Introduction and tech strategy

Transcript

When it comes to integration and automation, Workfront Fusion is in a class all by itself. As an incredibly powerful tool that enables system administrators, professional services teams, and partners to connect Workfront to virtually any other system complete with unique business processes and custom workflows all in an intuitive manner. Of course, these integrations are delivered on a proven platform without the need for custom code, custom infrastructure, or one-off support processes. These capabilities, in turn, can help your enterprise to be flexible in connecting the flow of work in a cost effective manner, and ultimately close data or process gaps that can slow your organization down.

Now, before we dive into all the details of Workfront Fusion, I first want to take a moment and clarify who Workfront Fusion was built for and how they’ll benefit. It’s important to note that while most business stakeholders and typical Workfront users benefit significantly from Workfront Fusion, most of this benefit occurs behind the scenes. When Workfront Fusion is working most perfectly, most users don’t know anything about it, and it simply automates and integrates their work across their organization.

Now, in contrast, Workfront system administrators and implementers directly access Workfront Fusion and all the capabilities we’re about to review in order to design, implement, and monitor unique workflows and integrations for your enterprise. To start to understand Workfront Fusion, we’ll evaluate some of the core capabilities that are foundational in driving this unique workflow and capability. First is the Workfront Fusion Scenario Designer, a powerful and intuitive interface inside of Workfront Fusion that enables you to identify specific steps, the order of those steps, the logic associated with those, and all the different applications and data that might be important for your particular business process.

In addition to that Scenario Designer, Workfront Fusion includes a set of pre-built connectors to some of the world’s most common business applications to ensure that you can quickly and easily connect the flow of work to those applications. Of course, as we stated earlier, it’d be impossible for us to provide a connector to every application our customers need. And as such, we’ve provided an incredibly powerful concept called universal connectors. This enables someone with limited IT skills to be able to connect to virtually any other application in the world that has a web accessible API, or to even more advanced capabilities to access and interact with systems that have a REST, or a SOAP-based API, and/or FTP functions.

Above and beyond those core fundamental capabilities of Workfront Fusion, there are a couple of other key capabilities to understand how Workfront Fusion can be used for you. First, an incredibly powerful filter designer to ensure that all the right data can flow to the right next step.

Additionally, we’ll get an opportunity to preview what it looks like to transform data, a key component of all integration and automation processes, where we can take dates and transform into different formats, we can perform basic math functions, or even do more advanced functions in working with lists or arrays, and any other number of operations.

Workfront Fusion also includes incredibly powerful capabilities to branch data and logic to go down different routes based upon different criteria so that you can meet virtually any use case. And unique to Workfront Fusion is the ability to iterate across multiple records and the ability to perform actions on each one of those records. We’ll get a chance to see what that looks like in the demonstration shortly.

A few additional supporting capabilities to be aware of when you look at integration and automation is the ability to be able to audit what happened, to ensure that you know that your processes are working as expected, and of course, be able to troubleshoot something that should come up. Workfront Fusion includes powerful capabilities to review execution history and see every aspect of what occurred in a previous scenario execution.

Additionally, for advanced users, when you’re formatting and working with data in many different types of systems, it’s important to be able to structure data to meet a particular format expected by that other system. Workfront Fusion includes powerful capabilities to structure that data and/or interpret that data coming from another system.

And last, before we actually get an opportunity to take a look at Workfront Fusion, you’ll note that in addition to providing customers with a blank slate to provide virtually any business process, we also include standard templates that enable you to get started with best practices for automating two particular systems. In fact, we’ll get an opportunity to look at what it might look like to integrate Workfront to Adobe’s Marketo system.

Well, we’ve learned a lot about integration and automation, but let’s go ahead and take a moment to actually see what that looks like inside of Workfront Fusion. We won’t have an opportunity to look at every aspect of Workfront Fusion, but I do want to give you a really good sense of the power of Workfront Fusion. Here, we’re going to design an entirely new scenario based upon a fictional example.

And of course, when we first interact with Workfront Fusion, we can identify several different services that we may want to integrate with. For the purposes of today’s demonstration, I’m going to choose to integrate with both Workfront and Salesforce. And of course, once I hit continue, I may actually choose additional applications as well.

