External Licenses and Collaboration

[RAshley]

We have a group who is trying to encourage more of their (very large) department to utilize Workfront for communication and collaboration. Most of the department's members don't currently have WF accounts. I think for the most part they're looking for comments and the occasional approval. Due to the size of the group and the very limited use for most of them they'd rather not have to manage "normal" accounts for all of them.

What they'd really like to do is tag a user in a comment or update, the user would get a notification email, then they could reply to that email and the response would show up as a comment in WF. They did a test where they added a user's Gmail account as a tag on a project update. This created a corresponding account with an External license. The Gmail account received a notification email but replies didn't seem to make it back into WF. (I don't yet know what happened if they clicked the link in the email.)

I've been unable to find much official documentation around this, everything here is gleaned from forum posts and a few tests.

My questions:

1. How are other companies accomplishing this?

2. What can we expect to happen if we tag a company email address as opposed to personal one? Will this conflict with SSO in any way?

3. The Gmail account they used now appears as a user in our Adobe Admin Console, which is concerning. What would happen if that email were tied to a personal Adobe account? 

4. Where is the documentation on how exactly External licenses work? I really can't find anything other than "they can respond to proofs."

[RAshley]

Update / More Info

It turns out the user also tagged his Gmail as an approver on a proof, so I'm 99% sure that's what created the External account. When he click the embedded link he gets an error, likely because we're on SSO. Using the /login URL and the "reset password" link he was able to get in as his Gmail account where he sees only the proof, not the project he tagged.

This is pretty consistent with other accounts I've read. It's quite clumsy and involves the recipient having the /login link (pretty major design flaw). 

Now the big question is, will any of this change when we move to the new licensing model (which we'll be doing in the next few months)?

[Sven-iX · Accepted solution]

Hi @RAshley 

so in general: Workfront doesn't have "guest" access. To access WF (creating updates and approving objects) to you need an account. 

The new licensing will not change that. 

When you're on console, as soon as you provisioning a user with Workfront access, the user account gets created in Workfront, and defaults to the (no-cost) Contributor license. Especially when Console is driven by your corporate active directory, there's really no lift here. 

Note that Adobe will automatically upgrade Contributor licenses to Light (which cost) if the low number of "free" approvals is exceeded. https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/review-and-approve-work/proof-doc-decisio...

You can block the auto-upgrade - https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/administration-and-setup/add-users/access...

Old licensing scheme https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/administration-and-setup/add-users/legacy...

New licensing scheme: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/administration-and-setup/add-users/access...

Access levels with new licensing: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/administration-and-setup/add-users/access...