Unlock Workfront Boards

Transcript

Welcome to Learn Back to Boards with Adobe Product. So we’re gonna get started and we’re gonna do some introductions and then the agenda.

So first things first, the scale team is here. So Leslie and Nicole, even though they’re not on this slide, they are absolutely in the chat.

So say hey to them in the chat. We also have our product team. We’ve got Natalie Mitchell, who’s also in the chat. She’s gonna be answering questions. And then the big special guest star, as I said in the 70s on Fantasy Island, Love Boat, all of those shows, Patrick Muir. You’re welcome for that, Patrick. Senior product manager at Adobe Workfront. So I am gonna let Patrick introduce himself. He does not mind.

Yeah, thanks, Cynthia.

Like she said, I’m a senior product manager. I’ve been at Adobe since they acquired Workfront back in 2021 and helped build and develop boards. So excited to share what boards can do.

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. I know that both of you are extremely busy, so I’m very grateful.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a former customer, obviously a part of Adobe Workfront as well. So I was a customer for about five years. So a lot of the things I’m gonna tell you about boards comes from my own personal perspective in terms of adoption.

And then for the past several years being a part of Adobe when Adobe acquired Workfront. So let’s talk about the agenda and what we’re gonna talk about. So welcome and intros. This is the agenda objectives. We are talking today specifically about boards in terms of adoption and expanding your business. Yeah, we could absolutely talk about, and have talked about boards in terms of agile, whether it be Scrum or Kanban, but in terms of feature functionality the pain points that we hear on the regular basis, this session is focused on what is the current functionality? How do I use it to solve any sort of problem? So we’re gonna not focus so much on the agile piece because boards, as you will see, if you haven’t tried it, can be used to solve a bunch of any process, what’s going on in your business, how to visualize work, how to communicate a message, which I find that incredibly helpful using boards to do that. So that is what we’re gonna talk about today. We’ll talk about the current features, what are the upcoming features. Patrick’s gonna do a demo for us. Obviously you can ask questions in the chat. We’ve got Natalie, she’s absolutely an expert, and then Nicole and Leslie helping out. And then we’ll just open it up. And then I do wanna save a few minutes just for updates because there’s a lot going on this fall. So I wanna spend about five minutes sharing that. Okay, done and done. So let’s talk about current features. And I do have my instance up, but I probably won’t need it, but just in case I do have it available. So first of all, what are boards? So yes, it can support agile and waterfall and hybrid. And I think that’s really important. I wanna talk on the waterfall part because we actually had a couple of conversations events in the last month or so where folks were like, hey, I need to show our work to a team in terms of boards, but everyone else is using waterfall. Like that is a perfect example of how you can use boards in your instance, like just you’re keeping that project, nothing is affecting that project. You’re just doing that work. But then if a specific team or a specific user wants to visualize their work using boards, they absolutely can do that. And they can customize it themselves, can connect cards. They don’t have to connect cards. So you’re gonna hear us talking a lot about connected versus unconnected work, but I just in terms of user adoption with Workfront, speaking as a former SysAdmin, before we even get started, I just want to tell you all like every time Workfront created a new feature, it was great, beautiful, but it also created work for me, right? So I had to configure it. I had to make sure it made sense to my users. I had to create training, I had to deliver the training. And then if something affected a project because they were using something downstream, then I had to fix it and troubleshoot it. So the reason that I truly love boards, and I talk about all the time, those of you that have been to my events know that I talk about all the time, is because all I have to do is put it on Playout templates so that it’s on their main menu and users can go out to boards and start just adding tasks for themselves. I’m gonna stop right there.

When I was a SysAdmin back in the day, creating separate projects for every single person in Workfront or putting them in a place, like they’re just random tasks so that they could see them in a way they wanted to see them, that was super messy. It messed up reporting for them to say, hey, my boss wants me to work on this special project, but it’s not something specific in Workfront. Or I’m tracking some work that I just want to do for myself or something that is affecting my goals for the year.

Doing that in traditional Workfront objects, specifically tasks and projects, creates a lot of work for project managers and system admins. So again, I know I’m trying to sell you on something, which I am, but being able to give your users, especially when you have users waiting in the wings for your system admins to configure their layout templates or their processes or whatever, versus like, I’m just going to get these users into Workfront, I’m going to give them boards, and I’m going to let them just literally start adding their own work and cards. It’s not attached to any project. It’s not a part of anything specific, but they could at least start getting used to Workfront. That is a huge lift. So I know I’m selling it heavy, but I just want to stop there as we talk about feature functionality, think about boards in a different way.

Okay, so next slide.

