Updating issues/access to edit - looking for suggestions

[CherylLu]

I would appreciate any suggestions here. I am looking at creating "Client Profiles" in Workfront for 100+ clients. This would be a form, customized for each client containing many details of the clients benefits package. These would be updated 1-2 times a year by our internal staff who are in Workfront as Workers. 
My thought was to leave these as Issues, and build a report for easy viewing of one or all of them. That works, however with Worker access, they can't update within the report. I'm afraid, after a year or more of project requests, it will be hard to find these issues, to update them in the requests page, since we can't create custom filters in the Requests area. One more caviat is that clients get moved from one worker to another, so it may not be the same person updating each year. I'm ok converting these each to projects, but I haven't found a solution that makes that any easier. 

I'm also trying to avoid changing anyone's overall workfront access just for the purposes of this report. 
Any thoughts? TIA!

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @CherylLu,

This "periodic updates" usecase reminds me of our Spiral Adoption post (many years ago), so I invite you to consider our Excel Updater solution: you could periodically circulate an appropriate spreadsheet for new info, then load (via a single authorized user account...I'm thinking "yours") to update Workfront with those latest and greatest details. Happy to chat further at doug.denhoed@atappstore.com.

Regards,

Doug

[Kurt_Jones]

Could you create a project called "Client List" and have each task be a client.  You could create a unique view in that project with all the custom fields to be updated.  I believe a work license should be able to update fields in the plan based on the sharing.  It would be one place for everything without change in access level.  From there you can build reporting as you need.

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Hi, if you can't give them Plan access to edit the form fields from a report, I guess you could still give them report access to at least compile the requests/issues in one place so they can click the issue name for each to go to it and edit the custom form fields from there... do you have an existing field that is on all of them to be able to pull what you have that needs updating to pull them together?

Regarding it changing hands, is it the same set of people that would be updating them and you could give report access to all of them and group by client or whatever the identifying field is that they would use, not necessarily who is assigned to it at the time?

[skyehansen]

Workers have the ability to update (at least inline editing) within a report as long as they have the right access (contribute or manage, with no additional customizations restricting editing of custom form) to the issues that they are trying to report. Can you let us know what sort of permissions your worker users have by clicking to see sharing for one of the sample issues? 

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Ah good to know, I thought Workers can't have manage report access? I was curious and went to my license settings and 'Edit' is greyed out for Workers for reports - I guess that's for editing the report itself, not for filling in a report?

[skyehansen]

You got it.

OP wanted “update WITHIN the report.” This is different from “edit report” (which yes… Work licensed users can’t do).

All my built workflows leverage the ability of the user to inline edit elements of the object on the report as a way to work around having to open the object itself. It’s extremely common for our users to confuse report editing for inline editing so we always start the troubleshooting as I did in my response above.

[CherylLu]

I've built it out as you suggested @Madalyn_Destafney. I've got one report that just pulls in the issue names plus a couple fields, so they can easily find the request if needed. If it's the same person who submitted it, they can inline edit but if it's a different person, they'll need to ask me to change the name of the owner to allow them edit access. Thanks for all the help and conversation!