Customer Access

[DaveRa4]

Hello, We are looking to gain some knowledge about allowing "Customer Access" to Workfront. We have a desire to allow our customer access into our Workfront environment so that they can follow the progress of their projects. The majority of our projects come from direct customer purchase orders, and we want to vastly improve project transparency. If you are currently doing this and would be interested to speak with one of our team members who is currently studying this concept please contact me. Dave Randall PMP Atlas Copco

[EricLu2]

Hi: We do this all the time. If it is a long-term need, we create a Group for that external customer. We create a team for that external company. We create a Access Level for the members of that team. We create an Interface for the members of that team. We grant view permission to specific projects using the team. Does that get you in the ballpark? Thanks, Eric

[JimBr1]

What sort of license are you using? How do you manage the issuance (and the recovery) of the licenses. I have about 500 customer facing projects at just about any point in time so granting contributor licenses can get pretty expensive. Jim Brown FujiFilm Medical Systems, USA

[EricLu2]

We use a Reviewer license. Because they are essentially unlimited, we don't worry about recovery and reuse. Thanks! Eric

[BenettaPe]

Lucas, I need this badly. So if I have 100 customers. They each have their individual project. I only want them to see their "own" project. So if I put them all in 1 group, 1 team, etc ... how to I limit their access to their "own" project only? How are they accessing workfront - thru what license? What userid/password are you using - meaning the same one for them all - or giving them each an individual one? thanks for your help. We desperately need external customers inside workfront in a limited manner and I have not figure out how to make this work. Benetta Perry APS

[EricLu2]

Hi: If you need to assign people to a project one at a time, then you would go to the project, Project Actions, Sharing, and add the individual(s) and grant them VIEW to the project. It will take a while to catch up, as you will have to grant access one project at a time, but when it's done, you'll have external customers able to see their projects and no others. We use the person's email as their login ID. We give them a standard password that they have to reset the first time they log in to see their projects. They all have their own Review license, which shouldn't cost you anything if you have the Collaboration package. Another way would be to give them a scheduled report of their project information – they wouldn't have to log in at all, unless they want to. You could send the report to each external individual who needs to view things on the project. If you send them scheduled reports, you don't need to create IDs for them, you just add their email address to the Send to: list for the report. Does that help? Eric

[DaveRa4]

Lucas, Thanks for the feedback. We are trying some testing with a single customer, similar to what you describe. What type of feedback do you get from your customers? Dave Randall PMP Atlas Copco Tools

[EricLu2]

Hi: We don't get feedback, generally. Their access just works. In large measure, they use the access when they click links they get in reports. I don't think they are looking at tasks on projects very much. They look at issues and reports, generally. Hope it all works out for you! Eric

[DerekVi]

We're doing this with right now with ~100 active projects. Everything that was said here so far I agree with. Here's some other things Restrict the client layout template to see as LITTLE as possible, you want them to only see relevant information as very few clients want to learn your PM tool. We use a role called "Client" to assign the Layout template. Make a client report that shows clients exactly what they need and make it load first on the Reports tab. That's worked well for us. Watch out for comments that clients will put in places that may or may not make sense. We've seen comments thrown in at the project top level, tasks/issues that are already closed, etc. To combat this we've been trying to direct our clients to just use the My Updates page to do all of their updates which seems to be working pretty well for us. Inbound emails have always been an issue for us with workfront, if you're trying to make those work there's a good number of drawbacks. For us personally we had a lot of missed mail so we had to write our own parser. Derek Visch Level Data

[BenettaPe]

Lucas, I have over 300 projects and growing, so the first solution is not do-able for me. (smile). No individual logins. Sending a scheduled report is a good solution. I never got that to work. I sent a report and it contained a link. When they clicked on the link - it come to a sign in screen - as opposed to just showing them the needed information on the report. Thus a roadblock and I never progressed pass this point. Did I create my report incorrectly? Now also there was an attachment. All they had to do was download the attachment and they could see the information. However, the link shown was MORE visible to them than the attached report. I could not configure the report to 'remove' that link - and it was very confusing and very embarrassing. Thus roadblock to progress. Your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Benetta Perry APS

[EricLu2]

Hi: Ah, the report you tried to send them had too many lines to put in an Excel spreadsheet or attached report. Filtering the report down will cause WorkFront to create an attachment instead of a link. See if sending the report in a PDF creates an attachment where there might be too many rows for Excel. I don't know how you would have one ID for them to login with. I'm not sure how that would work. Stick with it! Eric

[BenettaPe]

Derek and Lucas, Thank you for both suggestions - I'll continue working with this. Benetta Perry APS