I promise we’ll do Q&A, this won’t take that long. Okay, so the cool thing too is, and this came out and I know Patrick will do the demo. I just want to, I feel like this was last year, in the last year where we were actually able to add custom form fields and do commenting and things like that on cards. So that was really nice to be able to at least just add a custom form field for people that needed that. So that’s a really nice feature to have that card detail. In terms of usability, this is the part that I really like is that you can create columns any way that you want. Obviously you can filter. There are templates that you can use, they’re super easy to use. However, you can edit, customize what I want those columns to be, and especially the tags. I think that’s on a different slide. But the thing I like about the tags, you’re creating swim lanes, which again, that’s not really a thing in traditional work front objects in terms of projects. So having these swim lanes that cut across, like, hey, I’ve got all of these cards, but I also want to group them in a completely different way. You can do that.

Task and issue board views and projects. This is a beginner, right? So like, if you haven’t noticed, if you go out to your projects, there’s a button at the top of tasks and it’s got a little icon that says boards. And you can actually just put your regular project view in a boards view if you just even want to start there and start playing around and see what it looks like. Yes, this is a traditional Kanban view. If your teams are not in Kanban, that’s okay. I say that all the time. Your company, your teams, your users don’t have to know anything about agile to use the board’s functionality. And from someone who came from a company that was a full agile and we were scrum, not Kanban. So that means more ceremonies, right? More meetings, very rigid structure in terms of release planning.

We don’t, you don’t need to know all of that. Like most companies rarely have every single person, you know, working in that same methodology. So I just don’t want that to discourage you from giving it a try. Okay, the home widget is actually really cool. And a lot of y’all hear me talk about home a lot. Like, you know, how I didn’t, I wasn’t a huge fan of the old, old home and the old home. And now we have new, new, new, new home, whatever we want to call home. But we do have the new version of home that has the widgets. And what’s very cool is there is a boards widget and I have used it a lot and it’s great. So like you could see, this is actually a picture for my instance, but I’ve got an intake board. But if you see the dropdown, like I can get to any of the other boards if I want to and change it on my view. So it’s very cool.

All right, so we have one slide about coming soon. I’m gonna pass it over to Patrick.

Yeah, thank you. If you just want to click on the one slide. So, so we do have a, and they have had a boards fusion connector in beta since the end of March. So this, and we keep adding more functionality to this, but this essentially opens up the boards API and then you can set up fusion scenarios to do all sorts of things. And so some common scenarios we’ve seen is like adding a templated checklist item, even creating your own board templates and using the fusion to create those. And just in general connecting boards into the broader work front to where you can use different triggers to create boards or update boards. And it’s been interesting to see just customers and what they’ve done with it. So I’m not gonna demo that. It’s fairly advanced and it still is in a beta state. So it’s not fully GA yet, but if you have fusion and if you’re interested in that, we do have documentation and we could even jump on our call at another time to kind of discuss that more.

Cool. So technically it’s a beta, but there’s availability left. I should have asked you that. Yeah, it’s an open beta, so you can just use it. I just wanna like give that caveat that it is beta.

And so for example, like the engineering team could take it down for a day and so it might not work for a day. It’s just, it’s in that kind of general, development state. Gotcha. That’s good to know. But also if you have fusion, that’s awesome. I love that.

All right, so is it demo time? It’s demo time and I’ll start by demoing maybe the most popular in a way users use boards. So it actually starts with a request. So I’m gonna jump into requests and just submit a new request.

So this is, we’ll call this webinar demo, September 12th, and I’ll just submit that.

So submitted that demo. All that did was it created an issue on this project. And I’m just gonna jump over to a board and refresh. So I’ve set up a board that essentially routes or will grab any of those requests and just kind of add them to the backlog of the board. And so I see this new task, which I can then grab and bring in. So this is like I said, the most common use case for boards where you just have a team and they wanna aggregate all their work and put it in a single location. And so they’ll set up rules. And sometimes that rule is a request queue. And anytime that kind of a task or issue kind of meets that criteria, it’ll show up in the backlog. So that team can go ahead and grab that work and add it to their board and start working on it.

So I’ll kind of step back and I’ll just walk through kind of the basics of boards and kind of go up to kind of make it more powerful. So the most simple version of boards is actually just on a project. And so there is just a button called Board. If you click that, it’ll turn the work list into a board, into a Kanban board, and allow you to essentially view all your tasks. Or if you’re on the issue list, you can turn the issue list into a board and allow you to manage work that way.

You can do everything from here, from updating the task name to updating progress. If you added custom statuses, you can certainly update those here. And I’ll dive more into the functionality of boards.

But this is the most simple version of boards where you just can turn any project into a board if you prefer to manage things. More in a Kanban style, more in a board style.

So jumping into boards, I’m going to start by just opening up, demoing the basic board. So basic board is essentially a board with none of the functionality turned on. So you can just go ahead and rename this. And the default date is that nothing is configured, including your column names. So you can start by calling this, and you can name your columns whatever you would like. So this experience is supposed to just replicate just a very easy to use familiar interface within Workfront that so far is not yet kind of plugged into the broader Workfront.