In my fictional example, I’m going to go ahead and start working with the Workfront application. And I can see that Workfront Fusion provides lots of different triggers and actions that help me identify how this particular scenario should initiate, and of course, which data gets transferred to the next step. For my example, I’m going to go ahead and choose to watch records that might be getting created inside of my Workfront instance. Here, I have the ability to identify, I’m going to focus on new records in this particular case. And specifically, I’m going to see that this provides me with an intuitive interface to identify any type of new record that I might want to work with from inside of Workfront. In this instance, I’m going to go ahead and choose to kick off this particular scenario based upon a new project getting created inside of Workfront. You’ll also notice that dynamically, I’m presented with the list of outputs here. In other words, data that I might want to use to describe and work with later on in my scenario. This is all information that would be considered metadata or information about a particular project. And for our example today, I’m going to go ahead and pull in the ID of the project, a description of our project, a name of that particular project. And for our purposes today, we’ll go ahead and also include the planned completion date of that project. One other piece that I would highlight here is that above and beyond just the core fields that are available within Workfront, Workfront Fusion also dynamically pulls in custom fields that might be attributed to a particular project. In this case, we can see that we have budget category, and budget codes, and a budget status. I’m going to go ahead and pull those particular fields in as well, and then we’ll go ahead and click okay.

And here, we’ll say that we want to go ahead and run this process from now on in our Workfront environment. We’ve set up kind of the first part of this integration scenario, and I want to show you how easy it is to complete a full integration. The next part here is, of course, we’re going to take new projects that were created in Workfront and automatically go ahead and create them inside of Salesforce as a new campaign. Similar to what we saw with Workfront, we’ll choose Salesforce as an example and go ahead and create a new record.

In this instance, very similar to what we saw just previously, as we connect to Salesforce, we can dynamically pull the information that’s available within Salesforce and see a comprehensive list of all the different types of objects we might want to create. For today’s purposes, we’ll go ahead and choose to create a new campaign inside of Salesforce every time a project inside of Workfront is created. Again, we see a dynamic list of all the fields that are available in Salesforce. And in this case, including both standard fields, as well as custom fields inside of Salesforce. And here, we can see and get introduced to the Workfront Fusion mapping panel. Here, we can identify, of course, that there’s a field in Salesforce, so you can see it’s bold, called campaign name. In this particular instance, we’re going to go ahead and preface it with the word Workfront campaign, and then we’re going to use the powerful mapping designer to basically pull in information from Workfront. Here, we can see the name of the project that we’ve pulled in previously is available. And we can simply click on that to pull it in before. We can also see that inside of Salesforce, we have a field called Workfront Project ID. So we might as well take the ID from Workfront and place it there. And of course, we can see that there’s an end date of the campaign inside of Salesforce. Here, of course, we could do something as simple as say that the planned completion date coming from Workfront is the date that I want to use for the end date. Of course, I could also get more advanced and say that I want to add days to the planned completion date. And for our fictional example, we’ll go ahead and say we’re going to add 10 days to the planned completion date. Effectively, all of our campaigns in Salesforce will have a little bit of extra time on them from what they were entered as Workfront. That’s just one example of many of the possible mapping functions that you can perform. You’ll notice that you have a set of conditional logic that you may identify to present the right data from one system to another. Of course, lots of different types of math functions that might occur, or transforming text, or working with dates specifically, as we saw earlier. And of course, intuitive help text to help me identify and work with those particular functions effectively. At this point in time, I’m going to go ahead and click okay. And believe it or not, this is an up and running working integration. Just to give you a sense of what it looks like, of course, if I were to turn this on, this would be running in the background and just happened automatically. But let’s go ahead and jump into Workfront. If you’re not familiar with the Workfront interface, we won’t have a chance to demonstrate all aspects of it today. But certainly, here, we’re just going to do a very simple process of creating a new project inside of Workfront. And we’re going to do it based upon an existing template. Here, you can see I have an email template for my project here. I’m going to go ahead and click on creating a new project in Workfront for that email template. My new email campaign for Summit will be our new project. And of course, in this particular instance, I’m going to go ahead and identify that this campaign definitely needs to be completed by May 31st. In this case, I’m going to go ahead and save changes inside of Workfront. And then I’m going to pop back over to Workfront Fusion and get a sense of what this process looks like. Of course, Workfront Fusion, if this was running, would automatically be happening behind the scenes. But for our demonstration purposes here today, I can go ahead and click on run once, and I can actually see the integration happen in real time. Here, I can see that one record was found, and I can see that we actually went ahead and created a Salesforce record, and I can see the results from that as well. What’s most important to understand about Workfront Fusion is yes, everything I just did was incredibly simple, but it’s also the power of Workfront Fusion to enable me to build on what I just built just there. Here, of course, it would be natural for me to also want to build on my integration scenario, to go ahead and take that ID from Salesforce and use that ID to update the project inside of Workfront, and so that I have maintain a relationship between these two particular records. So here, of course, I can go ahead and map data back and forth between all these different systems and ensure that we are maintaining a relationship between them. In this instance, I’m going to go ahead and identify that the external reference ID in Workfront will get updated with that Salesforce ID. So of course, Workfront Fusion enables not just bidirectional integration, but in reality, omnidirectional. So of course, here, it might make sense that I want to go ahead and always create a new campaign inside of Salesforce. Hypothetically, I may want to integrate and interact with other systems as well. Let’s use Marketo as a very quick example, and assume that in some instances, I actually might want to go ahead.

