Creating a Launch Calendar

[KathyWi1]

We are looking to create a content calendar for items like email sends, webinars, article publishing, sales material launch dates. These items live within a multitude of projects. Is there a way to export this information to a calendar or something similar? I was thinking possibly adding tasks as milestones that have the launch date and pulling a milestone report. Anyone else run into the need for this? It's a lot of manual work right now.

[JillAc]

We've tried to use the calendar feature to bring in tasks from a variety of projects and types of projects because my team likes to see things in a calendar view so we can see the flow and interaction of In Market dates for various types of projects. I use Milestones to track the key dates. However, there is a big problem with calendars that they do not record Planned Completion Date, and will switch to Projected or Actual Completion Date -- so if people aren't marking tasks done exactly on the date (or they aren't automated to close out on a specific date), or they aren't updating their projects obsessively so the Planned Completion Date is correct, the past calendar will be inaccurate. This is why we can't use this and still have to keep a manual calendar of our content. A Milestone report can work fine, but the visual of a calendar is important to us. I've also tried to export the Milestone calendar and then import it into an Outlook calendar but then we lose any color coding between project types (emails are blue and social media is pink) and we couldn't find a simple way to do it.

[kynabaker16]

Hi Kathleen,

Like Jill said, while there are a variety of ways to use Calendars in Workfront to track this type of content, the biggest gotcha is that the planned completion date is automatically switched to the actual completion date of the object, which is annoying if the day you mark something as complete doesn't line up to the date you wanted it on the calendar.

We actually just barely posted a blog post (I haven't even gotten a chance to publish a post about it yet because it's so new), about a variety of ways that a couple of customers and I have used Calendaring for this exact type of scenario. Hopefully it gives you some food for thought, and the "gotchas" listed in there are something you can work around.

Check out the blog post here.

Thanks,

Kyna

[ElissaLa3]

Hi Kathleen,

I agree w/what the others said as well. You can setup groupings (up to 15) on a calendar to group items by channel or type of campaign, etc. Then you can use custom labels on the calendar, just keep in mind that the dates do shift if they are marked complete after the Planned Completion date.

Another option is to setup a placeholder Task on your projects, and set it to auto complete. Then use this task to pull it into the calendar.

Elissa