Adobe Workfront Experts on Workfront System Smarts & Strategic Starts | Community
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kautuk_sahni
Community Manager
Community Manager
September 22, 2025

Adobe Workfront Experts on Workfront System Smarts & Strategic Starts

  • September 22, 2025
  • 32 replies
  • 12332 views

October 29th, 2025

 

We are happy to welcome Monique Evans, Kiersten Kollins, Nichole Vargas, Cynthia Boon and Leslie Spier for an AMA session about Workfront System Smarts & Strategic Starts. 

 

Our experts:

  • Monique Evans is a Senior Manager - Global Content Studio Operations at Stanley Black & Decker, Inc.
  • Kiersten Kollins is a Marketing Operations Tech Manager at DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse
  • Nichole Vargas, Leslie Spier & Cynthia Boon are Customer Success Managers from Adobe. 

 

How this AMA works:

  • This thread will open on Wednesday, October 29, 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. 

32 replies

Level 2
October 27, 2025

I'm interested in setting up an automatic survey that will go out after a request has been completed/closed. Is there a way to do that today from a request object type?

LeslieSpier
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 29, 2025

You could automate this with Fusion! Alternatively, one way to do it manually -- I had a report that I got weekly on Mondays of all the projects that closed the week before - you could manually email the requesters in that report. 

Level 2
October 27, 2025

I would like to understand the best way to use resourcing and workload balancer for teams that have dynamic nature of work where planned hours or duration can change depending on the criticality of work?

CynthiaBoon
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 29, 2025

Hello! The easy (and hard) answer to this question is that there's no one way to use the Resource Management tools, and you might have to take a non-traditional approach depending on the needs of your team.  The cool thing is that one of our hosts today, @kierstenkollins, has shared her non-traditional approaches a couple of times on events, and they are truly inspiring! 

🎬 [VIDEO] August 2024 - [Workfront] Expert Insights: Non-Traditional Workfront Workflows with Kiersten Kollins 
[Event Follow-Up] Creative Ways of Managing Resources in Adobe Workfront - May 20, 2025 

Level 2
October 27, 2025

We are looking to enhance our calculations in our Workfront reporting as we have an ask to provide further breakdown and aggregated date on our current calcuations. I know that adding calculations to already calculated fields in Workfront has been discouraged due to the calculated fields breaking some times when updates are pushed to Workfront. Is there any other way that we can build out our additonal calculated reporting needs in Workfront or will there be any enhancement in the future that will allow us to build out more calculations in Workfront? We are currently looking at other resources to supplement this ask but would prefer to work solely in Workfront if we are able.

MoniqueEvans
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
October 29, 2025

I've never heard this being an issue. I've had calculated fields for a decade and never once has a Workfront update broken one. Maybe you are thinking of when you update the field in the form builder and tell it to recalculate the expression, but that also shouldn't break anything. I highly recommend continuing the course of making calculated fields that use other calculated fields.

KierstenKollins
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
October 29, 2025

In my 7 years of using calculated fields, we did not run into any issues with calculated fields when release updates were deployed. I agree with Monique to go for it and build what you need for your teams. Calculated fields are a game changer for teams and workflows.

BrittanyGarrett
Level 2
October 28, 2025

I'd like to know more about a few things: 

 

  • How to use conditional rules for reporting
  • Milestones
  • Wildcards
  • Text mode and how to get started
  • Predecessors and dependency loops (I keep creating them but want to know how to avoid this)
LeslieSpier
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 29, 2025

Hey @brittanygarrett ! These are all fabulous areas to get to know in Workfront! I'll drop some resources here. My team also hosts a ton of free events every month (I would make sure to attend the Admin 101 sessions - we repeat them quarterly and there's one specifically on reporting) - be sure to check out the Experience League Events Page.

 

Hopefully that helps!

Level 2
October 28, 2025

Not sure if this could potentially be covered, but I would love for there to be a bit more customization on the home screen widgets. Specifically, if we could add the description field to "My Tasks" it could prove very helpful.

MoniqueEvans
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
October 29, 2025

Corey you are not alone in wanting some more customization to Home. I'm hoping that more is coming with the 2026 release updates and if you post an Idea I will up vote it and share it with everyone I know to get more votes.

New Member
October 28, 2025

I see Workfront has an AI Assistant button at the top, I'm wondering if we could use the AI Assistant using prompts to create a specific report? Or will the AI Assistant support the creation of reports and dashboards?

