Hello, everyone! It was a thrill to be joined by so many customers during our first Experience League Live webinar Oct. 26th. Ben Robbins, Betsey West, and AT&T’s Jamie Smith shared their expertise about the new Workfront Home experience. If you were with us, thank you for attending!
Below are the questions from the Q&A that we didn’t cover or ran out of time for during the webinar. We hope you find answers to questions you might still have here and that you’ll let us know about any further questions or comments. If you don’t see your question here, check back again within the next couple of days.
Widgets
Q: Are we able to add custom columns within the widgets to show the most relevant thing for our work?
Yes. This is on the short-term roadmap.
Q: For the My Work widget, do you plan to improve how late work can be visualized?
Yes. We are currently working on this as well.
Q: Is there a plan to add a widget dealing with proof status?
Yes. A coordinator widget was in the works but has since been put on hold.
Q: Are there plans to put the filters at the top of the page so they can update all the widgets, so we don’t have to go into each widget?
Not currently, but we do like the idea of bringing this back once we can make it work for most.
Q: When can we incorporate custom form fields in our widget views/groupings?
This will be coming in another release in 2024.
Q: Are there plans to add the ability to sort the Awaiting my Approval widget by Due Date Right now, it appears to be by Date Created.
Hmm, no. But this is great feedback. If more of the community agrees with this feedback, please let us know.
Admin control
Q: Are there any plans for admins to be able to lock essential widgets in place?
It will depend on how we define the word “lock”. Our first release will make it so that widgets added by an admin will not be able to be removed by the end user.
To-do widget
Q: I believe the To-do widget is available only for people with access levels that allow them to create tasks—is this correct? So many people asked about that when new Home came out.
Yes.
Q: In the To-do widget, can you do anything other than set a date? Like add an update or document like you can do in Project related tasks?
Not currently. We wanted to keep that widget as simple as possible. We do have plans to optimize though and will consider this feedback.
Q: Are there plans to add the ability to make something on the To-do widget into an actual task? Often off-project work becomes important to track and log time to in the way one can with tasks.
Not currently, but this great feedback we’ve heard before. It’s just not the highest priority at the moment.
Q: Are there plans to add the ability to turn off time logging for the To-do widget? We don't want people logging time to invisible projects.
Time cannot be logged to the To-Do widget currently.
Q: How does the To-do widget work? Where is it stored and where does it come from? / Q: The personal tasks aren't associated to any specific project. The old Home page included this feature; are there plans to bring it back?
To-Do's are pared down personal tasks attached to a project that the system creates for them, so they can still be accessed via legacy methods, such as reports.
Filters
Q: Are there plans to make it possible for admins to set default filters on particular widgets (in addition to visibility)?
Yes. This should be coming with the Admin Controls release as part of 24.1.
Q: Will we be able to save applied filters on the new Home? Currently we must re-select them every time we log in.
Yes.
Q: Can custom reports or dashboards become widgets on the Home page?
We plan to do this in 2024 as we roll out the new reporting service.
Q: When I tried the new Home experience, I did not see a way to filter tasks by commit date and I rely heavily on that. Is that function still there and I missed it?
Which filter were you using? More information would be helpful.
Q: Will there be filters for the Team widget? Our Team tasks are not available with Filters so filters like Ready, Not Ready, etc.
Yes. We are incorporating this feedback into a series of other user experience enhancements that should be rolling out early next year 2024.
Q: Will we be able to select AND/OR on stacked filters?
This is not currently on the roadmap, but we appreciate the question.
Q: Home Page filters seem to have disappeared; will they be coming back?
The home filters continued to cause more frustration for users than it helped as many customers did not want to apply the same filter across each widget, since each widget can serve a specific need. There are no plans currently.
Q: Do you plan to add the ability to filter mentions?
As we bring in our new Unified Commenting Stream, we will have several capabilities that our current update stream does not support. Once we build a widget backed by the new commenting stream, widgets will inherit many of those features, included search and sort for comments.
Delegating
Q: How about delegating Proof approvals?
We have no current plans for proof delegation, but we will look at this after we release the new unified approval system.
Q: Is it on roadmap to be able to be more specific in delegations? We never use it because want to be able to delete by group or portfolio, etc., not ALL tasks for 1 person to go to another. / Q: If I have 40 hours of work, how can I delegate to one person who also has 40 hours of work already?
