It depends on what the changes are but, in my experience, try to be ahead of the game as much as possible. Be sure to frequently check the release updates page to see what is coming out to be able to plan for the changes. In the preview environment, be sure to test and grab any key users to ensure it makes sense to them before sending a broader communication when the time is right. As an Admin, SOP’s may need to change and that is part of the job. My biggest piece of advice to make sure you plan for these changes in your day to day, because they are important and should not be overlooked. Communicate with leadership the importance on why this is adding work to your plate but it is valuable.

Release Updates: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/product-announcements/product-releases/pr...

The communication cookbook is also a great resource to see how others communicate changes.

Communication Cookbook: https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/workfront-blogs/introducing-the-end-user-communicat...

Overall, it is about finding the balance that works for your business and users and to meet them where they are, so they know they have support when changes occur. This helps to promote adoption even when changes are scary sometimes.

That's a great tip! Thanks for sharing!

Most people would scream when they read this but honestly I do most of my building and testing in Production. I know, I know. But for me, I have a Portfolio and Program that is hidden to everyone outside of admins so it's relatively hidden. I also only run Fusion scenarios one at a time for very specific projects and use myself and/or the specific ID so it's a very controlled enviornment. Also when it's ready to roll out I don't have to think about any promotion limitations or recreating the whole build.

I won’t be able to share an example but here is what I have found to be successful over the years.

1. Develop a simple roadmap to start. Be sure to include the following: Project Name, Notes about the project, Team(s) impacted, Level of Effort, Priority Tier, ROI Value, Projected Timing (could be business quarter(s), year(s), ect.), Status (Completed, In Progress, Not Started), Begin Date and Completed Date
2. Be sure to share somewhere, either in Workfront, Spreadsheet, SharePoint, etc. a view of the roadmap that end users can access any time. This provides full transparency to users that there are a lot of items on an Admin’s list to solve for and not everything can be a priority when a new idea or change comes in.
3. Share recaps to all users. In my experience, a quarterly update was the right balance. We would provide a simple recap with what projects were in the works, where we were at with projects and what was upcoming. Also, within this recap deck, we would remind people to check out the roadmaps or where to go to submit new ideas.
4. Be sure to level set expectations with a disclaimer on all communications when sharing roadmaps. For example, adding the following: Please note, roadmaps are subject to change based on business needs. Projects may be placed on hold to re-prioritize other needs.

Overall, these steps also helped to protect the Admin from burn out and provide clarity to leadership that ideas and changes are being captured but take time to implement.

Kurt I can always count on you to ask the advanced questions. This one is really tricky because sometimes Adobe is coming out with something that will solve all your problems but it may not launch for another year or more. So you have to decide do you do something on your end or wait. Over the years, I've had to do both. And typically I try to get in on the Beta so my team can help test items and help build the product before it launches. When we can't be involved that way, I stay in lock step with the product updates from Adobe to make sure nothing I'm building is going to make adoption to the new update harder whenever it comes. But I think the hardest part is getting Leadership to align with the speed of a third-party (aka Adobe). And for that I use a lot of the power of presusasion and realigning priorities.

@Stacey_Robertson There isn't a way to report on proof reviewers currently (although that is coming with the new document approvals experience), however, if you were to create a Proof Approval report that filters for Approver ID > Is Blank, that will pull in all proofs that don't have an approver. 

Oh, that's a great workaround! We're not big fans of the new unified approvals. It's SO different than how people learned to add people to proofs, that it just adds confusion.

Hey @JenniferMa10 ! Can you give a little more detail? Are you trying to build timelines or fill out custom forms? We love a good in-line edit!

You bet! I would love a way to create a custom timeline in Workfront similar to Smartsheet. I want to create my own custom fields within View and then edit them accordingly. Our team creates very elaborate project plans, and I just can't figure out a way to get Workfront to do this.

Thanks for that additional context! 

From what I can tell (I am not super-familiar with Smartsheet's capabilities, but I just watched a video to brush up a bit), you'll need to set up the custom form and fields on the back end. You could then set up a view to see the columns you want to see. This would allow you to edit within the project, itself, while creating the tasks.

Alternatively, if you set up all the tasks, you could pull them into a report with the fields you want to see and in-line edit there.

In my experience, I have found to stay connected with your users on a regular basis to stay ahead of issues or pitfalls. 

One easy way of doing this to start is to offer Open Door hours where users can come in freely to bring up concerns or ask questions. These organic conversations versus scheduled feedback conversations can get to real, meaningful discussions versus sitting in a group call.

