adobe Enterprise. And then there’s a check box here that allows your user to select the storage provider. So you are, and I’ll demo this here in a second to show you what it looks like. You’ll actually be able to select a project that is a legacy project or it’s an Adobe Enterprise project. And you can even apply it to either your entire organization or specific groups. So let’s say you wanna slowly start rolling out these Adobe Enterprise features, these integrated features, you can select specific groups to start with if you wanna do some trial runs. And again, entire organization is an option as well. So I’m gonna leave this as it is here.

And I’m gonna jump into creating a new project.

So you can see here when I create a new project, new project here, this is an integrated project with Workfront, these are the new features. This is the legacy storage. So you choose this new project, this will have all your same templates, all the same stuff, all the workflows that you’re used to. That’s not going away. But today, again, I’m showing the new features today. So I’m gonna start here.

We’ll call this March 26 demo.

And I can add tasks as normal.

And I can add documents to this task if I want to as well.

I’m gonna add a document here just at the project level.

And you can see this list view right here. I can also change it to a grid view and you’ll see the asset show up in grid view. But here’s the list view and there are multiple ways to request an approval here.

So I have this blue bar when the asset is highlighted down here where I can select request approval. We also have this right rail over here where I can click on approvals and click create workflow.

And then I can also click into the asset like I accidentally did two seconds ago. And I can request an approval from here.

So I’m gonna go ahead and do that. I’ll click request approval. And you’ll see that this page looks very different than what you’ve seen previously. Now, if you’re a legacy work front, you will see this view as of April 16th of production. Right now, you’ll see this in your preview environment. So you can go test this in preview and see what these features are like. But this unlocks a lot of capabilities for us, this new approval flow here. By default, you’ll see that this is one stage and there’s this new button here for adding a stage. This has multiple stages that you could do. So I could call this creative and I could call this legal and I can even add a third stage and call this one final review. And I can add as many stages as I want. I can keep going on and on.

You’ll notice that right here, there’s this drag and drop. So if I wanna do legal first or creative first, you can just drag and drop the multi-stage here.

And I’ll just go ahead and add some names.

Myself, Jason Baron and I’ll add Travis Jordan. These are all my teammates.

And of course you can select a due date. You can click one decision required.

Now I know the majority of you are using templates. Like that’s the hero flow is the overwhelming majority of the time you’re gonna end up looking at templates. So you can see that we have a bunch of templates over here on the left side. I created a few of these. There’s a Mikey test template. Let’s say I decide I wanna use a template instead. So because I already built my workflow and I go ahead and I click a template, it’s gonna say your changes will be lost if you apply this template. That’s okay. I’m gonna go ahead and click continue. And then the template drops in here.

This gear bar, this gear icon right here, this takes me to where I can set up new templates. If I wanna create a new template, you’ll see here this on the right side. And of course I can just go and create AAA awesome template.

I’ll do a create a stage and I’ll add myself to it. And I’ll hit create template. And then I’ll just go back here and I’ll apply this template.

And just like that, we created a template. We created multiple stages and I’m gonna go ahead and I’m gonna request an approval on this asset.

Okay, that’s a lot of newness. Again, I’ll stop here to see if there are any questions that are coming through the chat that we should stop and answer.

Can you still make a stage private? At this time we’re not doing private stages.

Approval templates, can you add groups, teams or only individuals? So groups and teams are coming. That’s on the roadmap. I’ll share that here in a second. Can we set visibility of certain templates based on team? So that’s something that we’re considering. So we’ll take that one back to the team and we’ll get back as part of our followup.

Hey Mike, I know there are a lot of questions about being able to test in Sandbox. Is that possible? Yes, for sure. So what you could do is, so if you need these features enabled in the Sandbox environment, let’s say you sign your contract, you’re ready to move forward to use these. Your production environment could be all legacy workflow. So all your existing workflows and none of these integrated features will show. And that gives you an opportunity to test all of the things in Sandbox. Now, in terms of seeing those things in frame, you’d have to work with your Adobe rep to get some of those things set up because frame does Sandbox is a little bit different. And I can, if Sarah wants to touch on that or we can follow up on that later, we can. Yeah, you’d be able to do this in Sandbox before pushing your production.