We’re aware of the need for more refined delegation controls and better handling of task assignments for resources at capacity. While these improvements are not on our immediate roadmap, they are on our radar for potential future updates.
Calendar
Q: Are there plans for an ability to add calendar events to resourcing? This would be useful. / Q: Are you bringing back calendar view? Everyone on my team that are assigned tasks relied on that calendar.
As we grow to support Workfront’s project Maestro, we’ll begin to add new calendar views, starting with a project timeline view.
Misc
Q: Will Workfront be sharing a how-to training presentation so we can train our teams on the new Home?
- We have recently added a new Home experience tutorial on Experience League that goes over how remove, add, and rearrange widgets in the Home area. It also provides a few examples of what widgets to add based on your role or functions within Workfront.
- We continue to discuss further tutorials we can add as the new Home experience continues to expand
Q: Our issue with the new Home is shared tasks. When one person marks it 100% as they complete their part of the task, it completes it for both people and moves the project forward to the next task before it is ready. Could you comment on this?
In multi-user assignments, you can click Done with my part.
Q: Is there a way to scroll work list/approvals instead of paging through them? I have 103 approvals in my list. Current Home allows me to scroll through them. In new Home, I must select different pages, which is very slow and difficult. Are there plans to make this easier?
As we bring in our new Unified Commenting Stream, we will have several capabilities that our current update stream does not support. Once we build a widget backed by the new commenting stream, widgets will inherit many of those features, included search and sort for comments.
Q: Can external users have a Home page, or only users in the Workfront system?
We are expanding the personas that Home serves. We have a free license type called ‘contributor’ in the new pricing and packaging model. External users are contributors under the new model. Contributors will have a Home page option, while external users on the legacy package will not.
Q: Are there plans to add new Home templates to Blueprints?
This is great feedback and we’ll look into this possibility.
Q: Are there plans to add a manager view for those of us who don't own projects?
We have goals of adding reports and a project timeline view (Maestro calendar) as widgets, which will help support Home use cases for managers and executives.
Q: We love the Quick Actions; are there plans to make it available in more places? We want to see it everywhere.
That is great feedback that we continue to receive. We have no plans at this time but will continue to investigate ways to do it.
Q: Will we be able to delete specific mentions?
Not currently, but we are contemplating adding mark seen/unseen sometime next year. Thanks for your question!
Q: New Home is a huge improvement, but it is slow to load. Is there anything being done to address that?
We are constantly working on the performance by improving the other areas of Workfront that act as the source views for each of the widgets supported on the canvas. We’ve set benchmarks and will also prevent any advancements that makes the Home slower than it is today.
Q: Are there any plans to integrate AI capabilities into Workfront?
Yes, we are working on those now and will announce them within the next few months.
Q: Are there plans to add the ability for admins to limit view permissions to Request Queue's Queue Topics?
We don't have plans to invest in enhancing the current request queue functionality, but there are plans to work on the work intake in general, so we will take this into account then.
Q: Workfront's done a good job with in-app adoption for many new features, but are there any plans to expand the options of integrating our Digital Adoption Platforms provider to Workfront, not Jumpseat?
This isn’t currently on the roadmap, but thank you for the question.
Q: Has Workfront moved to a marketing tool instead of a project management tool?
Workfront capabilities are general and flexible enough to serve horizontal needs. Many of our customers are marketers, which influences our talking points, but the way users take a marketing campaign has many parallels to how many IT teams would take an initiative and track that workflow across stakeholders and adjacent teams.
Q: Are there plans to add the ability to allow/not allow personal tasks to appear in Balancer? Personal tasks in Balancer would allow folks to block time out for meetings and stuff not associated with a specific project.
We don’t have plans to allow personal tasks in Workload Balancer on our roadmap.
Q: Do you have a recommended path for how best to use Workfront and/or the new Home screen? We struggle to get our users to see the benefits of Workfront which makes adoption very challenging.
We suggest that you have your employees leverage the new Home screen to get immediate views into the projects, tasks, issues, and approvals. That screen is a central destination for all they need to get done in Workfront. You might also consider creating Workfront Fusion scenarios for their every-day work. Eliminating manual processes is a great way to demonstrate the value of Workfront.