So this allows users, common use cases for this is if they want to do something more informal, like it’s not an official project, task or issue, they want to just manage their own kind of personal tasks. And they just need a tool for that. A basic board can help them. So within a basic board, you can just start adding cards, cards can represent whatever you would like, you’re just naming a card.

And so these cards, it’s not part of an official project yet it’s not a task or issue. And you can move that from one column to another, and they can represent and act however you would like that.

And all the functionality of boards is available in a basic board. For example, you can create tags, and you can use that to organize your cards. So if you click into a card, you can add a tag or multiple tags.

And then those are visualized, and you can then filter on those tags.

Of course, you can assign, so you can have a comment, you can do comments within cards, I will say if this is just like an ad hoc card, it does not trigger like a notification or email, but it does allow you to kind of take notes and leave comments within a card itself.

There’s also kind of other very basic functionality, like checklist items, which allows you to just break a task, break this card down to different checklist items. And of course, you can check those off or not.

And so, again, the idea here is just to create a very informal, kind of meet this use case of just allowing users to get in, and if they need something basic, they might replicate another tool they might be using, but you want everyone working inside of the same system, it kind of meets that need.

Now I’m going to jump into actually managing work front tasks and of course, you can convert ad hoc cards, just so you know, you can convert them into actual work front tasks or issues by connecting them to a project.

So once you connect them to a project, that will actually now change this to and convert all that data into an actual task, and so now it’s connected, and it actually lives on that project.

And so you can always turn kind of these ad hoc informal things into official work if you would like.

So jumping into our board, so if you hit add board, we do have a few templates. The templates are really just a starting point with different features configured. And so I’ll start with the Kanban board.

So the Kanban board was the same board I demoed with the request queue.

And here what you’re doing is you’re setting up a query or a rule on what work gets sent into the backlog. And so you do that by configuring your board settings.

And so in this example, and I’m just going to retry it. So I took that away. So this example, I’m just saying pull in every task that belongs to the webinar demo project. So that’s going to create a backlog here of all those tasks, which I can then drag on and start managing here.

Now I just dragged that card from the backlog into the new column. And since I have two different statuses, it doesn’t quite know which new status do I mean. Do I mean the custom demo status or just new? Since this is the first time I did this, I haven’t set a default, so I can go ahead and just set a default as new. That way, next time I bring on a card, it won’t ask me that. I can always go into a card and, of course, change that to a custom new status.

And so I don’t lose the functionality by setting that default status. But what this allows you to do if you’re bringing in tasks or issues from multiple projects, because you could set up a rule and simply add another project, or add assignees, so you can expand your rule and it will include additional work. Those projects might have custom statuses for that project. And so it allows you to manage tasks and issues on the same board, yet still have the flexibility of using the custom statuses that belong to those projects.

So within a board, of course, you can add members to the board, and you can also add not only individual members, but you can also add team members.

So I did show a configuration to update what work populates the Backlog column. This setting is locked down, so only the board owner, whoever created the board, can actually go in and change this. That way, we don’t have to change the board if you have many members of the board, you don’t have some random member of the team kind of updating these filters, because these filters are very crucial to obviously routing the correct work onto a board. And so that is one piece that is locked down. Another thing to note is that all role-based permissions of Workfront are obeyed within boards. So if a user does not have permissions to update these tasks, if they try to go in and change the status, it will error out. It’s still going to obey that role-based permissions as if they were on the project.

A good way to think about boards is it’s really just a virtual version of these actual tasks or issues. These tasks or issues still live within the project. So to give that example, I’m just going to go, and I’m going to add an assignee, and we’ll make a comment, we’ll say, new comment.

I’ll hit submit. So I have this little button, I’m going to go ahead and actually open up that task within Workfront, and I can see that new comment, and I can see that Clint is assigned to it. And if I comment back, and I go back to the board, I got to close it, but when I open it, this will refresh the information, and of course, we see that comment there. So the data syncs back and forth between the card and the record, and really, all the board is doing, this card is just representing this task, but all the information actually lives within Workfront, it lives on this record, and the data just syncs. The only data that would never sync, if I hit Delete, it actually won’t delete, it’ll delete the card off the board, but it won’t delete the actual task. This, if I refresh this, the task still exists, nothing has changed. So we don’t allow a delete action from boards, but we do allow you to update, the Update Stream, the Document section, which I should show as well. So here we have the option to upload documents. So I’m going to go ahead and upload the Adobe logo, and again, if I jump into the actual Workfront task, and go to Documents, we can see that that document was added.

