Product Communities

If you were to spend a few days at the Workfront offices watching us work, attending our meetings, listening to our conversations, you may be surprised about how much of the conversation is about you. Your experience with our products. Where your team is going in the next 3, 5, 10 years and what their modern work management needs will be. We are intensely focused on delivering what you need – in our product and through your interactions with us. As a company, we have spent the last year identifying how best to do this. The framework of our conversations has been your customer journey. I’d like to give you a brief example of what a customer journey is by telling you about the person credited with inventing it, Jan Carlzon. In 1981, Jan Carlzon became CEO of the problem-ridden Scandinavian Airlines. At the time, the airline was near the bottom of the list for least punctual airlines in Europe, losing $17 million per year. Remarkably, Carlzon turned the airline around in one

Think the Olympics are over??? You can be a judge at the first ever Workfront One Olympics by voting daily for your favorite contenders!With four “sports”, we’ll have four different brackets, with an 8-seed playing field. We'll post the matches on Monday's and you’ll vote for your favorites by commenting on the post. We'll update the brackets regularly (posting about it on Friday's) to show the winners of each poll until we get a gold medal winner for each of the sports!Here's an example of what the posts will look like on the community for you to vote on.The four sports are: Quick Tips, Blogs, User Groups, and Learning Programs. You can see the four starting brackets here. Based on YOUR VOTES on the polls, we'll update the brackets, create new matches and ultimately decide the winner.Contending for the winning slot in the Workfront One Blogs Olympic competition are:4 things to love about the new Workfront experience5 myths about the new Workfront experienceWorkfront is simple – Part 1

Making it easy to get to the information your team needs is an integral part of centralizing work and mastering enterprise work management. Consolidate key reports on dashboards for groups of users, elevate critical data points and simplify navigation to help your team quickly access relevant data and improve the user experience! Below is a list of must-have dashboards for you and your team: For the System Administrator - The Workfront Clean-up Dashboard with an added User exceptions report that highlights missing user settings. This dashboard will help the System Administrator easily find Workfront data that may need to be cleaned up, may cause resource planning issues or that can affect reporting.For the Project Manager - A dashboard that shows pertinent project data and calls out exceptions that need to be addressed will enable a Project Manager to quickly see the health of their projects, address project-specific issues and ensure reporting integrity. Consider includ

I hope April showers have brought you May flowers! It’s been beautiful here in Utah this spring. We recently released the 2021 State of Work Report, our seventh annual study focused on how digital workers view and value work. We originally embarked on a journey in Q1 of 2020 to study how the two largest age cohorts in the workforce—millennials (ages 23-43) and Generation Xers (ages 44-52)—approached work. The data came back just as companies were sending their employees home to work, and provided a pre-pandemic snapshot of work trends. We ran the same study in Q4 of last year and then compared the two data sets, which gave us a view of how Covid-19 changed digital work.  The results of the survey are fascinating, and I encourage you to download the report. The study clearly surfaces generational differences in how individuals work, but also shows how the pivot to remote work has changed the way individuals view and complete work.  Here are some takeaways I foun

This 3-part series is designed to provide essential advice and actionable steps to make the challenging role of System Administrator a bit easier. As a follow up to last week’s blog on setup, this week will focus on how to best streamline your instance for maximum efficiency and productivity. ACTIVATE KEY EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS AND REMINDERS How many times do you check your email every day? Whether it’s once or every time a red bubble appears, you are trying to stay ahead and keep connected.  Workfront offers in-app notifications to keep you in the loop and to help avoid flooding your inbox, however, not all actions trigger a notification and not all users are working in Workfront every second of every day. To ensure that assigned work is not missed, updates are addressed and approvals are made, activate key global email notifications within Setup for all users.  The most popular email notifications that are inactive by default are: I’m assigned to an issueA project I’m on

Next to St. Patrick’s Day and the Spring Equinox, the highlight of March for many is Selection Sunday, when millions across our country eagerly complete their hopeful brackets for March Madness, carefully analyzing the data and teams at play. Whether you are a college basketball fan or not, there are a handful of lessons to be learned from March Madness that you and your team can benefit from.  Think about your business—what’s important to you? No matter your company or industry, your customers, employees, and product or service most likely come to mind. For these elements to mesh cohesively, you need a team that works together just as well.  Below are three lessons we can each learn from and apply to our role within Workfront:  Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.It’s amazing how many times we go into something not fully prepared, thinking that if we just wing it, everything will turn out okay. College basketball is the same way—just because you are a 1-see

