Community Manager

Adobe Workfront Community Experts on Workfront Proof

Forum|Forum|9 months ago
April 15, 2025
37 replies
11282 views

May 8th, 2025

We are happy to welcome our Workfront Community Advisors and product experts Lyndsy Denk, Monique Evans, and Richard Carlson for an AMA session about Workfront Proof.

Our experts:

Lyndsy Denk is a Marketing Training Manager at IDEXX Laboratories
Monique Evans is a Senior Manager, Global Content Studio Operations at Stanley Black and Decker Inc.
Richard Carlson is a Systems Administrator at Behr Paint Company

How this AMA works:

This thread will open on Wednesday, October 15, for you to start submitting your questions
Reply to this post with any questions you have for our Experts. They will reply to as many of your questions as possible.
After the AMA is over, the thread will be locked for new replies, but it will remain visible as a resource.

Workfront

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Stacey_Robertson

Level 5

Can the archive period be changed? We have noticed that proofs archive after 60 days and drop off of the My Approvals report on the home page. This is not an ideal set up as we don't cancel proofs until after 90 days.

Richard__Carlson

Community Advisor

We do not believe that the archive period can be changed by system admins. I was not able to find any settings for this specific feature.

MorganHatcher

Level 4

What is your opinion on when to use a Document Approval vs. Proof Approval?

MoniqueEvans

Community Advisor

Great question! This is a heated debate but in my opinion, the best direction is to be very consistent with your workflow and not mix the two. It is much easier to report on Document Approvals and eventually (way down the line) this is the route that all asset approvals will take eventually so it will be less of an learning curve. Proof Approvals do have their perks with their more specific details but reporting on them can be quite difficult.

I think in this case a best of both worlds approach is the best; but does require a lot of training and due dilligence. But this allows you to use the markup capabilties of Proof and the organization and reporting ease of Document Approvals. Here's a link to see more details on this. Use Unified Approvals and proofing together

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EmilySo2

Level 1

We currently only use Simple Proof. I want our project managers to see the value in Proofing Workflows, but all they see is extra work and more "admin time." Do you have any recommendations on how to get buy in for Proofing Workflows? Along those same lines, I know about the templates, if anyone has best practices or recommendations for that, I'm all ears!

CynthiaBoon

Adobe Employee

Hey Emily! I definitely had this issue back in the day, and here's my 2 cents. The cool thing about the Advanced Workflows is that they save time, by having it already created, but they are super flexible in that PMs can change out names, add a stage if needed etc. What I did was to meet with the PMs and created a couple of "shell" (or basic) Workflows with just a couple of stages that everyone seemed to use, and then the PMs could adjust as needed.

For the templates, the best piece of advice that I can give is to use Naming Conventions that make sense to your PMs. There's not a way to sort them, so if you have a bunch of them or if the names are super similar or confusing, your PMs might not select the correct ones.

ElizaBarryGuild

Level 2

Is there, or could there be, a way to set up which workflow a proof would need before the designer finished the item? We, for instance, know that who needs to approve a piece before it is made and I can't find a way to not create a stall between the design being finished and the PM setting up and triggering the workflow. Ideally, the designer would be able to kick it off instantly, but then you have to train them to activate and use the correct workflow.

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ConnieAr1

Level 1

Would like to better understand how copywriters use the proofing tool in Work Front? Is there a way to see track changes from Microsoft in the system?

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ConnieAr1

Level 1

Tagging the experts in case this helps (per instructions) (@Lyndsy-Denk), (@MoniqueEvans), (@Richard__Carlson)

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BethBa4

Level 2

In Workfront email notifications, the proof name url is so much more prominent than the Go to Proof CTA. Is there a way to realign this notification so users stop going to proof url and trying to make comments (and sometimes succeeding) in the native file? is the proof url even necessary?

