Identify Workfront users who are online.

[#1]

Description - Can we have a feature to identify users who are online / away / Out Of Office? It helps to know when we are responding to comments by tagging them and will not expect an instant reply if we know. Something similar to Office 365 - MST Teams and Outlook

Why is this feature important to you - To collaborate better and faster if we know someone is online/OOO

How would you like the feature to work - when notifying the user on comments / viewing tasks of the user, a Green dot indicates user is online and so forth.

Current Behaviour - no indication of user being away / online / OOO

[#2]

I heard similar ideas in my team

[#3]

Good idea @kiransurfs,; it captured my imagination.

Given the As Designed high visibility but limited functionality of each User photo, for those with Fusion who enjoy a challenge (perhaps you, @Rafal_Bainie), consider, if you will…

- creating a project called Out Of Office

- uploading an image (grey, or with a grey dot) to that project for each user to indicate that they are OOO, named with their ID_OOO.png

- optionally, use Fusion to copy each user’s current photo (or leverage our User Initials solution…hmm…which we might enhance to handle the green dot idea…will consider…) to that same OOO project, as ID.png

- use Fusion to check (daily/hourly/etc) to swap each user’s photo to ID.png (normal image) if it is - according to each user’s schedule and personal time off (PTO) — within current business hours

- optionally, if the user has logged in today, bonus marks for also creating and swapping to ID_Online.png to then add a “green dot” image

- otherwise, swap to ID_OOO.png

#FusionWorldChampion (for the year) to the first to solve and share the answer…and no, you can’t (well, you oughn’t) change your Experience League nickname to that until you’ve won.

Regards,

Doug

[#4]

this is excellent @Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore !

we already have in place custom solution that covers most of what you are describing, but I haven't thought about switching pictures based on users "working hours" which we do track. We just have "current availability" on user level with 3 values free/flex/busy and we used that for filtering in number of places.
Once I find time to try this out I will try to remember to post about the results here.

huge huge thanks for this suggestion!

[#5]

My pleasure Rafal,

Sounds like you already have the heavy lifting figured out. We've done a lot with images over the years (such as this watermark example using our Magic Reports solution), so although tempted to tackle it myself, would be delighted to have you grab the brass ring on it.

If it would help speed up your first pass, I invite you (again) to consider deploying our (currently free, btw) User Initials solution, which you could then trace through and leverage as a substitute image (i.e. using each person's initials) for those who've not yet uploaded a photo. You could also simplify things by repeating a single image for out of office that would be applied to all, in such cases (e.g. stop sign, beach ball, heck: have a contest).

Have fun with it, and I look forward to hearing how it goes!

Regards,

Doug

[#6]

I like this conceptually, but I don't see it being useful beyond OOO situations. 

A green dot or other avatar modifier suggests "this user is looking at Workfront right now and will see your update or assignment immediately." That wouldn't be true for a few reasons - unlike Slack/Teams/Outlook/other messaging apps, Workfront doesn't deliver notifications via the OS or browser. It's really common for users to have a Workfront tab open in their browser, perhaps all day, but that doesn't mean they're viewing that tab at all throughout the day. So while they're "online" that doesn't mean Workfront has their current attention. This would lead to frequent disappointment as users expect quick replies from someone who appears online, but is not aware someone is wanting their attention in Workfront. Slack and Teams are much better suited for immediate/urgent comms, and both of them can be connected to Workfront so a user can see immediate notifications from those apps about Workfront updates or assignments if they so choose.

An OOO flag on the other hand, would be useful. A current option is to instruct users to update their name to "John Doe PTO 4/26-4/28" (also possible via Fusion). This helps users understand that it may be days or weeks before John sees your comment, or that the work you are assigning won't get done because the assignee is OOO.

Just my 2¢

[#7]

Fair comment Bill,

I agree; the green dot is a stretch, and of less use than the OOO "grey image" idea. Supplementing that with an OOO suffix on the username would be a useful and informative reinforcement, too.

Regards,

Doug

[#8]

something close to instant messaging is already available in BETA (only for issue updates at the moment). This is huge win from workfront. Now, I can imagine that if this gets replicated to User profile, my updates or something like this, you basically get wf "chat"

The only thing that would be needed is to have in-app notifications appearing automatically (without refresh) or desktop notifications from WF

[#9]

Hi @Rafal_Bainie,

Thanks for the call to noodle through the Avatar API call today; I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

In the meantime, I'm pasting some notes from a related call below in which @William-- pointed out that pasting an icon into a user name might be another (faster, easier, API-able) option. It would require users to periodically refresh their Workload Balancer page to "get the latest" from end users who've updated their status -- e.g. to Busy (red), Open (green), Flex (yellow), or OOO (grey) -- but if your users are disciplined enough to play by the rules (and remember to set it to "green" each morning), might be an inexpensive and elegant solution for now.

Regards,

Doug