Have you seen the new project creation and template attachment updates planned for 21.4 release in Preview?

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi All,

I wanted to draw special attention to the updates planned for the 21.4 release in the experience of creating projects from templates and attaching templates to projects in New Workfront Experience. We have updated the experience to allow you:

• preview key information about the template before deciding if that's the one you want to use
• quickly access the favourited templates without the need to scroll through all the templates in the systems you have access to
• for the new project from template flow, see layout template configuration applied to that screen as well similar to edit project, project details pages

You can find more documentation about the functionality on our help site: Attach a template to a project, Create a project using a template and in the release notes.

In order to have smooth transition from the current experience to the new one in terms of having quick access to the favourite templates, we would recommend favouriting the most commonly used templates in production environment so that once the functionality is available you can continue seeing those in the dropdown for the new project creation. But don't worry, even if you/your users don't do that prior to the release the new search and preview template screen will make it super easy to find and favourite templates.

Please review this functionality in Preview and let us know if you have any questions/comments.

Kind regards,

Anna Asatryan,

Product Manager

[Femke_Crijns]

Hi @Anna Asatryan‚,

I love this idea of marking templates as favorites due to the long list of available templates. I also like the preview of the template with the basic information on it.

I hope that this new appearance will also be implemented in the conversion process, e.g. 'Convert a request to a Project from Template'.

Kind regards,

Femke Crijns

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi @Femke Crijns‚ ,

Thank you for your feedback!

Converting a request from template is something we are going to work on next!

[nryan2]

I like where you are going with the template preview but it is disappointing in the current iteration. The information shown in the preview does not distinguish one template from another in our use case. (Our templates all have the same top level task and the same custom forms attached). It would be more useful to have a description field or be customizable.

Thanks,

Nancy

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you for the feedback Nancy! We will be definitely collecting feedback for future enhancements.

Wondering though, what's the difference between the templates except for the description? Are the number of tasks, duration, planned hours, owner identical? I understand that a template user might know all this by heart but if they use the template frequently some of these key components can be something they can orient by.

Thank you in advance for the additional information.

[nryan2]

Hi Anna,

Number of Tasks, Duration, Planned Hours, and Owner vary by template but are not enough to distinguish differences between the templates in order to select one.

Key information that would be helpful to select a template is being able to see if the template includes specific task trees (e.g. does the template have Location Photography tasks, or Studio Photography, does it include Premedia, or Printing?), if these were shown under "Top Level Tasks" , that would be great but I only see the highest level Parent Task which encompasses the entire project from start to finish and is the same on all of our templates.

Custom Fields: We have many custom fields on a project and some of them could be used to distinguish the difference in the template.

Other distinguishing items: Milestone Path, Program.

Regards,

Nancy

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you for the additional information Nancy! For the first iteration of this feature we wanted to keep the things simple but if we continue getting feedback that the information isn't enough we will see if we can introduce more information.

Thank you again for taking the time to provide details.

[RandyRoberts]

I don't think you need MORE information, just DIFFERENT information.

[J_Hobbs]

@Anna Asatryan‚

I'm looking forward to seeing this feature once we are able to convert an ISSUE into a project and then select a template.

Any idea of a launch date for that missing piece?

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi Jonathan,

The conversion through a template workflow is currently targeted for the next release, i.e. 22.1. We will do our best to get it to preview environments as soon as it's ready.

Thank you for your patience!

[satchell_mr]

Hi @Anna Asatryan‚ - super happy to see this additional favoriting functionality! Definitely helps remove some noise when scrolling through a large list of templates.

We're seeing a minor bug in which the warning message doesn't display alerting a user that they're over their 40 maximum favorites when you over-allocate favorites in this new "Template Preview" window . I'll tag you in a support ticket I've just opened detailing the issue.

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you Satchell!

I am glad that the functionality will help eliminate the frustration of finding the right template.

For the bug, I am glad to say that it's been fixed internally and should be in production with the release.

[RandyRoberts]

When we can hide the New Project choice and force template use, I'll be happy. And maybe hide the MS Project Import, it's just in the way for the vast majority who will never use it.

[Femke_Crijns]

Yes, I would also encourage this idea of hiding the New Project option to force template use.

Great suggestion!

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi Randy, Femke,

Thank you for providing the feedback, we weren't able to get to this due to other priorities but we might revisit this in the future. I wish I could provide better news here.

[skyehansen]

I like the new functionality. I will definitely be looking in preview over the next couple of months to see it made available to those converting a request to a project.

I'd love to see some functionality added to layout templates to that we can configure what shows up in the "template information" section.

Thanks Anna! Great job.

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you for the feedback Skye! We will take into account the feedback for the future improvements.

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you Skye!

[ChrisBudgen]

We found one - for us - major issue (ticket with Support pending): if you have custom forms on the templates to which the user creating the project from the template has no access to (because they will be used by another user along the process), the project cannot be created anymore. This worked well before this release and due to this bug, a big portion of our over 1k plan/work users were blocked last week :-(

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi Chris,

I apologise for the problems we have caused with that workflow. The ticket is with the development team, the fix is in place, and after the testing round it will be included in this week's patch.

[J_Hobbs]

HI @Anna Asatryan‚

Thanks for getting this fix pushed this week with the patch. Can you confirm exactly what this fix will correct and what other fixes will be pushed in this patch (if any)?

Also when do you expect the patch to go live?

Thank you. 🎃