Thanks!

MoniqueEvans
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
October 29, 2025

Reporting AI is not yet available but it has come up in every Beta meeting I was in earlier this year so just know the Product team knows how much we'd love to see this. Hopefully we hear something more at Summit. But in the meantime I'm so glad we can use the Assistant to generate and refine formulas for calculated custom fields.

 

Here's some more details on that: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/basics/ai-assistant/ai-assistant-overview

New Member
October 29, 2025

I’m looking for guidance on how to best use Milestone Paths in Workfront. Right now, our project phases aren’t set up as Milestones, which makes it difficult to report on phase progress or determine if projects are On Target, At Risk, or In Trouble.

A few questions:

  • How should Milestone Paths be structured in templates to accurately track by phase?

  • Any recommended dashboards or reports that highlight project health using Milestone Paths?

  • Can Milestone Paths update automatically when due dates shift (e.g., due to PTO or resource changes)?

  • Can Milestone Paths be used to track multiple projects?

Would appreciate any best practices or examples from your experience.

Thanks!

CynthiaBoon
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 29, 2025

Hello! I love using Milestone Paths for Reporting - mainly to create an easy to understand picture of where all of the in-flight projects are. The main piece of advice that I would give is to create milestone path phases general enough that they can apply to a large group of projects, so that you're comparing "apples to apples." One of the challenges with Workfront and Project Management in general is that sometimes everyone is using a different word or description for the same effort, so Milestones can give you a mechanism for consistency.
Now, the drawback is that you can only assign one Milestone Path per project, and can only use one Phase once. (So for examples, so you had two tasks that could technically fall under a Phase 1-Planning milestone, you have to pick just one to represent that phase. If that's the case, this might require you to rethink your Project Templates a bit.)
In terms of a Dashboard, I would build a specific report for each Milestone Path you are using. I had a General one, then I had one for IT/Development Projects, and then one for more Marketing/Creative Projects. So I'd create three reports, filter to the applicable projects, and then Leadership could focus on the ones that were most meaningful to them.
For the record though - Milestones didn't always communicate everything I needed, so sometimes I would tag Projects with a specific Custom Form, that had more nuanced fields - specific to the business units, strategic initiatives, timeframes (custom quarters), etc.- but this includes a specific Project Condition that was more meaningful to our org and that the PMs could manually set depending on what was going on with the projects. Having those reports on the dashboard filtered to those nuances really helped communicate a clearer message of the statuses of the phases and the projects.
I talked a little bit about this in a short video, so hopefully this helps a bit!
🎬 [VIDEO] Top 3 – How to get started with Milestones 

CynthiaBoon
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 29, 2025

I also meant to share this!  It's an older event, but it's got some great tips around Milestone Paths, just in case.

Webinar | System Admin Essentials: Foundations of Project Templates (May 17, 2023) 

Level 3
October 29, 2025

Once a request is converted to a proeject the original request is deleted. I have checked the preferences and the box is ticked to keep the original request. Is there anywhere else that this could be managed?
Is there a way in which the request can be 'locked' rather than deleted?

CynthiaBoon
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 29, 2025

Hey there!  This definitely seems like a potential Support ticket.  The only thing that might be worth checking is to make sure that your users aren't deleting the issues after the project is created.  If not, definitely open that ticket! 

Level 3
October 29, 2025

Hi Cynthia,

 

I'm more curious about the last part of AWoody's post - "Is there a way in which the request can be 'locked' rather than deleted?"

 

I like to keep the requests instead of deleting them, but some infrequent users use them (instead of the resolved projects) to send updates, muddying the communication path.

 

Thanks.

October 29, 2025

What are some prime use cases for utilizing POST or PUT methods in External Lookup Fields? The documentation notes "This will mostly likely be Get.", but I'm wondering what is possible with the other two as they are available methods.

 

Level 2
October 29, 2025

One issue that I have seen with Workfront is the functionality of groups/teams. We experimented with creating teams of people based on specific brands in a hope of speeding up the process of assigning tasks on a project. The problem came when the task would not show up on anyone's "My Task" list on the home screen and would only show up on "My Work" or "Team Requests". Is this a bug or a feature? I think if someone claimed the task it would show on theirs and disappear for everyone else, however that would not work for us with how we operate.

Level 2
October 29, 2025

I would expand this to include the Priorities page - when a team is assigned that a user is a member of, this does not show up in the Priorities list for a user.