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

[Anna_Asatryan]

The problems that will be fixed is

1. Custom forms that are not visible to the user won't get on the way of them creating a project from the template.
2. Users will be able to search and preview the templates with system wide visibility.

The patch is planned to go out this Thursday!

Thank you for your patience!

[KRISTINEPU]

Hello,

If you favorite a template, does it become a favorite for that single user or all users in the organization? Thanks

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi Kristine,

Sorry for the delay in replying to you.

Favouriting applies only to the currently logged in user, not for the whole organisation.

Let me know if you have any additional questions.

[skyehansen]

hi @Anna Asatryan‚ thanks so much for making the favorited templates available in request conversion for release 22.1. I'll be testing this out over the next few days but very excited to talk to my users about this.

I'm less excited about the new "Convert to a blank project" for two reasons:

1) I can't really trust users to know what a blank project is. A certain number of them assume any new project is "blank".

2) I feel like so many customers WANT their users to use templates that making this option "first" or easier to get to, really doesn't help. It would have been nice to hide this at the bottom of the list (e.g. here's a list of templates and at the bottom, the "I have no template" option) or better still, if you can give the system admins the ability to hide the line option for blank project I know at least a couple of us would be thankful.

That said, I am looking forward to 22.1.

[Anna_Asatryan]

HI Skye,

Thanks a lot for your feedback and readiness to test the functionality prior to the release. That does help us to prevent any unforeseen problems.

For the blank project option: I am hearing more and more of similar feedback. Since we are going to update the experience of converting to blank project as well, I will review the possibility of introducing the ability to control the visibility of it.

I might reach out to you for additional information around that topic.

[Heather_Kulbacki]

Agree with Skye on the "Convert to blank project." We wouldn't want our project managers using this. We have a "No Tasks" template which allows them more customization of the tasks they need, but includes the custom forms that all our projects need in order to pull into various reports.

[Femke_Crijns]

I agree with Heather and Skye. We have the same setup as described by Heather.

We do not want projects without a template in our system.

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you Heather.

Does this apply to the New Project creation when created directly from the projects area?

[Heather_Kulbacki]

Yes, project managers can select our "No Tasks" template either from the New Project creation area or when converting an issue to a project.

Ideally we only want them using a template to ensure

1. all projects have the necessary forms attached (this is crucial to accurate reporting)
2. fields that we have filled in at the template level carry over to all projects (this is a big timesaver for PMs as they don't have to manually fill in those fields)

[ChrisBudgen]

Same for us. We have a "Generic" template that includes all the recommended settings as well as necessary custom forms. Currently, to ensure compliance, we use Fusion to alert the local admin as well as the users themselves in case they have created a project w/o using either a full or a generic template.

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you Heather, Chris!

Do you have a use case where the ability to control if users can create blank projects should be separate for direct project creation vs conversion workflows?

[Heather_Kulbacki]

For us, no, no matter how a project is being created users should ALWAYS use a template. All of our various groups have templates, even if that template has no tasks, it still has other data that is needed to ensure accurate reporting.

[ChrisBudgen]

Neither for us. Every project should always use a template.

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you for the information!

[RandyRoberts]

Having a favourites option for templates is useless for us unless the admins can set the favourites. That way we can put the templates they need right in front of them.

I get that Workfront wants to empower everyone but the reality is when it's left to the everyday users with no oversight, it becomes a jumbled mess. Their job is to get work done, not to organize and manage Workfront.

[Anna_Asatryan]

I totally understand your point, Randy. At this point, unfortunately, there is no other way to add items to favorites. We did our best to make the experiencing of favoriting the templates while converting the issues or creating projects as easy as possible, so that users don't have to do a lot of actions. We hope that will reduce the maintenance on the end user side.