How to add a new Department/team to Workfront.

[TracyPa2]

When we had Workfront originally set up for us it was just set up for our Creative Services team to use and we had an outside company set it up for us. Now another department within our Parent company would like to start using it as well. YAY, I want every department to use it, BUT also AHHHHHHH!!!! I'm not entirely sure where to start. I wasn't involved until the setup was already completed.

I need to meet with them to get a break down of their processes to get a full scope of what needs to be created. I assume the first place to start would be with creating a team/group that only they are part of. Then I would need to create portfolios and programs. Problem is our current portfolios are the property names and our programs are the department names. They would technically need all of those same options. But we don't want their stuff getting mixed up with ours and we don't want them having any access to our stuff. Would I need to create a new version of each portfolio/program with there initials in front or something like that. I am also concerned that all of our stuff may be visible to them as when we were creating it we weren't expecting to have to hide things from another department.

I really want to take on this task as I love learning new stuff in Workfront and I'm afraid they will go outside due to the amount of time required to set this up and this not being in my actual job description.

Does anyone have any tips on how to start or know of any articles that explain how to start this that I could read up on?

Also, not entirely sure how working in the sandbox mode works. If I worked on all of this in there will it function normally and then i can just push it to our regular mode once it's all set up?

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of all this 😃

Appreciate and help/advice I can get.

Tracy

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Tracy,

Great question! There are many approaches to this one (which I look forward to reading as folks suggest them), but my go-to technique is:

• Define one Group for each such department
• Set each user's Home Group to "their" Group
• In all your reports (retroactively, and going forward), always include a line that says Group In $$USER.otherGroups (note: in theory, and perhaps even in practice, this shouldn't be necessary as Workfront is already "smart enough" to automatically only show users what they should be able to see, but I'm in the habit of taking this step as an extra precaution)
• Set up Layout Templates for each Group(s) (again, optional, but best practice and a good habit to get into)
• Use Login As to check your own assumptions and confirm that everyone sees only what they ought to see
• Minimize the number of SysAdmins -- opinions vary, but 1 or 2 is ideal, 3 to 5 is reasonable (especially following some kind of 1:100 type ratio, but more than that is asking for trouble -- and if possible, set up a governance team with representatives from each group; @Shawn Loutensock‚ is the primary SysAdmin for Workfront's own instance of Workfront, and shared an insightful presentation for LEAP about their "Done Right At Workfront" (DR@WF) initiative
• One final advanced tip which @NRYN R - inactive‚ convinced me of a couple of years ago is to resist using the SysAdmin account except for when when you need to, and instead set up a separate (albeit pretty powerful) user for your own "day to day" purposes, partly to help differentiate the SysAdmin actions you take (audit trail wise) more explicitly, but mainly to force yourself to regularly view the system through a similar lens to the one Real Users will conduct their work

Regards,

Doug

[CathyKe1]

Hello @Doug Den Hoed‚ and @Tracy Parmeter‚ - I'm in a similar position, so I was pleased to read these posts.

Our current Workfront production environment is set up for our Marketing Department and includes request queues, custom forms, templates, projects, layouts, dashboard, reports, etc.

• Recently, members of our video team have been given worker accounts and they are assigned tasks in a few of our templates.

However, we now wish to set up the Video Department with their own stand-alone processes:

• Request queues, custom forms, templates, projects, layouts, dashboards, reports, etc.
• The Marketing Dept. members do not want to see any of the stand-alone video department objects when doing a “global” search.
• The Video Dept. will need to see specific Marketing Dept. projects that they are assigned to (and relevant reports), but otherwise they don’t want to see Marketing Dept. objects when using the global search.

Beyond what Doug has detailed above to limit access to objects, can I further silo the two departments so they don’t see each other’s results when using the search feature?

Thanks!

Cathy