That’s awesome, great.

Okay, can decisions be customized? That’s again, it’s another thing that we’re considering at this time, you can’t customize the decisions but it’s been a pretty frequent request and we’re looking into it. Just no date for delivery on that one yet.

All right, does the email notification look different? That is a really amazing segue into getting my email notifications this.

So I will pull that up.

Now I don’t have pictures downloaded for this particular email but this is what the email looks like. So Mike Angle wants you to approve. I added myself as the approval to the muffin picture and I’ll click go to review. So I’ve uploaded an asset. Let’s say I’m a program manager or I’m a creative whatever your process looks like. I uploaded the asset, I added the approval. Now the creative or the program manager, they’re done.

I saw a question, need to know if you can still mark up the proof like before. I am about to get to that part. So I’ll show you. So this is the, I’m the approver. There’s this call to action button, go to review.

Now this go to review is gonna take me. This is the viewer right here.

Second.

So this is the viewer. This is actually frame IO and you can see the high resolution image of the muffin showed up. The decision button is here for me to make my decisions. So I can click approve or needs work. I can anchor comments.

Love the sugar falling. I’ll anchor that comment. I can circle things.

No, looks delicious.

You can attach files to comments. You can attach links to comments. All of the same sort of annotation features, emojis those sorts of things are, those are all available in what we call the frame viewer. So this, again, this is natively integrated into Workfront.

Okay.

Questions here. Just scan through chat. Does anybody, any other Workfront or frame team need to jump in? Can you still tag a user in your comments on this? Yes.

Awesome.

Still have text markup tools.

Text markup tools.

The previous one, you can highlight text.

So for document workflows, there’s going to be text markups where you can highlight, insert, remove.

And then for video assets, you can also leave range-based comments. And then something else that Mike also didn’t share is that you can actually attach a different asset type to a comment here. So if you want to say, like, I want it to look more like this, you can upload any asset type to a comment. So that’s also really powerful Yeah. I’m getting a lot of questions about versions. Let me move to that. While you guys are answering questions, let me start, let me move to showing versions. So I’ll put a document here and then we’ll do, I’ll show versions as well. Hey Sarah, maybe you can answer. Can you still, like, mark comments as done if, like, the designer goes in to make all the changes? Sorry, I couldn’t find my mute button. Yes, there might be some kind of differences between license types related to Frame.io that we’d might have to go into, but you should be able to complete a task within the Frame Viewer.

And I think Mike’s going to go into versioning, so hopefully we can get some questions answered around side-by-side things like that.

Yeah. Yeah, I’m working on versioning. One second. Thank you.

It’s so good to see all the demos live, but I know it does take some effort to get between things. So we appreciate it.

And I think we’re going to talk about that transition process, how long we’ll have access to things. That’s coming later, right? It is. Well, so yeah, so I did refer to… No, I’m listening to a demo, but I don’t have to… Hold on one second. I can talk.

Okay, there we go. Sorry, can you repeat that question? Yes, transition. So we’re going to go over timing, when you’ll have access to things, what that looks like if you have access to both. That’s coming, right? Yeah, so the legacy and the Adobe Enterprise systems are going to exist at the same time. How long they’re going to exist at the same time is to be determined, but we want to give you the time that you need to make that transition. So if you have these legacy environments, you’ll continue with your same workflows and you can slowly transition over to the new things. We haven’t set a date on when legacy would stop working. I would imagine that there would be quite a bit of time to give you that transition period.

Perfect, I knew we were going to talk about that, but I was seeing some anxiety in the chat. I wanted to calm that a little bit, that you’ll have time. We’ll make sure you can move your things as you need to.

I did have a quick question on, and maybe you’ll get to this, but on retention, once you switch, with document retention policies and the like, just wondering, once you switch, is the data and the markup from the old legacy proof system going to still be available for use? Or before we change over, do we have to download that and save it somewhere? Because we have some pretty strict guidelines around how long we have to retain that information.

So data retention policy, let’s get back to you on that. I don’t know the exact length, because I know it’s different with financial services, which is my understanding is seven years or other industries where it’s three years. So yeah, totally understand that. I don’t have definitive on that. So that’s one that we can follow up on. Right, thank you.

