Third Party Vendor Access

[kshimata]

Aloha Workfront Community! I'd like to get thoughts and best practices from the Marketing Teams who work with third party vendors and agencies. I am looking at ways to onboard some of these teams for the work we do but would like to hear about strategies regarding level of permissions/access and how you folks balance the number of licenses allotted. Mahalo, Kevin Kevin Shimata Hawaiian Airlines

[VicAl]

Hi Kevin, I don't work with Marketing Teams, but the concept would be the same for an IT contractor (unless we're talking Proofs in which case I think there's a different answer – we don't use Proof yet). What I do is set up a Reviewer license for the contractor with their own company's email address. This way I can assign Issues or Tasks to them and know who is responsible. I have a weekly status meeting and review the current tasks/issues and close them or move them as appropriate. I can also comment to them as to a status or whatever etc. They'll get an email and can simply reply to the email and I have an audit trail. I also don't have to train them to use WF. I can just perform updates for them and they can live in email.

[VikkiGI2]

Hi Kevin, We have set up a couple of external agencies who work with our Marketing Teams with the proviso that they are restricted in what they can see in Workfront. I created a new access level based on a Reviewer license with View access to Projects, (no inherited permissions so our Marketing & Creative teams have to share the project/proof with them each time), Tasks, Reports, Users. Then no access to Portfolios, Templates, Financial Data, Resource Management. We do give them access to Issues as we have a Support Desk request queue along with one for Marketing and Creative so they are able to submit a new request to each of those teams and follow the progress. Under Additional Restrictions we have every option ticked apart from allow user to delete announcements. They have a specific layout template to restrict the menu choices and this points them directly to the Requests tab. They use My Updates to check on Tasks, Proofs etc and have been given some basic training around adding Updates etc so they can keep the work in the tool rather than sending emails on the side. Each time I set up a new 3rd party I log in as them and do a quick check in terms of All Projects (what appears if anything) etc just to ensure I have the access set up correctly. Hope that helps! Vikki Gibbs WF System Admin Paragon Customer Communications

[JenniferMiklasz]

Hi Kevin, We set up our external vendors with a Work license so they can see the tasks, upload/download, comment. The only thing they can't do is mark their tasks as complete which the we, Production Managers do. This works well as we can view their work to ensure it's correct before we send it for approval. We trained all our external vendors. I created a job aid. Since their task are limited, they've all picked it up very quickly. thansk Jennifer Jennifer Miklasz

[kshimata]

Aloha Vikki, Thanks for the insight here on how you folks incorporate your vendors into your work! This sounds about where I'd need to end up with some of the vendors we plan to bring into Workfront. Sounds like you've put in a quite a bit of time to set up permissions for each aspect of these vendor accounts to ensure they have just the right amount of access to handle the things they are responsible for. I'll have to explore this option, possibly with Work licenses as our vendors would be responsible for some tasks. Thanks for listing the various areas that you configured for these accounts. I'll refer back to your message to ensure that I don't miss any important areas for the account set up! Mahalo, Kevin Kevin Shimata Hawaiian Airlines

[kshimata]

Aloha Jennifer, Thanks for your thoughts here! This sounds about where I'd need to end up with for our vendors as well. They'll be responsible for some work so we would need to be able to assign them tasks. How did you set their accounts up to prevent them from marking their tasks complete? Mahalo, Kevin Kevin Shimata Hawaiian Airlines

[JenniferMiklasz]

Aloha Kevin, So we actually have them set up as Vendor - Review licenses. In the Access Levels section, you can choose what they have access to. Here's a screenshot: Hope that helps. Jennifer Jennifer Miklasz