So although we don’t replicate every single document, every single action you could do on a task within Workfront, we did replicate the most popular tasks that users do, updating status, updating the name and description, the commenting stream and documents. And we also have the ability, which I think I have it toggled off.

You can also log hours.

And in general, in this section, we call it the configuration section, you can decide what features you would like on a card, so you can clean it up so you don’t have to have everything. So for example, if you don’t use estimations, you could just toggle that whole item off. Same with due dates, we’ll just say we’ll toggle it off, it’ll disappear.

Alternatively, you could keep due dates, but you don’t want to actually display it on the card, so you could just hide it. We went ahead and toggled on hours, and we’ll toggle off comments and documents. So now when I open up the card, I do have this little widget to log time directly from the card, but I no longer have the update stream or documents showing up because I did not find those relevant. And I do see the due date or the plank completion date, I can still update it within a card, but I took it away from this view to clean up, or I didn’t see it as a need to populate it on this small view, but I still wanted the ability for a user to click in and see the due date or plank completion date and also make an update there.

So you can also bring on custom fields as well.

So let’s go into this task and let’s just look at the task details.

So maybe we’ll try bringing in this reference number.

So if I go back and I look up reference number, and just go ahead and save it.

Now when I open up this task, I now see this reference number here. Now I can’t edit this field, so some fields you can’t edit like reference number, but it matches, like I’m not able to update it here. If I were to bring in another field, like let’s just try bringing in the URL field, so if I went ahead and updated that, and then I jump into the project, into the task details, I’ll see that the custom field did update. So custom fields also sync. So that allows you to bring on the different custom fields or native fields that are relevant to you and are out of the box standard fields as well. And then just down here, you can configure what fields show up and what don’t. We also have the ability, as you add more cards to your board, just to archive cards, and those will essentially no longer show up on the board, but you could toggle on the ability to see archive cards if you need to get to them. And then once you toggle on that, you can hit filter and then kind of see those archive cards. And of course you could restore those archive cards as well.

We do have an automation for archiving cards, where you can call it card fall off, so you can set a time cadence. So oftentimes users want things that have been in the completed column for we’ll just say two weeks. Once that two week period has come, and if that card has had no updates, it will auto archive and therefore be hidden on the board until you were, unless you were to toggle on, display archive cards on the board.

Just gonna go ahead and shut that off.

And just one more thing on tags. I’m gonna go ahead and add a few more tags.

When it comes to kind of the other functionality boards, you can group by assignee, you can create swim lanes. You can also group by tags as well. So it’s just another way that you can organize your work and see what needs to get done. Tags, like I mentioned, very easy to create.

And of course, these are gonna represent whatever you want them to represent. So it’s a very open-ended kind of feature that allows you to organize the board, how you see fit by using tags and tagging cards.

So there is one board type that does function different and that’s a dynamic board.

So what’s different about a dynamic board is it does not have an intake column, but instead, and see if I can just delete this, instead it is a query and the cards kind of will appear on the board based on that rule or filter a query that you set up and it will always be organized by status. So while the compound board kind of updated everything and had, or when you set up this filter, it had it go into a backlog, go ahead and refresh. This will populate the cards directly onto the board.

I believe I did have it configured to auto archive completed cards, so that’s why they did not show up. I could have unchecked that to not archive completed cards, that prevents just sometimes a user set up filters that for a project that might have 300 completed cards and they don’t intend to bring on 300 completed cards.

So by default, they are archived. Of course you could bring those back and show them or you could override that if you do wanna bring on completed cards.

So a dynamic board, like I said, is now organized by status, but I do not have to drag those tasks or issues from the backlog to get them onto the board. It just populates in there.

And you could do that like with the request queue that I set up earlier, you could have it also populate on a dynamic board, but rather than having it go into a backlog where you have to drag it on, you could just have it directly onto the board. Of course, all new requests are in some type of new status, so they will appear in whatever column you have organized with the new status.

So a few more advanced features I need to show. It’s very easy to add a column.

And you can add as many columns as you would like, but you can go ahead and configure each column. So in this example, you might have a second in progress status that relates to a second status.

And so that allows you to, if you drag cards over, it will update it to that custom status. So of course you can have basically unlimited columns with all the different custom statuses that you would need that equate with new in progress on holder complete.

So that is one kind of built-in automation of columns.

You can also override or add tags. So if you wanted to add a tag every time a card goes into this column, you could also add or override an assignment as well. And so if you were to drag a card in there, it will auto populate with Clinton. It also added the new tags and of course changed the status. So there is a few more built-in automations. I did mention earlier the boards fusion connector, which does allow you to trigger even more automation based off of kind of even that trigger of dragging a card from one column to another.

A few other things that you can do with connected cards, like I said, besides log time, you can of course still do the checklist items as well.

Issues do not have sub tasks. So I got to jump out and go back to my demo.

