System Admin Essentials: Finding Efficiencies in Workfront with Automation (April 19, 2023)

[KristinFarwell]

As an Adobe Workfront System Admin, do you find yourself completing maintenance tasks over and over – deleting templates that aren't being used, updating users' license types, etc. It’s important to keep your instance clean, but there must be a better way.

In this on-demand webinar, originally broadcast on April 19, 2023, Monique Evans (@MoniqueEvans), Systems Operations Manager at Stanley Black & Decker, and Ewan Hruska (@EwanHr), Senior Customer Success Architect at Workfront (and a former customer), shared their “good, better and best” tips - from simple reports to Fusion scenarios - to address inefficiencies.

Specifically:

• Repetitive processes that can bog Admins down
• New and improved Fusion templates for common scenarios
• How Monique Evans from Stanley Black & Decker has iterated and updated her workflow processes over time
• And more!

You can view the recording here and a copy of the slides is attached. Have questions for our speakers? Tag them in a comment below.

[ewanh]

There was a question in the chat for the webinar around App Connectors.  Here is the list:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/workfront/using/adobe-workfront-fusion/fusion-apps-and-modul...

Please note that we can also connect to just about anything that has an Open API and common authentication mechanism like oAuth2 using what we call Universal connectors (HTTP, Email, SFTP, etc..).  You can sometimes be limited by firewalls for on premise applications and what is surfaced in the connected applications API so do your research. 

A list of additional resource links will be provided with the session deck in the appendix.

[NicholeVargas]

Have follow-up questions from today's webinar or want to dig deeper into specific areas of automation or cleanup? Join webinar hosts, Ewan Hruska and Monique Evans for a 1-hour open Q&A session on Thursday, April 27 at 10:30am MT. Come with your questions!
Register here.

[MoniqueEvans]

For anyone wishing to take their template clean up even further, I highly recommend reading this post from @RandyRoberts.

For those trying to clean up their templates, I have some goodies for you 

There is so much text-mode goodness in this one and shows how to make a template report instead of a project report grouped by templates.

[Lyndsy-Denk]

Yessss, when I found the tips from @RandyRoberts it made my quarter(ly audit).

[MoniqueEvans]

Randy truly unlocked the cheat code with these!!

[MoniqueEvans]

A question was asked about attaching an InDesign template to Workfront Project Templates.

I haven't done this with InDesign files, but we add other files to our Project templates, such as our shot list spreadsheet for photography and a checklist for packaging graphics.

It's very simple to do, you upload the asset to the Documents section of the specific template. If you can spare an extra license, I would recommend creating a generic Admin account and using that to upload the files, because if a person moves to another role or is deactivated the document will show as being uploaded by them every time a project is created using the template.

[MoniqueEvans]

One automation topic we didn't discuss is Kick-Starts. I'll be the first to admit, kick-starts are very tricky but can be extremely helpful for adding in a lot of data in bulk. Just remember that kick-starts can only be used for creating new objects and not updating existing ones. Here's the documentation on how to do a kick-start

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Thanks @MoniqueEvans,

For those who would like to update existing objects in a Kick-Start fashion, I invite you to consider our Excel Updater solution, which does support updates (and inserts).

Regards,

Doug 

[AndrewKo]

Another great tool for creating and updating records in bulk is Postman. As long as you have knowledge of Workfront's APIs and how to create and manipulate JSON data structures, Postman is a quick and efficient way to make API calls to your Workfront environment.

[MoniqueEvans]

Great call out!! API calls via Postman is a great solution for anyone without Fusion or even if you have Fusion and don't want to "waste" a scenario.