Other questions? Okay, let’s jump back into version. So I just added a random asset here as a new version of Milky Way Galaxy, but this is the frame viewer here. And you can see that now that I’ve added a new version, there’s this drop down menu to show version. So that muffin picture is here, and the Milky Way Galaxy picture is here. And we can also compare versions side by side. So I know this is a feature that a lot of folks liked from Workfront proof for proofing that you could do this, and you can click back and forth to see the comments.

And then you can continue to do your markups here as well.

So then I have these versions, the version stack is in Workfront as well. Oh, here we are.

Okay, are there any questions that I missed? Or are we good to keep moving? Okay, question about multiple documents on the same proof.

We are working on a feature called bulk and grouped approvals. So where you had improve HQ or improving, you could combine proofs where let’s say you had 15 assets and you combine them into a single proof, and then that single proof receives the approval for a bunch of different things that you’re working on. We are upgrading that. So what we’re working on is the ability to take multiple assets, a dozen, 100 assets, and group them together and add a workflow to that group. But the approval is on the individual asset level. So no matter where that asset goes, whether it’s AEM or frame, that asset itself has an approval on it. And then there’s a, the frame viewer has a really cool feature that would show all of the assets and you can carousel through them and make your decision as you’re carouseling through the assets.

And then I know there are a lot of questions about like video approvals and that sort of thing. That’s where frame really shines as the video approvals. And you can, when we do these grouped approvals, you’ll be able to mix and match assets together. That’s a June delivery timeline. Again, we’ll talk about that in the roadmap.

Okay, so let’s go beyond Workfront and the viewer just for a second here.

If you start your project in Workfront, that’s what kicks off this whole thing, right? Is like the integration, the project needs to be created and started in Workfront. And then that’s when the assets will show up within your project in frame. Now, anything that you do beyond that, they’re talking to each other. So this is the project within frame. If I upload assets here within the frame, the assets will show in Workfront. If I change the name here in frame, it will change in Workfront.

You can do version stacking in frame. So if you were used to using frame and that’s where your workflows are starting, you do have to at least create the project in Workfront, but then you can do all of the things that you need to do in frame and then they’re gonna immediately reflect in Workfront. So that’s the part of the beauty of this integration is that they’re talking to each other and there’s no more downloading and uploading. Just saves you a lot of time. It’s all hosted in that Adobe Enterprise Storage.

Okay.

I’m gonna stop here for just a few more questions. Can we get a demo of the bulk approvals? Yes. That’s a bit of an audible, but let’s do it.

So give me a second to get that set up. I think showing the group approvals is super powerful. So let me pull that up. And do we know if Frame.io will be accessible for Fusion for folks that have built out Fusion scenarios with the current proofing capabilities? I can answer that. So I think a lot of the questions related to Fusion is that there is a lot more work that’s in active development for this new unified review and approval experience. But for those of you that have renewed with the current proof situation, but you may also have Frame.io, Enterprise, just a separate account, you can use Fusion today. We do have endpoints available in Fusion. We’re just building a lot more Fusion scenarios built out for this new unified review and approval experience.

So yes, and more to come. Yeah, exactly. Good, good.

Okay. So here’s a, I’m gonna do it. This is a Vibe prototype. So just a heads up, these are gonna look a little bit different, but the concept remains. This is gonna be bulk approvals. Now, I’m just orienting you here for the purpose of this Vibe Coded prototype. This is just the homepage. So I’m gonna go as a program manager or creative, and I’m gonna add several assets here.

So I get five assets. I’m gonna click select all assets. This familiar blue bar that I just showed request approval.

Now there are a couple of ways we could do this. One is I can add one workflow to as an individual asset. So each individual asset will have its own workflow, but I’m like bulk adding the workflow to individual asset. This is something we’re doing later. What’s the more immediate thing you’re working on is as a group of assets. Now this is set for June, July, August timeframe for delivery.

This is as a group of assets is what I’ll show you here. I’m gonna add Reina, reviewer, and Chris campaign manager.