I don’t know why sub tasks aren’t showing up. I am in a staging environment, but you should be able to access all your sub tasks as well from cards and easily create sub tasks directly from the board and have them sync over onto your tasks within Workfront and vice versa of course, where if you create those sub tasks on the parent tasks, they will show up within the card as well.

So lastly, just wanted to show you can customize, we do have a board’s home widget.

So you can go that and then you can go ahead and add that board and it will now show up on home and you can interact with it on the home screen as well. So that is one value out of the home widget, just having a board directly on your home screen.

So that’s kind of the end of the demo. I can go ahead and kind of demo out more functionality based on questions or answer any questions that users might have.

Yeah, so as you should not be surprised, there’s a lot of ideas for enhancements to boards. I’ll just address that really quickly. So y’all know this is, well hopefully y’all know, this is a fairly new feature to Workfront.

I mean like new and then this year, there’s been a lot of focus on the product and engineering team on the things that are coming out. So if you’ve heard about Workfront planning, you’ve heard about the report, like the reporting with the data lake and that’s coming out very soon. I know they’ve been working on canvas dashboards, but we don’t have a date on that yet. So I just wanna tell you as a long time Workfronter, we’re heading 10 years.

Your ideas are amazing, I love them.

But just, we will, as the scale team, we’ll let you know as soon as Patrick lets us know that we can like sort of get new enhancements and things coming in terms of boards. So I don’t want you to think that we’re not like, these are great ideas. I know Natalie has said that in the chat as well. So we get a lot of that Patrick and we’ll collect that information. Yeah, we definitely, kind of our next round of innovation that we’re hoping to do is just probably a lot of the suggestions are like quality of life enhancements. Like, hey, I’d love to filter by more things or I’d love to customize how my cards display. These are all really good ideas. We kind of had to kind of temporarily kind of draw a line in the stand and say like boards kind of isn’t, a functional state kind of fills this need. And we’ve had many users kind of jump into boards and they still, they desire to have even more functionality to really adopt it. And we hope to address those more advanced use cases, but also kind of fill in these gaps of kind of quality of life enhancements that users of boards have experienced, but they just want better and more functionality with boards. So we really do appreciate giving those ideas and we hope to start implementing them soon.

Kind of the things that I’m not sure we’ll get to is making boards even more advanced at some point.

Boards really is intended to be like an easy, tool for teams and end users.

And it does a pretty good job of filling in that gap.

And that’s kind of, will continue to be its focus going forward. And then we’ll have to visit kind of more advanced use cases as they come up.

Yeah, definitely.

I was just gonna let people start asking questions if you’re okay with that. There’s a ton of questions in the chat.

But Natalie’s got them. Yeah, go ahead, Natalie. Before we go there, I was gonna say that I actually just saw a question from a few minutes ago that I could answer, but it would be so much easier to just show the answer, which is where do we go to access archive cards? So maybe you can just quickly show kind of where you go find them, like unarchive them, that kind of thing. Oh yeah. Let’s see.

We just archive a few cards.

So it’s kind of a two-step process. So you do have to first say display archive cards.

And then once that’s active, they’re still by default hidden. So you have to filter them in so they show up. And then in this little three dot menu, you have an option to restore and then you can restore them.

So that’s just a process to view archive cards and then just restore them.

The other thing that I think that would be super helpful since we’ve got you, Patrick, because there’s so many questions about, can I add a filter to filter out cancel projects or this or that? Oh, yeah. Those, yeah, kind of walk through, like just for everybody on the call, the filtering is amazing. And yeah, it’s… Yeah, so we do have advanced filtering, which allows you to create very complex, filters, so I’ll just show, like you can stack filters.

So one trick I tell users to do, cause kind of building a filter, it’s like trial and error. It’s like, I think I got it right, but oh, that’s actually bringing in completed tasks. And I didn’t mean to mean to do, or it’s pulling data from tasks that are, or projects that are canceled or completed.

So what I recommend that you do is in a reporting tool, this filter services kind of shared, and you can actually save a filter and then reuse it here in boards. So I think I could jump into it, but if you go into reports, there’s just like a better user interface to build a new filter within like the report section. So I tend to even myself go in, build a filter here, kind of do the trial and error to get it right. And then I just save it. And once it’s saved, I can jump back into boards. And then when I go to configure my advanced settings, I can just choose the filter that I saved in reports. So that’s like one, because not that, cause there’s only so much, we can only make the experience so good within this kind of right rail. And we really did try to make it as good as possible, but we just can’t compete against the full screen experience that you can do in reporting.

And then it’s just kind of easier to figure out kind of if you have things correctly in the reporting tool, save that filter, and then you can just apply it here.

