2018.1 Release - General Release Format & New Home Area

[sydneyp50459827]

Hi WF Community! Has anyone noticed a change in the order of events or the format leading up to the releases? From what I remember, Workfront used to hold the live webinars first, then they would release each beta stage to the sandbox. Now, the beta releases are in the sandbox before the webinars are scheduled. My process / communication steps used to be to.... Watch the beta webinar Email my admin group with the important highlights per beta release Meet with my admin group during the "Customer Preview" month to walk them through everything they need to know for the "2018.1 Workfront Release" I did look forward to the live webinars first, as my "heads up...here's what's coming." I had a little more time to prepare before my admin group jumped into the sandbox or emailed me with questions about the release in general. Does the 2018.1 Release Activity Overview outline everything p lanned for this release? In the past, I would... Refer to the individual Beta outlines on the help site and then look for the overview when we are closer to the preview stage. Attend the hour and a half long webinar, compile all my notes from the beta releases, add anything I overlooked / any new functionality introduced. Email my admin group one more time before our in person meeting, with the full overview, highlighting the important things I'll expand on when we meet. If the release activity overview has everything ahead of time (with the specific beta call outs in red), that's fine, I may just need to rethink my communication steps a little. and one last thing...does anyone know if the new Home area will be replacing the My Work area all together? As I understand it right now, we can opt in to one or the other via layout templates, but is the plan to merge these two into one? I apologize in advance if this has already been outlined on the help site, I may be a little behind this month. Thanks for reading and I appreciate any feedback! Sydney Peterson Diversified Communications, Inc.

[TracySm]

Hi Sydney. Thanks for the question and for the quick phone call :). If anyone else is asking the same questions, here is what we have done to try and improve our communications: 1. On each Release Activity Overview page, we now highlight what is new in each beta in red to help it be more clear what on that page is new. 2. The release webinar is now early the week after the last release to Preview instead of the day of or the day before the release. This gives us a bit of flexibility if the dates adjust slightly, and this also allows customers to see the new functionality in Preview when we are presenting the webinar. Regarding the Overview page itself: that page is updated as new betas are released. So for beta 1, it would only include information for beta 1. For beta 2 it would be updated to include what is new in beta 2 (beta 2 items highlighted in red) and so forth through beta 4. We now typically have 4 betas to support each release. The final release to the Preview environment is what we call the Custom Preview release. We have one final webinar for this release to cover everything that is included in the release rather than just what is new in the betas. In fact, for 2018.1, we have decided to have two different webinars instead of one because feedback from 2017.3 was there was just way too much information shared in one webinar. More details to come but we hope people will find this more effective and helpful. We are very interested in general in any feedback that will help us help you be ready for each release. So, if anyone has feedback on this topic, please share. Tracy Smith Workfront

[SusanPf]

Hi, Tracy. I have a question about My Home UI. Within the webinar it stated System Admins have control over the Opt In option, but can that only happen with a layout template? We use general WF system template layout and I noticed in Beta 3&4 I don't have the option of turning the Opt In on or off. We are considering not allowing the Opt In option until mid-year when there is more parody with My Work. We are in the middle of adoption and don't want to make any big changes. In addition, we have many users who use the request queue and it's more challenging to have the teams jump from Global Nav bar to find their work. My Work provides the easy view. Thank you. Susan

[VicAl]

To the best of my knowledge that's the only way to control the Opt In. But you can create a Layout Template and add everyone to it pretty easily if everyone is already assigned to a Group (which usually represents Division if you configured that way). Vic Alejandro, PMP, CSM | IT Program Manager Denver Water | t: (303-628-7262) | c: (303-319-6473) "http://www.denverwater.org/"> http://www.denverwater.org INTEGRITY | VISION | PASSION | EXCELLENCE | RESPECT