Now this is part of like, just as an aside, this is part of the features that we’re really leaning in to this integration, right? So this is where our focus is going in terms of resourcing and building out new features on this integrated platform between we’re front and frame. And bulk approvals is a major unlock for a lot of you. And I know a lot of you’ve been asking it for it for a long time. But again, just want to highlight that this is where we’re going with things. So that is Reina and Chris campaign manager. I’m gonna request my approval. And as a program manager or a creative, I have now requested my approval. So I’m gonna go back here.

To the email. And we see that the email is showing that I uploaded multiple assets.

And I’m gonna go to review. And as an approver, this is what I was referring to with the frame viewer where you can click on the assets, you can make your decision, and you carousel through them, and you can quickly log your decisions here.

And so I’ve made my decisions.

Another thing that I can show you here is, I’ll switch to Chris campaign manager.

I’ll go to work front homepage. The other thing we’re working on here is the my approvals widget, where you can go into work front and you can see all of the assets here and you can make your decisions from the widget or you could open it for review in the frame viewer.

So that’s bulk approvals. This is what we’re working on delivering in the June, July timeframe. Hopefully that’s helpful.

You just have 19 documents and you wish you could add this now. Yeah, this is the one that we’re super excited about.

Okay.

Hopefully that was helpful.

Let’s talk change management just for a second. So a couple of tips as an admin thinking about, okay, we’ve got the future of work front, all of these features. I know I already mentioned that you have to sign a contract to get on these integrated features. But as you’re moving forward, just a few things to keep note of. Take stock of the approval system that your teams are currently on. So if you’re not ready to sign the new contract yet and you wanna move on to unified approvals, that’s something you can talk to your Adobe rep about and we can get you on unified approvals if you’re still using document approvals or proof approvals.

The other thing is lean on experience league. So we do have documentation up for the new stuff as well as some of the legacy features that are available.

If you need help finding resources, again, talk to your Adobe rep, but experience league, we do our best to keep that up to date.

I would communicate early with your stakeholders. So admins, they shouldn’t be the only ones aware of this change. Help your stakeholders build a communication plan with your teams and keep them up to date on what is changing and why it’s changing.

You can also run a pilot before you roll things out broadly. I know there’s a question about the sandbox and yes, you can test certain things in the sandbox.

You won’t be able to open things in the frame viewer from the sandbox, but you’ll be able to test like these multi-stage features and so forth. So test things out in the sandbox and roll them out broadly. And then you can also select certain groups. Once you do roll things out into production, you can select certain groups to test things in production where you can open things in the frame viewer and essentially dog food the platform. So eating your own dog food before rolling it out to the entire organization. So just a couple of tips for change management as you’re thinking about the transition.

And let’s talk about the roadmap.

So again, the roadmap subject to change, but I’m sharing it now. We’re good.

Okay. So things that we delivered in Q2, multi-stage approvals, documents on tasks and issues in this integrated environment, which is a key unlock. In Q3, we’re gonna continue to add features to the multi-stage approvals, the express integration, the bulk approvals that I just demoed for you, reviewer support. So the ability to go into frame and complete your review, fusion actions. Now there’s a lot of questions about API as infusion scenarios, those will be available.

And just a note, Q3 for us is that June, July, August timeframe. So that’s the window that I’m talking about in Adobe’s Q3, June, July, August.

Parallel stages. So that’s when you can create a multi-stage sequential path and then you can create a second path that can run concurrently. So two multi-stage approvals can run at the exact same time. That’s one that we’re working on. Print summary, interactive HTML, gem studio PIM integrations, auto log, overlay pixel comparison, which is, I know that’s a feature that a certain, you’re looking at different copy and you wanna see what changed and what moved around since the last version you uploaded. So that’s what I mean by overlay pixel comparison in the frame viewer, open Photoshop from Workfront and Mountable Drive. Those are the things in Q3. Q4 is a little more TBD than Q3 is, but this just gives you an idea of the things that we’re working on and what we’re doing too. I see several hands. I’ll stop again here for questions.