And anyways, that’s one thing I’ve learned myself. So let me just make sure. So because that’s a really good idea, and I actually thought about that. So if I save that filter, I don’t have like, it’s just an existing filter within Workfront, it’s not just on yours. Like, do I need to share it or? Okay, awesome. Yeah, you can share it as well.

Like it should function just like any filter within Workfront. Like if I just go to a project view, I believe if I, oh, this is a, so this is like the same filter service here in the project view that’s on Boards.

And so I can apply my same save filter. So that’s one thing that’s nice, oh, it crashed for me. That’s one thing that’s nice about the filter service. It’s universal across Workfront. And so things that are, if you create a filter in one area of Workfront, you can apply it in other areas of Workfront and Boards is part of that ecosystem. Okay, I just wanna pause on that for a second. It was really important. Cause remember the session and folks in the chat as well, the session is Boards for Adoption. So if you’re gonna be free and let your users at least try to start using Boards, but yeah, I mean, the filtering pieces of Workfront are really more advanced, right? Like it’s a system admin, unless your project managers are really comfortable with creating filters. But that’s a great idea if you want to create like a filter that you know is like it’s a team or whatever, have it out there and just go, hey, go grab that one. And then your filter will be correct. So I think that’s actually gonna, that would help a lot of people. I just wanna share that. It’s good. It’s a good tip.

Yeah, and I would say like that the filtering is like the most, you know, arguably the most crucial part of an effective board is making sure that you have the right work going there.

So it is kind of, unfortunately it can get quite complex if you have complex needs. Yeah, like the fact that you can go and grab all the different objects, like it can be as complicated as your report. So sometimes when I’m playing with Boards, I’m like, wait, that’s not what I want it to do. So this is really good.

Natalie, I wasn’t sure if there was any or Leslie, if there’s any other things that we wanna address from the chat.

Are there any other questions? I saw a couple of questions around finding specific types of Boards.

So maybe you can just kind of show quickly, I think you went over it, but maybe just quickly show again how you create the different ones. Yeah, there you go. The templates. Yeah, so we have these prebuilt templates. I think a good way to think about it is we have two types of Boards. Like these three over here, they’re just a basic Board with settings pre-configured. And the dynamic Board actually functions differently because the whole filter populates the Board rather than just the intake column or the backlog column.

And so if I jump back into my basic Board, I could basically turn this into a Kanban Board pretty quickly. Like you could just rename these columns and set up your status to trigger off of new and add edit intake filter.

So Boards was really built with that in mind that you could scale up or scale down the complexity of what features your users need. And the templates just really help give you a starting point of like a Kanban Board just starts you off with these columns already pre-configured with status set up and kind of points you to kind of build this backlog column. But really you could do the reverse and you could shut that off and you could undo all these statuses and turn it right back into essentially a basic Board from scratch.

The dynamic Board really is different though because it is kind of always organized by status and the only way to get work on there or at least work from work front is to build a query but then it’s gonna populate the entire Board organized by status.

So there’s a sort of a, I wanna talk about a philosophical question before we get to the other question. So this is the one, can you address or restate what Board is best for when a project should be used instead? So I wanna, if you’ve been a work front for a while, like it’s always been portfolio, project, task, right? I mean, some people use programs but that’s pretty much where every, like it’s this very linear hierarchy and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I still do that.

In terms of your project managers versus your workers and users and this is an absolute argument which I’m waiting for the chat to just blow up. I was one of those people that only like shared these full projects with a million tasks, right? Even though your users do not need to see that. I will argue to the day I have no more breath, the project manager needs to see all those tasks, absolutely but your executives do not need to see all those and your workers do not need to see all those. So the question is build the project out with all the tasks, run the project, like your PM is gonna do that or your Scrum Master or whoever, right? But your end users find that view overwhelming, confusing, annoying, that’s why this is about adoption, because everybody’s like, oh, it’s just too much information and there’s hundreds of tasks and I can’t find what I’m looking for which all of us system admins do what? We build reporting, right? We spend our hour after hour building special dashboards and reports to present information to our users and execs in the way they wanna see it. When you could let them use a board.

So that’s my argument is that there is a way to let people get the information the way that they wanna see it and especially a lot of people sort of like push the basic board aside and say, oh, it’s just a basic board, but the basic board is the way to go for when you’re starting from scratch and you’re like, hey, I wanna build something that speaks to an individual user the way that they wanna see it. And the way Patrick was like, okay, you can pull in tasks just assigned to me or I can pull in tasks assigned to a team or I can pull in tasks on this just this one project and I can filter out other things and you can do it and you can add tags that say, this isn’t me or this is someone else or whatever. Like you could literally create things in a way with verbiage that makes sense to the individual user. So I know that’s a lot and I know I spent two minutes talking about it, but I just like, I’m just trying to like break out of the linear and break out even the box of boards and think about could this be a way that people get excited about Workfront? All right, I’m gonna stop talking. I know Natalie’s got stuff to say, go.

