Home Calendar - 365 integration feedback

[DavidCo3]

Hi @Chandler Smoot and/or other Workfront Product Managers for this area. We've finally started rolling out Office 365 so I've been doing some testing of the Home Calendar Integration. I've found a couple of issues / areas for enhancement when syncing from Workfront to Outlook: Tasks only show in Outlook with their task name. We would really need it to show the Project name as well so that users have this context (many tasks are named the same across projects). In addition, it would be very nice if we could populate data from other Task/Project fields into the calendar item details field. I do my best to align items in Workfront to the regular 30 minute blocks (e.g. 3:00pm to 4:00pm) but the items show in Outlook as 3:03pm to 4:03pm. If I adjust them 1 pixel upwards in Workfront, they show as 2:57pm to 3:57pm. It should really auto-snap to the nearest 15 mins or so. When you open the calendar item in Workfront, the timezone shown is UTC. This might be unavoidable, but if it is possible to have it show in the user's timezone that would be best. Aside from the above (and as previously mentioned in other topics), the main thing stopping us using the Home Calendar is that it doesn't show pre-planned work. We don't want our users to have to drag all the items onto their calendar again after they've already been carefully planned out by PMs / RMs. I know that you're working on an enhancement for this, which we're eagerly awaiting. We are super keen to start using the Home Calendar with 365, so if we can assist by providing any further info or feedback, please let me know. Thanks Regards, David Cornwell

[KatherineHa1]

Good points David - thanks for posting. Mine seems to open in my timezone?? Looks like they fixed an issue we were having - where on the Home/Calendar page, items brought in from your Outlook calendar such as someone's birthday - used to add 24 hours of work to that day. Looks like those types of hours aren't adding in any more - which is great!! Katherine Haven, PMP VP, Director, Business Technologies - PMO FCB

[DavidWa1]

Thanks for getting this started, @David Cornwell . Great points. I agree with all three of your points, especially the auto snap to nearest 15 minutes. Have tasks start at 3:03 is irritating. A few other features I'd love to see: Bi directional sync. As far as I can tell, if I move the task from my o365 calendar, that doesn't update back to the calendar on Workfront Home. I would be great to be able to have a task from WF on your calendar and move it in o365 as needed. Options to view the calendar by Week, Month, Work Week, and Day would be a great help. The settings pane seems a bit buggy (I'm using Chrome in Windows 10); I can't select/deselect the View box for all my calendars, and sometimes I'll click one box, but another box will respond. Sometimes task dragging doesn't work. I'll click on a task to move it to the calendar and instead I'll highlight a bunch of text. The only fix I've found is refreshing the page. Overall, the o365 calendar integration is a huge hit with us. Looking forward to seeing it get better and better. Best, David Walsh VP ERP Services Berry Global David Walsh Berry Plastics Corporation - IMS Group

[DavidCo3]

Hi @David Walsh - regarding point 3, I've also experienced this bugginess. Selecting one checkbox and the other one responds! Like you, I really look forward to some bug fixes and enhancements as this is the beginnings of a great tool that we want to use. David Cornwell

[TimHa1]

We too are looking to use this functionality. We also noticed that when Workfront is showing the hours cummulative compared to your planned hours, i.e. 15/40 in the top right that it is counting two conflicting meetings in the same hour from Outlook as 2 hours instead of 1. Tim Hawks Agency Jumpstart Template