If you are unable to hold open doors, anonymous surveys periodically work wonders. I have found the simpler the better with these. 1 - 2 minute surveys can be valuable to see how people are feeling to get ahead of panic or users not adopting the tool.

Unfortunately neither of us have used the external lookups yet but I did attend an incredible session earlier this month that had a lot of insightful information that may help you. If not, please post a separate Community post and I'll tag some of the other Advisors to chime in if they are better versed.

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/workfront-discussions/event-follow-up-workfront-pro...

I use external lookups with control projects and custom forms to help manage extensive lists for drop-downs. I find that using a series of filters in the external lookup and custom forms on the tasks helps mitigate most issues. 

Communication can be hard, but it is essential to maintain strong adoption for changes or new process implementations.

I have found that with users they need to have the nuts and bolts broken down in a simplistic way. In my experience, provide the who, why, context, etc. goes a long way. We would send Process Updates to communicate changes in real time which can be found in the Communications Cookbook.

Communication Cookbook: https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/workfront-blogs/introducing-the-end-user-communicat...

If there were larger projects with stakeholders, these were treated differently. We would have core team members and weekly or monthly updates sent out for status updates. This was important to bring users along the journey the entire time so when changes were made live, teams were prepared and aware versus being out of the loop. Lastly, have a feedback loop with teams. This could be a 30, 60, 90 day check in to see if something needs to be adjusted and meet users needs.

You could automate this with Fusion! Alternatively, one way to do it manually -- I had a report that I got weekly on Mondays of all the projects that closed the week before - you could manually email the requesters in that report. 

Hello! The easy (and hard) answer to this question is that there's no one way to use the Resource Management tools, and you might have to take a non-traditional approach depending on the needs of your team.  The cool thing is that one of our hosts today, @KierstenKollins, has shared her non-traditional approaches a couple of times on events, and they are truly inspiring! 

🎬 [VIDEO] August 2024 - [Workfront] Expert Insights: Non-Traditional Workfront Workflows with Kiers... 
[Event Follow-Up] Creative Ways of Managing Resources in Adobe Workfront - May 20, 2025 

I've never heard this being an issue. I've had calculated fields for a decade and never once has a Workfront update broken one. Maybe you are thinking of when you update the field in the form builder and tell it to recalculate the expression, but that also shouldn't break anything. I highly recommend continuing the course of making calculated fields that use other calculated fields.

In my 7 years of using calculated fields, we did not run into any issues with calculated fields when release updates were deployed. I agree with Monique to go for it and build what you need for your teams. Calculated fields are a game changer for teams and workflows.

So excited to hear this, this will really make a difference for our team and leaders!

Hey @BrittanyGarrett ! These are all fabulous areas to get to know in Workfront! I'll drop some resources here. My team also hosts a ton of free events every month (I would make sure to attend the Admin 101 sessions - we repeat them quarterly and there's one specifically on reporting) - be sure to check out the Experience League Events Page.

• Conditional formatting
  • Add basic conditional formatting to a view
• Milestones
  • Create a milestone path
• Wildcards
  • Wildcard filter variables overview (my most used are $$USER.ID, $$TODAY -usually with a calculation)
  • Intermediate reporting tutorial playlist
  • Use user-based wildcards to generalize reports
  • Use date-based wildcards to generalize reports 
• Text mode - I would start with conditional formatting things before diving too far into text mode. If you have specific questions, you can always search the community or post a question in the community!
  • Text mode overview
• Predecessors and dependency loops
  • Predecessors can get tricky! Are you nesting tasks under other tasks? That's usually where I get the most errors. 
  • This tutorial might help: Learn to sequence tasks

Hopefully that helps!

Corey you are not alone in wanting some more customization to Home. I'm hoping that more is coming with the 2026 release updates and if you post an Idea I will up vote it and share it with everyone I know to get more votes.

Reporting AI is not yet available but it has come up in every Beta meeting I was in earlier this year so just know the Product team knows how much we'd love to see this. Hopefully we hear something more at Summit. But in the meantime I'm so glad we can use the Assistant to generate and refine formulas for calculated custom fields.