I don’t have stuff to say, I’m sorry.

I thought you did. Oh yeah, I’m preaching. I’m sorry. Sorry.

Tell us what Cynthia’s preaching on because there’s a bunch of us that are long timers like this, show us. I just, we know, right? If you’re a long timer, what do you hear every single day? I don’t like it. Yeah, I know.

So just throwing it out there and I know like system admins can’t see all the boards that people create, I get it. But here’s the thing, it’s not gonna break your projects. Don’t forget, it’s not gonna break your projects. So they could build out their board any way they want, jazz hands it up and it’s not gonna break your project. And you can always log in as them and go, okay, what’s your problem? Because you’re probably gonna have to do that anyway. So I know it’s not perfect, but if I could have gotten my users in and be like, look, here’s a filter, here’s your stuff, go figure it out. And they just did it, that would be kind of cool.

Okay.

Patrick, can you show us a basic board like that? Can you show us a basic project board like that, simplified? That it’s filtering in a project or not even filtering? Yeah, you can just filter in tasks from project, just one project. I want a board that just shows projects.

The tasks, so it doesn’t do projects yet. So it’s task and issues, but you can filter. Like I only want tasks or issues from a specific project. I want tasks and issues assigned to a specific team, a specific user. Like I like to just pull in from a couple of projects that I care about and then add cards that are not connected. So I’ll have a basic board that’s got connected, actual tasks that exist in projects that are in flight. And then I’m also adding cards that don’t, hey, don’t forget, you need to create this PowerPoint or whatever, like it’s a task for me related to that project, but it’s not something that the PM wants me to add to the project.

I don’t know if that makes sense. Hopefully that makes sense. Yeah, I think, and just to answer your question, like there’s been a lot of demand to have different objects represented as cards like projects. That is something we’re hoping to bring to boards, but it’s currently like not planned for development right now, but we’ve heard that loud and clear from customers that they would like to see that added.

And I have a board, Patrick, that’s got, it’s filtered to two specific projects. If you guys want me to show you that really quickly, I can do that. Sure. I’m gonna share. Can you filter boards based on like a department manager and they can only see their projects without tasks? Without this project being done yet? So let me, and Patrick, keep me honest. So if the project is owned by a specific, I’m assuming that the manager is over a team.

So the answer should be yes.

Yeah, so you’re filtering to that team because- You filter to a team, but you’re still seeing tasks. Yeah, and issues, yes.

You don’t have to use issues, but it’s tasks or issues right now.

And what’s cool, Sam, is say you wanted to test like say it was a couple of projects, right? You could create tags with project name and have swim lanes and say, this is project A and this is project B. And you’re tagging the tasks based on, like the tags can be literally anything and color coding anything. Yeah, it’s like a report that they want that’s milestone view for just digital projects or email projects or pick a project, but they just want to see those so that they can move them easily without having to do tasks. It’s worth playing around with and just seeing if you could create a fake, because a lot of people don’t like the current milestone functionality, which I totally get. Like you can only create one more milestone path per project, like I get it.

If you wanted to play around with a basic board and the columns where the milestones and the tags that swim lain across were something completely separate, like it would be a cool view. It would be amazing. And it wouldn’t affect the regular project, right? Like it would still exist in that linear order, but then you’d have this view of something completely different.

And I know people don’t, like I did that video and I showed that the event team here used boards for skill exchange. And that’s how they did it. Like it was wild the way that they did it. So I would say that it’s worth the effort to play around with and see if you can build that view out the way you want and then executives can see it. I know we only have a couple of minutes left.

I’m gonna do the updates really quickly. And then if we have time, I’ll let, and I’ll let, because Patrick and Natalie are only here so let me do the update super fast and then I can show my board and then we’ll end the session. That’s cool. Unless I’m missing something.

Natalie, thank you for the survey. Let’s see.

Okay. You mind stop sharing Patrick and I will share my screen.

So share really quick. I’m gonna try to run through them and you guys will get the slide deck.

So let me get this back in presentation mode really quickly.

Try to do this in like 60 seconds.

We’ll see how I do.

Okay. Two sets of resources. You’re gonna get these all linked. Here are the actual like articles and tutorials on experience league. There’s way actually way more than this, but I couldn’t fit like all like 40 on a slide. So this will definitely get you started. Also, these are the event recordings and the short videos. So the one that I’ve like creative approaches with boards, that video shows how the adoption marketing team built boards to actually manage skill exchange, which is really cool. So that’s on there. Also, there’s the Mattel session from summit, brilliant stuff on boards. If you wanna know about agile and scrum in terms of just how to adopt it, the Natalie’s video expert insights is out there. So there’s a bunch of stuff here. Updates and events. First of all, this is a good one. Everybody wants to know the roadmap, right? Everyone’s ears perked up roadmap. Biannual roadmap webinar series. We have the links. This is October 9th for the second half of the year, depending on what time you wanna go. So this will be in the slide deck if you wanna sign up for that roadmap and see what’s coming in terms of work front. Also Adobe Max is coming. And there’s a bunch of functionality that we were just talking about that will be mentioned in terms of like creatives and things like that. So there’s online events. For the online ones.