Did you wanna ask your question? Yeah, we’re utilizing, can you guys hear me? Yeah. Yeah, we’re utilizing Fusion today to remove a lot of the manual proof setup dependency from our marketers, meaning our marketers are basically just uploading a document in a custom folder in the documents area. From that, our Fusion scripts are picking that up and automatically building the proof, building the stages, pulling in the approvers that need to be approved, proving the document, et cetera. Is that functionality still going to be available in frame IO? So we can’t regress backwards to have put the burden back setting up proofs.

Yeah, and this is where I’ll revert back to the fact that your existing environment will continue forward. So all those Fusion scenarios, all those custom scenarios that you have, if you’re creating a legacy work front project, those automations are all still gonna be there. Now, the feature set is not a one-to-one translation because we’re building new features and building them in a different way. And so that gives you time in this Adobe Enterprise storage situation to build out some of those workflows again.

And yeah, the intent is to, once again, on the roadmap in Q3, we will build out the ability, or this is actually currently in development for Fusion to be able to support all of the core scenarios. That’s creating an approval, get an approval, add or update stages, add or remove participants, make decisions, remind and follow up on the participants, delete an approval, all those actions, the same ones we have today would be available to, we could invoke those same actions within the unified review and approval process as well. Once again, that’s not out today, but those action updates in that Fusion connector is slated to be updated in Q3. Okay, and just to be clear, will we have to modify our current Fusion script to point to the frame IO or make the adjustments, or will we write something completely new? I believe you should be able to edit your existing Fusion workflows, but it may require a new one. I can get back to you on that one. All right, thanks, I appreciate it. Yep.

Question in the chat, and then I’ll get to Ruth and I’ll get to Mariana here in a second. Do customers have to sign a new contract in order to test this in Sandbox? Yes, if you wanna test the work front and frame integration, you do have to, in a Sandbox environment, you do have to sign a new contract.

Ruth, go ahead.

Yeah, so I have a question. So we’re still using proofing workflows and we have the automated workflow set up. How would this new approval flow mirror that, or can we mirror that behavior? Yeah, that’s where Travis was jumping in, saying that the intent with this Fusion actions is to allow as much of the one-to-one translation to happen as possible. Now, again, your existing workflows will be there, and if you do the legacy project, nothing is changing for you. All of those workflows are still there. So you can still use them. You sign a new contract, the switch is flipped, you have access to all these new features. As long as you’re creating a legacy project, you can still utilize all of those Fusion scenarios and workflows as normal.

So we don’t have Fusion right now. I just wanted to make that clear. We just have the regular proofing. Okay, so yeah, if you’re not using Fusion, Fusion is just a way of doing backend automation and connecting things in a custom way in the backend. That’s totally fine if you’re not using that. If you’re using ProofHQ, Workfront Proof, that standalone product, again, that’s still gonna be there. You can still use that, and your workflows are still gonna be there. It’s just that at some point, whenever your standalone proof contract runs out, you will not be able to renew it, and so you will have to use these new features.

That’s what I’m asking, because our contract renews in a month, so I’m trying to now prepare for this. So if our contract renews, this feature will now be replacing ProofHQ? Upon signing the new contract, then yes, you’ll have access to this new system.

Will it replace ProofHQ? Will that still be there? I don’t know the details of your contract specifically.

So you’d have to talk to your Adobe rep to really know for sure.

As of now, we’re no longer allowing contract renewals for ProofHQ, so if that’s the case, then yes, you will be moving on to this new platform and this new system.

Okay, and then in the new system, will I be able to mirror my ProofHQ approval flows? You will. I don’t know. What do those workflows look like? But if you’re using multi-stage and all those workflows. Yes, I am. Multi-stage. Yeah, so you’ll need to create new templates, but all of those, you can still do the same workflows that you were able to do before the vast majority of the time. Now again, there’s gonna be edge cases and nuances where that does not necessarily translate, but again, I’d work with your Adobe rep to make sure that as you’re transitioning, that as much of the workflow is mirrored as possible.

Hey Mike, I think maybe it’s just a little bit of confusion between Proof as a standalone product, completely separate versus Proof integrated into Workfront workflow. And so for customers who have Proof integrated into Workfront workflow today, when they sign the new contract and move over to the new version, those two experiences will run concurrently. So you’ll have the Proofing workflows available and you’ll have the Frame Viewer workflows available.