Crank it up to ELEVEN! 11 steps to make managing your Workfront users easierStruggling to get your users to log in to Adobe Workfront? Spending all your time managing user access? Searching for answers to users' Workfront questions?The primary goal is to get users into the system, provide them with appropriate access to their work, and grant the right permissions to perform that work.Let’s get this party started! It’s not a party until the people show up, so how do we get them in to Workfront? There are a few ways to add users, so we’ve got lots of options!1) If you are getting started with just a few users, adding them individually might be the easiest. Our step-by-step Adding Users learning path will walk you through the entire process.2) For bigger groups, departments or bulk new hires, avoid adding them one-by-one and instead check out the steps to Import Users via an import file. 3) Staying on top of new additions and deactivating emplo

To highlight and share key data across the organization, from team members to executives, we encourage you to take advantage of three key report features — conditional formatting, running reports with the access rights of another user and automatic report deliveries. As you continue to build on your reporting knowledge, these will be a great addition to your skillset. Let’s start with conditional formatting.  Conditional FormattingCharts are not the only way to tell a story or surface important data. Conditional formatting can be applied to single cells or entire rows so that when column rules are met, specific information pops out. Formatting options include text color, text format, text alignment, background color, icons and custom text. To learn how to add column rules to your reports, read through the article, Use Conditional Formatting in Views.Run a Report with the Access Rights of Another UserBy default, users can only see objects in a report that they have permissions

Welcome to 2021!   Did you know the tradition of celebrating the new year and making resolutions has been around for about 4,000 years? It’s true! It first caught on with the ancient Babylonians who made promises to earn favor of the gods.  Babylon aside, did you make any resolutions this year? Most of us typically set personal resolutions, maybe to exercise more or eat healthier foods. Coming out of 2020, I imagine many of our resolutions have changed. I’ve heard people resolve to ‘relearn social cues after a year at home’ or ‘do so much yoga that it actually justifies wearing yoga pants 24/7’ or ‘actually put on a full outfit for Zoom calls’. Sadly, I think all of these apply to me! So you’ve made personal resolutions, but have you made any New Year’s resolutions for work? If you haven’t yet put pen to paper for 2021 work aspirations, we have one for you! Make a plan for getting the very most out of Workfront by migrating your team and organization to the ne

So you want to get started with Agile. This is no surprise as companies all over the world look to adopt Agile work practices to improve performance and accelerate delivery. After all, there is growing evidence of potentially substantial gains in utilizing an Agile-based operational model. Research from McKinsey indicates that 93% of business units that had fully adopted an agile model before the COVID-19 crisis outperformed units that had not. Given the prospect of such competitive advantage, leaders and people managers such as yourself have been tasked with adopting Agile practices. So by now you’ve read about Agile, studied dozens of blog posts and watched hours of video – but how do you get started? Don’t worry. We got you. You can totally do this. We’ll describe a couple of easy ways to get started. First... Keep in mind the Agile mindset, which re

The Superhero Activity is a unique and interactive way to introduce users to Workfront. The project itself consists of a project with a series of tasks that guide users to find superhero themed documents and objects that have been hidden in the system. During this activity, your team will acquaint themselves with Workfront objects such as projects, tasks, assignments, statuses and so much more as they learn Workfront by solving problems and becoming a Workfront superhero! The attached kit provides instructions and all documents needed for the activity to run smoothly.To guarantee your activity is as fun and effective as possible, we encourage a few practice rounds with new team members, some incentives, and even dressing up, to add a little more flair to an already exciting day!Superhero Activity KitThe superhero activity kit contains:A setup guideKick-start XML fileThree digital assets to be used in the activity Emergency SceneSuperhero GuideSuperhero HeadquartersPrintable Workfront S

Anthony Imgrund is a Project Manager at Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB), one of the biggest advertising agencies in the world. He’s been with the company for 13 years and is also the System Admin for Workfront, where he spends about 75% of this time managing the agency’s global instance of Workfront. He also works on FCB’s SharePoint 2013 environment and a custom tool for the New Business team. Anthony lives in NYC, and loves theater and music. He recently presented on resource management in a Workfront Virtual User Group for creative agencies. Read on to see how this customer has found some unique ways to work around and with existing functionality in Workfront. How FCB is using Workfront FCB has one global instance of Workfront, which Anthony says makes his job easier. But they do have 16 different agencies and business units currently in the tool, so they rely heavily on Workfront’s group functionality to separate those business units out.  With groups, you can have