We have our September events, the scale ones. We have several more coming up this month, but also we have the Boston meetup. And I think I saw someone asking about the Boston meetup. So there’s the register link. You’ll get that in the slide deck. And then we have the free October events. We’re linking them up now. We’re getting them on experience league. Those are coming, but keep visiting the events page for that. Skill exchange recordings. Go check those out. The fourth quarter release is coming. Note, Legacy Home is retiring October 17th. I’ll say that one more time. Legacy Home is going away October 17th. If you wanna know more information, check that out. Cause we’re gonna do our release roundup in October. And then our regular system admin resources. I think I did that in 60 seconds. Okay.

Stop sharing.

Okay.

It’s two o’clock.

Y’all want me to show that board real quick and then we’ll let Patrick and Natalie go.

No, you guys have to go.

I have a couple extra minutes. So I’m gonna try to get to the rest of the questions in the chat while you do that. Thank you so much Natalie. I appreciate it. Patrick, I really appreciate you. I know that I think you had another meeting. Thank you so much for your time and the demo. Thank you. And we’ll put it up on experience league. So thank you, Patrick.

All right, I’m gonna share my screen really quick.

Sure. I have to go into incognito mode to get to my instance.

Okay.

All right, so boards.

For some of y’all that asked, can you put a board on a dashboard? Technically you can put it on as an external link, but sometimes the dashboard doesn’t like that. So I’ve played around with that. It doesn’t always work, but it’s not technically supposed to work, but that’s me breaking the rules. So if it works for you, that’s great. Okay, here’s my basic board with intake. Okay, so I have filtered to just two projects.

I’ve got Twilight’s Road Trip, which is really important. And then I’ve got something called Pickle Project. So if I wanted to, so I’m bringing in tasks from two projects and just filtering to those two projects. If I wanted to, I can create some tags. I don’t know if I have any right now. Let’s see if I have any tags in this project.

I don’t, okay. So I’m just gonna create a tag.

I’m gonna call this, call this Twilight’s Project.

And then I’m gonna add another tag.

Those are, listen, you gotta have some better colors than that. Come on now.

Do the University of Texas at Arlington because no one cares, but I care. All right, so there’s that. And then I’m gonna add a tag to Twilight’s Project.

I gotta move, I gotta move our little faces. Hold on.

Okay.

And then Pickle’s Project, right? And then I’m gonna add a tag to Twilight’s Project. I could literally start dragging and dropping. So if I wanna put all of Twilight’s, and I know y’all are like, but that’s so manual. I get it. But I can create this amazing view that’s got what’s happening, what’s gonna happen, what happened, but I’ve got them swim-lained across the different tags.

All right, it’s hard for me to do this, like literally, yeah, there we go. So this is what I was talking about. I can have columns that communicate a certain thing. They could be milestones, right? And then I could have specific tasks but tagged in different ways. So that’s what I was talking about.

Hopefully that gives a better visual. And I will tell y’all, I mean, I’ve used boards for like teams that come with, they’re using one of those online whiteboarding tools, which don’t make a lot of sense to me. So I just took all that information, I put it on a board. They’re not connected cards. They’re just, it’s a visualization of what everybody was talking about and what the columns were and what was tagged. And what’s cool is you can have multiple tags on a card. So maybe it’s this, maybe it’s assigned to this person. Maybe it’s a certain milestone, whatever, but you can have it and visualize it in a bunch of different way.

Okay, so we’re five minutes over.

Natalie, are we good? Are we close? There are a few more, but I think you might be best to follow up on those. Yeah, let’s just do follow up. Y’all, I really appreciate you coming. Natalie, thank you so much for this. I mean, you were a boss in the chat, so I’m very grateful. We will get that follow up out today. I’m gonna spend the rest of the afternoon working on it.

I mean, y’all know I love Natalie. I love Patrick, don’t get me wrong. But Natalie, thank you so much for doing this. And she did the Expert Insights video for us as well. And that was so much great information. So y’all have a great day.

Sorry, I interrupted you, Natalie, go ahead. I was just gonna say, this is why I stay on later. So I get the extra accolades. You do, you get the gold stars, all the gold stars. Everyone, I want you to have a great rest of your week. Maybe you’re having a, you know, hopefully everyone will have a light Friday and a great weekend. Thank you so much and we’ll see you next time. Bye everybody.