Yeah, that’s a really good call out, Lauren, and that’s why I put this slide in here to show you what it looks like. This is the standalone Proof. This is really old and very few customers are on this. If you don’t have this, then what Lauren said is what you’re gonna experience. So the system that you have today for full work, if you don’t have this, full work front will continue. You will still see that, you’re still gonna be able to use that.

Okay, so we have a bunch of other questions. Mariana, go ahead, you’ve been waiting. Yeah, so I have two questions. One, I know you mentioned that to start the flow, we need to set up a storage and we need to initiate new projects from basically a new project view. How would that impact project templates? Do we need to rebuild project templates with the folders and other things to match the new view or our old templates for the project, not the approval template, right? I’m talking specifically project templates.

And in the Adobe Enterprise project, you will need to create new templates and the work front legacy project, all your templates will still be there. Okay, second question, is your team prepared to give us a list of all impacted areas that gonna sort of break or need to be reset? When we transition to a new flow, like templates, projects, reporting, dashboards, right? I think transition doesn’t seem to be seamless, right? So we need a checklist of what all we need to modify to be able to migrate. And I think that is a prerequisite for us to do it. Yeah, that’s a really, really great question. And that’s, well, let us take that back as a team. That’s gonna likely end up being something that you’re Adobe rep on, but certainly resources that we can provide.

Prakash.

Hey, thank you very much for the wonderful presentation and for the insights into what’s coming up. Couple of thoughts that I had, which may be useful for everybody, an admin that is gonna have to work around this for the changes that are coming. One would be the proof HQ templates that are there. We have like a thousand templates or so that have been created and workflows are work on those. So if we have to manually rebuild, that’s the challenge. If there is a way in which we could export all of those as is without breaking any of the functionality and workflows built into it in an automated fashion into the new thing that’s coming up. So that we continue to leverage that instead of spending a few days just rebuilding that, that’ll be appreciated. So that’s the first input.

And then the second one, somebody talked about migration checklist. That’s awesome. And the more, if we’re trying to move a number of customers over, I think in my opinion, if there are automated fashion, least intervention, least invasive methods put in place, which does not break the functionality that is existing, would be much appreciated. So a little bit of investment in that space from Adobe is what I’d be looking forward to instead of putting the burden of a certain change back on the customer. Yeah, and that’s amazing feedback and certainly top of mind for us. We want this to be a smooth transition and I also appreciate the feedback. So thank you. And templates is one that’s come up multiple times a question. I was kind of monitoring the chat. I was pulling a few things up. I noticed templates a lot as a concern. So let us take that back and discuss that as a team. So appreciate the feedback. Thank you. Sorry, go ahead, Prakash. No, I said, no problem. If you need us to be part of the pilot in the discussion, I’m available to pull me in. Okay.

Zufelt, hopefully I pronounced that, Corey, go ahead and ask your question.

Hi, thank you. Yeah, pronounced it great, thanks. My question is right now, when a user is indicating that they have time off and they select an approvals delegate, it is a nightmare in ProofHQ to get those delegations working. With this unified review and approval approach, will the delegations work properly if it’s set up in Workfront or will there be like a secondary process that that needs to happen to have those proofs delegated to their selected user? Yeah, so delegation for approval is on our roadmap for later this year. As for how it, if it works, it should work before we release it. So that’s the intent for sure. But in this integration, we won’t have delegation initially. So you have to wait till later this year for that feature. Okay, so if we had a user who had time off right now and we were using this system, we would have to manually share that proof with their delegate. Yeah, what I would recommend is if you’re going to be out of office, you can add another person or multiple individuals to the approval and you can check the one decision required box. So then it’s kind of first come first serve, whoever gets to it can do the approval. So that’s how I would recommend doing it until the proof delegation or the approval delegation is in place. Perfect, thank you. You’re welcome.