Here's some more details on that: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/basics/ai-assistant/ai-assistant-overview

Hello! I love using Milestone Paths for Reporting - mainly to create an easy to understand picture of where all of the in-flight projects are. The main piece of advice that I would give is to create milestone path phases general enough that they can apply to a large group of projects, so that you're comparing "apples to apples." One of the challenges with Workfront and Project Management in general is that sometimes everyone is using a different word or description for the same effort, so Milestones can give you a mechanism for consistency.
Now, the drawback is that you can only assign one Milestone Path per project, and can only use one Phase once. (So for examples, so you had two tasks that could technically fall under a Phase 1-Planning milestone, you have to pick just one to represent that phase. If that's the case, this might require you to rethink your Project Templates a bit.)
In terms of a Dashboard, I would build a specific report for each Milestone Path you are using. I had a General one, then I had one for IT/Development Projects, and then one for more Marketing/Creative Projects. So I'd create three reports, filter to the applicable projects, and then Leadership could focus on the ones that were most meaningful to them.
For the record though - Milestones didn't always communicate everything I needed, so sometimes I would tag Projects with a specific Custom Form, that had more nuanced fields - specific to the business units, strategic initiatives, timeframes (custom quarters), etc.- but this includes a specific Project Condition that was more meaningful to our org and that the PMs could manually set depending on what was going on with the projects. Having those reports on the dashboard filtered to those nuances really helped communicate a clearer message of the statuses of the phases and the projects.
I talked a little bit about this in a short video, so hopefully this helps a bit!
🎬 [VIDEO] Top 3 – How to get started with Milestones 

I also meant to share this!  It's an older event, but it's got some great tips around Milestone Paths, just in case.

Webinar | System Admin Essentials: Foundations of Project Templates (May 17, 2023) 

Hey there!  This definitely seems like a potential Support ticket.  The only thing that might be worth checking is to make sure that your users aren't deleting the issues after the project is created.  If not, definitely open that ticket! 

Hi Cynthia,

I'm more curious about the last part of AWoody's post - "Is there a way in which the request can be 'locked' rather than deleted?"

I like to keep the requests instead of deleting them, but some infrequent users use them (instead of the resolved projects) to send updates, muddying the communication path.

Thanks.

I would expand this to include the Priorities page - when a team is assigned that a user is a member of, this does not show up in the Priorities list for a user. 

This is the intended functionality of assigning work to teams. It's meant to be a team queue for users to then delegate their work out within their own team and manage their team resources, instead of project managers assigning work directly to users. Once someone on the team claims the work, it will move to their My Task Widget.

Team assignments

A Project Manager does not always know which individual will complete an assignment–simply that a particular work unit or team completes work of that specific nature.

Members of an assigned team can also go to the Teams > Team Requests area and see the tasks assigned to their team. They can assess the impact of a task and volunteer to work on it. For more information, see Team requests overview.

Thank you @KellieGardner, is there a way though that groups can be created and assigned to a task but it shows up in each member of the group's "My Task" list? and if one of them checks it off it is checked off for everyone? For a bit more detail on how we utilize Workfront, we will often have a copywriter and a designer assigned to a task. Currently, we add each individual to the tasks which can be tedious. Additionally, we have three people involved on print related tasks. All three of them need to be on each task, however we currently have to type in each user for each task (sometimes 10 tasks on a project). We would not want a single individual claiming a task, and would still want them to see the task under "My Tasks".

This might take me a minute, but it should be possible using the task collection vs predecessors! 

@LindsayOl This should work for you, although you'll want to swap out the text "Name of Custom Field" with the name of your actual custom field. 

displayname=Previously Completed Task(s)
listdelimiter=<br>
listmethod=nested(tasks).lists
type=iterate
valueexpression=IF(!ISBLANK({DE:Name of Custom Field})&&{status}="CPL",CONCAT("✅: ",{name}," - ",{assignedTo}.{name}," - ",{plannedCompletionDate}))
valueformat=HTML

Still not able to get this to display info.  Does it matter what type of custom field this is? It is a check box field. @NicholeVargas 

displayname=Previously Completed Task(s)
listdelimiter=<br>
listmethod=nested(tasks).lists
type=iterate
valueexpression=IF(!ISBLANK({DE:CC Milestones})&&{status}="CPL",CONCAT("✅: ",{name}," - ",{assignedTo}.{name}," - ",{plannedCompletionDate}))
valueformat=HTML

@LindsayOl Is this a project or task report? Asking because it works for me on a project report (I assumed that's where you wanted to surface task information). Both single-line text fields and checkbox custom fields work in my expression. 

If this is a task report, in order for specific tasks to be pulled in, those would need to be part of the Filters area. 

Hello!  It is possible, but you're correct, to have this automated, you would need Fusion.  There is a Fusion template that is along those lines to give you an idea of how it could work, but that's definitely a scenario that customers have built in the past.