Workfront reports don’t just have to be a simple list with standard views, filters and groupings — they can be dynamic visuals used to tell a story, compare data, paint a clear picture of how work is getting done across the organization and keep the targeted audience engaged. There are six different types of charts in Workfront — bar, column, line, pie, bubble and gauge. Review the Resources on Workfront One In order to apply a chart to your Workfront report, you must first add a grouping. For a quick refresher on report groupings, click here. Once a grouping has been applied, you can begin to create and customize basic or 3D charts to highlight data trends or patterns in an attractive and easily digestible way. And if you want to have the colors match your company’s style guide - no problem - enter in the appropriate RGB code. To learn more about adding charts, review the article, Add a chart to a report, and watch the short, 6-minute video, Create charts with reports, on Wo

Did you know? You can set how reports display on a dashboard within the report settings. Let's walk through how this works.  Each report has four settings that affect how the report displays on a dashboard: Run this report with the Access Rights of:When the Report loads, show the:When the report loads on a dashboard, show: <number> itemsShow Prompts in Dashboards Change these settings on an existing report from Report Actions, then Edit. Once you’re in the report builder, click Report Settings in the top-right corner.  You also can establish these settings when creating a new report. The first section — Report Options — contains three of the four settings. 1. The first setting is “Run this report with the Access Rights of.” With this feature, all users — regardless of their access level or permission level on items inside the report — see the same results in the report as the user designated in this field.   For example, the repo

A few weeks ago at dinner, after my daughter’s second day of in-person school, she said to me, “My art teacher asked us what our parents’ bets were for how long we would attend in-person before moving back to eLearning.” Shortly after that, her math teacher gave all the students their workbooks for the whole semester, just in case. That’s a lot of uncertainty for the first week of school!    It might feel difficult to see the bright spots and the success right now. It helps to anchor ourselves to a North Star: something to keep us pointed in the right direction. At Workfront, we’re passionate about a concept called the Commander’s Intent.   A Commander’s Intent is a statement that includes the most important thing you can do, your desired outcomes, and your constraints. It is meant to be that North star to provide orientation when things get uncertain - which we’re all familiar with in 2020!   Commander’s Intent In my personal life, my Commander’s Intent might be,

To wrap up the 3-part series on Administrator Essentials, this week’s blog focuses on scale — the desirable outcome for peak optimization. Scalability does not necessarily refer to adding resources or people, it’s about the presence of clear, shared goals across multiple teams and departments with established communication channels and metrics. Detailed below are four recommended action items you should consider to get out of the day-to-day run activities and instead, put the focus on strategic work.   GET TOP TO BOTTOM BUY-IN In order to ensure that everyone is engaged, involved, and accepting of this company-wide strategy, you must get buy-in from all parties. This means collaborating across teams, departments and regions so that all processes and key performance indicators (KPIs) are accounted for. Communication should happen early and often so utilize the Announcement Center to send out personalized messages and schedule a meeting with everyone involved to talk st

No need to navigate away, include a webpage on your Workfront dashboard.  Are there numbers you pull from another system to include in Workfront custom forms? Do you want to make a Workfront request queue more accessible? Do your users regularly access a web-based document management system or wiki that contains needed project information? Including URLs on a dashboard allows your users to navigate quickly and easily to live websites without leaving Workfront. Before you jump into the setup, there are two conditions that must be met—the URL is encrypted (https) and the website must allow embedding as an iframe. You may be asking, what is an iframe?       “An iframe (short for inline frame) is an HTML element that allows an external webpage to be embedded in an HTML document. Unlike traditional frames, which were used to create the structure of a webpage, iframes can be inserted anywhere within a webpage layout

Within your projects, each of your tasks have a Planned Start Date as well as a Planned Completion/Due Date. Typically these dates could change for multiple reasons such as dependencies, delays, or changes in prioritization. As you change dates in your project plan, you might want to understand how your current project plan compares to the plan, let’s say a week or two ago. That’s where baselines come in. Baselines are a snapshot of your project plan and key pieces of information. These snapshots will allow you to compare information from the current plan, to the original plan, or any other point in time, to identify problem tasks, scope creep, and other trends over time. See more on baselines here.  Calculating ‘Slippage’ is a way you can see how each individual task compares to the original Project plan. This requires you to capture at least one baseline for a project. The specific baseline you want to compare your current project to should be marked as the “Default Baselin

The end of the year is quickly approaching, which means it’s about time to write down the same New Year's resolutions we use every year—eat healthier, exercise more, and save money.  Although personal goals may remain the same, the way work gets done is constantly changing. According to the Workfront State of Work 2020, people and teams are under constant pressure to work faster and more efficiently. Workfront is designed to help you and your team master modern work, so consider the following ideas to elevate your team’s work productivity within the tool. 1) Designate a Workfront champion.  This person is your go-to for all things Workfront. For most system administrators, the role of Workfront champion is automatically assumed, simply based on access level. However, every organization has someone who’s an early adopter, someone who knows every keyboard shortcut, or someone who can navigate the system without even looking. This is the ideal user to ch