So there was a lot of really good questions. Did you still have more you wanna show, Mike? I do, but we’re running low on time here. I wanted to show kind of the future of reporting cause that was a question. But what I can say about reporting is, so if you’re interested in trying out Canvas dashboards, you can go to Canvas dashboards and you will have to agree to the open beta. It’s an open beta right now, and you can test things out. We have a bunch of prebuilt options for you to click through and test it and provide some feedback as well. But it’s a really nice, easy way of setting up your approvals. We’re gonna continue to build on Canvas dashboards just because it’s so nice and visual. But that’s the future of reporting, but your reporting is gonna continue as you’re used to it for the time being. We could do reporting as a whole new webinar. I’m not necessarily signing us up to do that for now. I’m just saying there’s a lot of content there. So if you have questions about that, Experience League is a really good place to start. We have resources there for you to get started on Canvas dashboards.

Awesome, and we’ll make sure to include those in the follow-up email as well.

I’m gonna run through kind of our closing updates. Let’s see, can I just ask one quick follow-up question to that reporting thing for Mike? Someone had asked around, will report, are reports going to break? Do they need to rebuild them in Canvas dashboards or can they still use sort of existing reporting functionality and nothing’s going to break? Yeah, the existing, so the reporting functionality is plugged into the data stream and we update the data stream as we update the future. So in short, what I’m saying is that your report should not break. If they do break, let us know, but they should not be breaking.

All right, okay, just a couple quick updates.

Upcoming things, the Q2 release is coming April 16th. We do have a webinar for that coming up April 9th. That is available on the Experience League events page if you wanna register for that and hear about all the updates that are coming and prepare for that.

The other big event for April is Summit. And I know we talked about this a little bit in the chat. I know there’s at least one session. We’ll see if there’s any others and we’ll include those in the follow-up email that if you will be at Summit that you should check those out related to this topic.

If you are a work front and you’re attending, we did just launch our GroupMe chat. So check that out. It is posted in the community and we’ll include some details on that in the follow-up as well.

I think that that is it on my end.

Corey, did you have another question? Nope, sorry, that’s just my hand still up. No worries.

One thing I thought we could touch on real quick before we go, Mike, if you’re okay with it, someone was asking about setting up new project templates in the new experience, trying to understand why. If I’m understanding correctly, because I’m learning this along with everyone else, it has to do kind of with that storage aspect of where things are being stored for the new proofing. So I think the requesting experience is still the same. I would go in and say, hey, I need this project in the request queue. But then when you go to convert that request, it’s maybe a different template. Is that correct? Yeah, it’s because of the features are updating and it’s a new storage system. So, and again, this is one that seems to be a consensus concern. So let’s take this back as a product team and we’ll have a discussion about it. But for now, yeah, it would be that you’re creating new templates.

Okay.

I know there’s a ton of questions in the chat.

Cynthia and Nicole have been very busy on the backend, compiling everything. So we’re gonna see what we missed. We’ll be summarizing it in the follow-up email. We’re gonna continue some of this discussion on Experience League. So feel free to post things there. Travis, did you have something you wanted to add? No, I do not. Okay, sorry. I just wanted to make sure if you did, I let you speak. Leslie, I’ll chime in for one extra thing. So I don’t know if you fully addressed it, but so the version of Workfront with unified review and approval, we were just calling in feed two. So it does require you guys to move over to that version because there’s some new entitlements for storage and a few other things that have to be provisioned. So it’s generally available. There are a few exceptions, but pretty much 90% of our customer base can move to this today, but it does take that contracting event. So if you guys wanna make that proactive move, please reach out to your reps. If not, this will come at your standard contract renewal and will be available for you guys. But as long as you’re moving to a like-for-like package that’s available today, there should be no additional price uplift for this specific version outside of your standard renewal processes.

Awesome, thank you, Lauren.

Okay, we’re gonna gather everything. Look for that follow-up email probably later today. Give us some time because I know there were a ton of questions. So if you guys have gathered, consolidated, make sure we’ve got them answered, and we’ll try and get those out to you later today. You’ll get the recording, the slides, and some of our notes. So thank you, Mike. Thank you, team, for everything. I know there’s a lot of exciting things to come. So yeah, we’ll see if we can get some more, maybe another event spun up once we see kind of what’s still outstanding.

All right, everyone have a great day. Thank you.