New Commenting Beta experience

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi All,

We are excited to announce that we have enabled a new Commenting Beta experience in your Preview environments. The experience is aimed at providing better performance and enabling the delivery of modern commenting features and functionalities. It is available for the issue object only for now and will be gradually enabled for other Workfront objects and locations.

The toggle is planned to be made available in production with 23.2 release, so we invite you to test the new experience and share your valuable feedback. There is an in app feedback button when you switch to the Beta experience.

Some of the long awaited feature enhancements are available with this experience:

• Real time updates
• Editing comments
• Removing people from the threads
• Seeing comments separately from the system updates

We would also like to get your feedback on the usage of the following features that are located on the current and are not available in Beta commenting experience:

• Log Time
• Editing Custom form
• Updating task and issue status related data
  • Condition
  • Percent Complete
  • Planned Completion Date

We are considering changing the experience with these so would like to get your opinion.

We would really appreciate if you could provide your feedback by filling out this 5 minute survey  or jumping on a 30 minute call where we could discuss the feedback or more specific use cases in more details. 

Thank you in advance for your time and feedback!

[RandyRoberts]

um…

There is an errant "%20" in the URL

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thanks for highlighting the problem with the link, Randy. I have now corrected the link!

[RandyRoberts]

You're welcome. You can delete the post now that it's fixed if you want. Or maybe @jon_chen can do it.

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Editing updates and removing people from threads - two long overdue enhancements! So happy!

[RandyRoberts]

I like the separation of sys updates and messages as some of our projects last for 9 months or more. That makes for a really long list!

[_Manish_Singh]

I would like to suggest adding a search function to the system activity section, which would allow us to filter updates based on specific fields. For instance, if we wanted to view only updates related to issue condition, we could use the search function to filter for condition updates only. This would make it easier for us to find the information we need for audits.

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you all for your feedback and suggestions! We will continue reviewing the feedback and improving the commenting stream.

[Sheri_Whitten]

Looks great @Anna_Asatryan! Just those few changes already make the experience so much better  Now, how soon can we have it on everything, everywhere?? 

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you Sheri !

The plan it to gradually expand it to other objects: projects, tasks, documents, then other areas. Please stay tuned for the release updates! 

[Kiersten_K]

Looks great! Super excited to have this feature on everything down the road. 

[Anna_Asatryan]

Thank you Kiersten!

[Casey_Harward]

So far this is looking great! The file attachment feature is a huge plus! I have a few questions/notes in regards to functionality...

1. Will there be a searching feature added? If I'm looking for a comment through a long thread, it would be wonderful to be able to identify comments with specified strings/keywords.

2. Will the system Activities tab have the ability to make comment on as previously capable of doing?

3. When an attached image is added, is it posted based on resolution/pixel size?

4. Is there a limitation on types of media attached? 

5. It appears that the beta is only on the Issues object? I tried to navigate to a project and task Updates tab and only find it there...

6. If possible, it would be nice to have additional tabs for the other operations (log time, custom form, status, etc..) similar to how the System Activity is separated.

7. Will the emoji's be removed or are they just missing from the beta?

8. Will there be an option for admins to delete comments other than our own? 

9. Will there be an option to have larger font or even different font styles in the future?

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi Casey,

Thank you for the feedback and the questions. Please find the comments/answers below.

1. Will there be a searching feature added? If I'm looking for a comment through a long thread, it would be wonderful to be able to identify comments with specified strings/keywords. - This is something we plan to implement with this new commenting experience. Here is the list of the existing and upcoming features with their state and preliminary estimate of delivery.

2. Will the system Activities tab have the ability to make comment on as previously capable of doing? - We currently don't plan to bring back the ability to comment on system generated updates since our data shows it has a very low usage. Is that capability being used a lot on your side and if yes, could you please describe when you are doing it and why the regular comment isn't being used for it?

3. When an attached image is added, is it posted based on resolution/pixel size? - I am not sure if I fully understand the question, but we plan to introduce size limitation on the image you attach.

4. Is there a limitation on types of media attached? - We currently support only image attachments. Do you see a use case for supporting other media types in the updates vs document section? The attachments in the comments are targeted to provide visual context to the comment being added, but not to fully replace the documents section, so I would like to hear you use case if you think otherwise.

5. It appears that the beta is only on the Issues object? I tried to navigate to a project and task Updates tab and only find it there... - That's correct, it is currently available only on the issue object, but we plan to enable it for projects and tasks with the upcoming release.

6. If possible, it would be nice to have additional tabs for the other operations (log time, custom form, status, etc..) similar to how the System Activity is separated. - We do plan to re-introduce the log time pretty soon. As for the other actions, such as editing a custom form or a status, we are researching whether or not we should bring those over as is. We would love your feedback on why you would prefer to edit the form or update the status from the comments tab instead of details page or the header.

7. Will the emoji's be removed or are they just missing from the beta? - Emojis aren't available in the beta version but would definitely be brought back soon.

8. Will there be an option for admins to delete comments other than our own? - Admins can delete comments when logging in as other users, so we don't plan on introducing the ability of deleting those when they are logged in as themselves. 

9. Will there be an option to have larger font or even different font styles in the future? - It's not currently on the roadmap but if we see a lot of requests for that, we will consider introducing it.

Let me know if you have any questions.

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi All,

I hope you enjoy using the New Commenting Beta currently available on the issue object and soon to be available on the project, task and document objects (23.3 release). For those who did and provided the in-app feedback, really appreciate your time and input, we are reviewing those comments on daily basis.

We would like to present another UI update aimed at enhancing the visual presentation of the commenting stream. Before implementing this change, we want your feedback to ensure we're moving in the right direction. We would really appreciate if you go through this super quick usability test where you choose the UI that you think would work better for you. That will help drive our decision.

Thank you in advance!

Anna Asatryan, Sr. Product Manager, Adobe Workfront

@AnnaBalyan Sr. UX Designer, Adobe Workfront

[MarkTEvans]

Can we add back in the ability to update the commit date along with a status update? In the current beta setup, the user has to submit their update, and then go to the task overview to update the commit date. This is adding additional steps/training over current, non-beta, processes.

[Anna_Asatryan]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the feedback. With the new commenting experience, our goal is to keep it mainly for commenting purposes. We are currently analyzing what can be done to compensate for the absence of the status update components, but I we would like to avoid bringing it back into the commenting stream.

[AdamCnote]

The users my team supports are all very vocal about having this functionality back.  It means more clicks and time by keeping them separate; which ultimately results in users just not doing it at all.

[swoerle]

Hello, apologies if I am posting this in the wrong thread, if so, please let me know if there is a better thread out there.

We're seeing that if a user selects a task from the Task list and posts a comment using the "Task Summary" module, that comment will not appear in the "Updates" section of either the Projects level or Task level. If we turn OFF "New Commenting," then the comment will appear using the legacy commenting experience.

Is there a solve for this?