And instead of simply creating something inside of Salesforce, I’m actually going to create a record inside of Marketo. And in fact, we’re going to conditionally branch that as well. So here, you’ll introduce that concept of a router, where I can actually identify different paths that I may want to go on based upon different conditions. Here, I may actually decide I want to create a program inside of Marketo based upon some particular condition. Here, we’ll go ahead and create an email campaign, and specifically focus, similarly, on that name and the program channel, and even the right particular parent folder ID. And here, we can see how the comprehensive nature of an entire workflow can continue to be built. Of course, here, I might identify particular conditions that will determine whether I go down one path or another. If the name, for example, contains the word email, I might come down this path. And of course, I can add multiple conditions and processes. Of course, for today’s purposes, we’re only getting a very initial introduction to Workfront Fusion, but I do want to highlight one last thing before we end the demonstration and wrap up the presentation.

Here, we’re going to go ahead and switch to an existing scenario that’s already been built and get a sense of what an integration with another application might look like. In this case, we’re, again, using the concept of integrating Workfront with an application like Marketo to initiate a campaign. In this particular instance, we can see this existing scenario is built out. And to help move along our scenario, in this case, this particular integration has been set up not to go ahead and start when a new project’s been created, but instead, to go ahead and start when a project moves from planning status to a current status. To help us along with that demonstration, I’m going to go ahead and move over back over to Workfront. And here, I’m going to go ahead and identify some additional information that we’ll go ahead and use in our process. In this particular instance, I have some information that I might be storing about Marketo. And specifically, when I use this particular project, I have the option to choose a Marketo program, and specifically, a Center of Excellence program. And here, from my email campaign, I’m going to identify an existing Marketo program, which we refer to as the Three Drip Nurture program. Here, I’m going to go ahead and save those changes. And then I’m going to go ahead and change this project from a planning status to a current status. Now, of course, very often, if this was running behind the scenes, we would actually see this process go ahead and execute. But I’m going to go ahead and go into Fusion and go ahead and run this process manually. And we’re going to evaluate. This actually occurred on its own.

And here, we can actually see the integration happen in real time and see all the data associated with it.

You can get an opportunity to see more details. You can see, of course, I’m filtering and looking only for projects that have moved from planned to current. And I’m only doing it with the projects that are associated with an email template. Here, I’m cloning a program inside of Marketo from a master program, and updating that project inside of Workfront. And even above and beyond what we just did, we’re actually identifying all the sub-folders that are associated with that particular program, and even doing a process of iterating through each one of those to identify all the emails associated with that campaign. And in fact, for every one of those emails, we’re grabbing that email content if they’re approved and taking that content and bringing it back to Workfront to upload as a proof. Now, we saw a lot of things happen inside of Fusion, and very quickly. You can audit and kind of look at additional details about what actually occurred and the information there. But of course, the most valuable piece is to come back into Workfront and/or Marketo and see that information automated and integrated seamlessly. In this particular case, I’m going to come back into my documents tab inside of Workfront, and I can actually see that there are the three emails that we saw actually represented inside of Fusion. In this particular case, I’ve got those emails actually generating as a proof so that I can route those to the right stakeholders using Workfront’s proofing capabilities so that we can ensure that people can sign off on the perfective content to target the right audiences with the right quality information. And of course, we can use all of the Workfront capabilities to drive that well into the future. This is, again, just one small example and of literally hundreds of thousands of different types of integration scenarios to help enable virtually limitless integration and automation capabilities with Workfront Fusion. -