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront-fusion/using/create-and-manage-templates/curren... 

@CoreyMa4 That’s a great question and something that can definitely vary by user and setup! 

There are quite a few types of notifications that can be triggered in Workfront, both in-app and via email. It’s important to note that in-app notifications aren’t fully comprehensive and also can’t be turned off, so if users find those overwhelming, it may be best to help them understand which ones to focus on and which to disregard.

For email notifications, the article you linked is an excellent resource for understanding the different triggers and how they work. You may want to go into the Setup area and review what notifications are turned on globally and see if there are any that can be deactivated. Likewise, if you get an email that you don't need, you always have the option of clicking "stop emails of this type" in the bottom corner and that will automatically turn it off for you. I’d also recommend watching the on-demand event Mastering Email Notifications in Workfront, which covers best practices and strategies for controlling notification volume and tailoring them to your team’s needs.

Finally, it’s worth considering how your users prefer to work. If your team primarily collaborates in Microsoft Teams or Slack, Workfront notifications can be integrated there as well allowing you to reduce email traffic and surface updates where users are already active.

Hello! We definitely heard this question in the 4th Quarter Release Webinar a few weeks back.  Currently, there is no way to turn that off at the Global level, but your users can absolutely turn that off individually.  For organizations that rely heavily on their current Requests page functionality, I had recommended that Sys Admins send a note to their users with a screenshot of how to toggle that off. 

Cynthia, thanks for the reply, but sending a note to new users every time they join our WF instance will not be feasible. We have a whole university of people who can opt in to request work from our marketing unit, who will only use the requests section of WF.I will probably need to create a new user doc around this or make a Fusion notification that gives the new users the info. Seems like a lot of unnecessary work on my part around something so simple, that we do not want activated yet.

I totally understand.  This was the feedback that we shared with Product.  (And as a 5-year Sys Admin, I totally get the work to train and manage user expectations.) I personally had training documentation that I provided to new users when they joined our instance, but I've heard from other Sys Admins recently that use Slack, Teams, or SharePoint to support users with updates and training docs, and they said they were going to pin information about how to toggle that feature off for now. Sorry it's not more help! 

Unfortunately you cannot remove items from a timesheet unless you change the date frame or unassign the user. I would highly recommend rethinking your current process workflow to include logging time to be able to use a lot of the amazing features that Workfront has to offer.

But if that isn't an option for you, you could post an idea and have others in the same position upvote the option to delete items from timesheets. Once that functionality exists you could use Fusion to delete in mass.

In the mean time, I recommend training users to pin the key items to their timesheet and/or using the general hours at the bottom for time logging and to ignore the tasks and issues.

One way could be to go to the user and add a comment via Updates. Not sure if that is recommended or the quickest/simplest way. 

I usually had a few projects set up for some of these ad-hoc tasks for the quarter or the year (with their own portfolio). Like, "Leslie's Admin Tasks 2025" or "Team File Cleanup 2025." That way I had a place to easily create the task, assign it, and they had a place to track time towards it.

This is a great idea, not quite a functionality available yet. If you haven't already please post this as an idea and I will absolutely upvote it. In the meantime, I think you may be able to achieve this via Fusion but I wouldn't know where to begin.

@GregNa The speakers are responding to each question one at a time. Please allow them a moment — your question will be addressed shortly.

And please refresh your page to see the update getting reflected. 

Hello! I can tell you how I handled this, and it was primarily through a combination of specific Portfolios, Project Templates, along with a defined use of defined Project Statuses that matched my Governance model.

So, our fiscal year began in October, and we conducted budget meetings over the summer.  I would start "collecting" potential initiatives for the next year, and creating projects with a basic "annual planning" template with tasks that aligned to a general Milestone path.  These projects lived under Annual Planning Portfolio, with a "Requested" status.  The Governance model for projects (and project requests) would start at Requested, then either Approved or Rejected (with reasoning attached) and if approved, then it could move into a Current status, with the applicable Project Template.

Doing it this way allows you to build reporting with current Projects, sprinkled in with Annual Planning Projects, if I include that Portfolio. AND since I'm attaching Project Templates that have some Custom Form fields on the Tasks, I can build a fabulous little Annual Planning calendar.  

Hopefully this helps a bit!

Hi @ShannaBo ! @Lyndsy-Denk recently did an event about how her company handles translations/localization - it might give you some ideas! 

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/workfront-discussions/event-follow-up-power-templat...