Workfront offers numerous features and functions to help organizations transition from ad-hoc to strategic work management. It is simple to get started, simple to quickly progress and scale and simple to measure and show value in your work. Knowing where to start, how to identify and streamline current processes, and ensuring all users are on the same page are some of the challenges many system administrators face. The Setup area is where the foundational design of the system is built, but during implementation this part is often handled by a Workfront expert.  To provide you with the building blocks for success, this week will kickoff a Workfront is Simple series starting with the most important aspect — people. Below, user management best practices are broken down by license types, access levels and user organization. LICENSE TYPES License types — Plan, Work, Review, Request and External — are the first level of access on a system level. They define what a user can or can

Greetings! My name is Heather Foeh and I lead the Customer Marketing team at Adobe Workfront. If you have ever read a success story about a fellow customer, attended a User Group, received our customer newsletter, and more, that is all the work of our team. Our goal is to shine a light on our customers’ success while also making sure you’re communicated with in a timely manner. A few weeks ago, Adobe Workfront proudly celebrated YOU, our customers, in our 11th annual Lion Awards. The Lion Awards honor customers who are achieving positive, measurable results as they transform work management within their organization. This year was a bit different, not just because we were virtual–we've done that before!–but because we held the awards in tandem with the Adobe Experience Maker Awards.  The Experience Maker Awards aim to celebrate the exceptional experiences Adobe customers are creating through Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, and we were honored to be part of the joint ce

Workfront’s out-of-the-box integrations sync with today’s top enterprise tools and systems, so your team can continue to work with focus, efficiency, and productivity. As most, if not all of you, use email every day, this week’s blog details the benefits of integrating Microsoft Outlook with Workfront to help you master modern work.  Setting up the Outlook integration with Workfront can be quick and easy if you have everything you need. To get you started, watch the short video below. Focus With so many different ways to communicate with colleagues, you may find yourself switching between platforms or applications to share updates and ask questions. To streamline communication and remain concentrated on the work at hand, the Microsoft Outlook integration allows you to reply to comments in Workfront without leaving your inbox. You can even post an email as an update to an ongoing task or project. To learn more, refer to the knowledge base article,&nbsp

Are you taking the time to highlight Workfront with the decision makers in your organization, at least twice a year? Establishing a regular rhythm of business reviews helps ensure that leadership is well informed of the positive impact Workfront has made to the challenges they set out to overcome. This is your moment to share compelling information, position yourself as the leader of managing how work gets done across the business and to provide an opportunity for professional growth or promotion.  This week’s blog will detail six essential elements of effectively communicating the value modern work management brings with leadership, along with a list of recommended actions to guide the conversation. IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE Your direct leadership should be involved, up to your executive sponsor. If the Workfront technology happens to be “owned” by another group, those decision makers should be involved, as well. Finally, whenever possible, include those involved in identif

Everyone knows the excitement, anticipation and anxiety you experience on your first day at a new job. Through project templates and reports in Workfront, several teams execute on a series of tasks that ensure our new hires have a smooth transition and an onboarding experience they will never forget. As soon as a candidate accepts a job offer, a New Hire Checklist project is kicked off. Tasks such as their seating assignment, desk setup, access badge, parking access, software and hardware setup, systems access, and and welcome box shipment are on the list. It also includes tasks specific to their department. On day 1, the new employee is assigned a New Hire Onboarding project. This project includes everything a new employee needs to know and do in their first 2 weeks on the job. This includes benefits paperwork, software training, profile setup and of course banking information (so they can get paid).Take a look:Of course, all good things come to an end. Workfront has made it

Do you ever feel like you spend so much time responding to ad hoc requests, it’s impossible to come up for air to think strategically about longer initiatives? You aren't alone. I’ve heard this referred to as the “tactic treadmill.” It feels impossible to catch up, let alone get ahead, because there's always something urgent that needs your attention. The good news? When teams are empowered to evolve from simply responding to requests, the work they manage can also evolve to be more proactive and strategic in nature. Gartner defines work management as "a set of software products and services that apply workflow structure to the movement of information as well as the interaction of business processes and human worker processes that generate the information.” In other words, work management gives meaningful structure to the work. It’s an ecosystem where the people, process, technology and data are brought together into a framework specific to your business objectives.&nbsp