CynthiaBoon

Adobe Employee

Hi Beth! We talked about the proof and Workfront email notifications during yesterday's session, and one of the recommendations was to turn off those Proof Notifications in Workfront option (in Setup) since it can get confusing. I always found a Proof Approval report way more useful than the notifications, but here's the event link, if it's helpful.

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/workfront-discussions/event-follow-up-mastering-email-notifications-in-adobe-workfront/td-p/752745

ElizaBarryGuild

Level 2

That's great for the meantime, but it would be nice if we could customize notifications so that they ARE useful rather than finding workarounds. Lots of people don't log in unless they have a reason to, so it results in PMs chasing people from the report rather than individuals self-serving, which isn't scalable.

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Alanimal1

Is there anyway to have a separate chat stream from the updates comments that the submitter sees? When having combined workflows for say Brand and Creative, we would like to have separate comment/updates stream for the proof the team can comment on, that the submitter doesn't see?

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ConnieAr1

Level 1

Not sure if this helps but we add and remove who is able to see a proof. So version 1 may have 5 people, but version 2 may just be creative. Then once creative has approved. The version 3 we will add the reviewers back into version 3 proof.

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Alanimal1

Thank you Connie, in the case of a multiple team workflow (brand, creative, AI), especially with creative, there are many comments and possible opinions in the comments. This in turn makes it hard for the original submitter to follow and becomes confusing. (things mentioned that the submitter doesn't need to see) By keeping that part of the conversation separate between the teams involved, takes confusion away from submitter in the update comments, makes the interaction with the original submitter cleaner and less confusing or controversial.

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NatalieTe1

Level 2

What is the benefit of a "private" workflow stage and how are they typically set up? What does this type of stage mean?

Richard__Carlson

Community Advisor

What is the benefit of a "private" workflow stage and how are they typically set up? What does this type of stage mean?

A private workflow stage would only be visible for people added to it. One example of how to use a private stage: Allowing the content creation to happen uninterrupted without executive oversight. In other words you can hide the stage if you wanted content creation work to happen and at the same time eliminate the "curious people looking at artwork through the system and reviewing it before they're ready" scenario.

Can proof owners/uploaders be a part of two different workflow stages (one private and one not)? - I was not able to do this in my testing

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Cici5

Level 1

@richard__carlson

What is the benefit of a "private" workflow stage and how are they typically set up? What does this type of stage mean?

Great option I was not aware was availble.... quick add question.... can the proof be revised to public once it is ready to share? So let's say V1 + V2 are priviate but V3 can go now go public?

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NatalieTe1

Level 2

Can proof owners/uploaders be a part of two different workflow stages (one private and one not)?

Lyndsy-Denk

Community Advisor

This is not currently a function. In that case, we encourage you to submit an idea. There is an oldie from 2020, but the team doesn't look further back than a couple years.

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DreadkiailiWork

Level 4

What is the best way to reporting of the portion of the task duration that the proof was with someone else. To clarify, we have a task that is assigned to the designer. It has a planned duration of 5 days. If a reviewer has the proof for 6 weeks, the task looks late and is assigned to the designer, but it isn't the designer's problem. I have a very complex Fusion senario to try to get the data written to the task, so we can hide the task from the designer's to do list when it isn't their turn and to get the data for reporting on SLAs. But, this isn't great.

Lyndsy-Denk

Community Advisor

We recommend splitting the tasks so that you have one for review and another for applying the feedback you received during the review.

From there, you have a couple options for reporting:

A separate task allows you to run a calculation comparing the start and completion of the task.
A Proof Approval report that looks at each individual participant's interactions in the proof, including when they clicked the decision button.

Check out the screenshot attached for an example.

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BridgetBo1

how can we create the following report

"A Proof Approval report that looks at each individual participant's interactions in the proof, including when they clicked the decision button."

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Kasey-Gagne

Level 5

What is the best way to delegate proof approvals when an Approver that is set on multiple workflows is out of office? Perhaps there is a way with Fusion that I'm not aware of? We are manually adjusting and it is a major time suck.