User support materials

[Lucinda_Workfront]

Hi all,

I'd be interested to how you have produced and shared user support materials - for example training manuals, user guides, FAQs etc.

I'm after details about file format and shared location that everyone can access. So for example:

• seperate powerpoint/pdfs in sharepoint site.
• held directly in Workfront as seperate docs
• An all-emcompassing URL - such as Google sites

And I'm sure there are many more!

Any details you can share about how you've gone about this, and what has worked well and hasn't worked well would be gratefully received.

Many thanks in advance.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Lucinda,

This Shared Documents article lead me to this Document Filtering - Project Status article, which describes how you can add custom data to documents in Workfront (eg “course number”), then create a Workfront report that filters on that custom data to pull those related documents (eg “course number = 123). You could also share that report and those documents publicly, so that anyone (whether a Workfront user or not) could access the documents (eg people enrolled in Course 123).

Regards,

Doug

[Lucinda_Workfront]

That's so useful - thanks for taking the time to respond @Doug Den Hoed‚ - much appreciated.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

My pleasure, Lucinda; I’d be interested to hear how you end up solving this one.

Regards,

Doug

[CalvinFold]

Since our deployment is more restrictive than those shown in WF's training videos and materials, we couldn't show those to our users. So we had to create our own...for everything.

We have:

• PDFs generated from InDesign, all very professional and templated with copious screen shots. They are broken out by topics so there isn't a huge manual but lots of 1‚Äì6 page "cheat sheets." These are stored in a shared Box repository. Over a dozen of these PDFs now. While mostly our for our own group, we always make this type for users who are not part of our group because they make a strong, positive impression (Reviewers, Requesters).
• The PDFs though are a tad slow to change/edit because only one person handles department documentation, so we are exploring moving to a wiki-based system so a couple more people from our team can edit it and also do so on-the-fly.
• We also have two training videos (made with Camtasia); one for Requesters and one for PHQ Reviewers. We found this format (combined with a PDF version) worked better for these audiences. Both are 10 minutes long. These are time consuming to create, but have been worth it. We really wanted to do more, but too many time constraints so we've kept it to these two
• We also have a small collection of thrown-together Word-n-screenshots when we can't wait to make nicer versions and something needs a cheatsheet now.
• We also have held large and small training sessions.

I probably can't provide examples, but I can answer questions. 😀

[Lucinda_Workfront]

Thanks for providing so much detail @Kevin Quosig‚ - sounds like a good approach. Is the shared Box repository directly accessible from Workfront or do users locate it another way?

[CalvinFold]

Couldn't figure out a way to provide a link right in WF that would be useful or noticed, so we simply provide the link to the docs in Box when needed. During onboarding, training, etc.

Or in the case of the PDFs we just send them directly to answer questions rather than have them find them on their own in the Box repository.

[KatherineLa]

My team has something of the reverse of Kevin's challenge. Our implementation and use cases are way MORE complex than the standard WF training, so we've had to write a great deal of our own as well.

We've written very little static documentation (PDF/PPT etc) because it gets stale too quickly in our environment. We start our new users off with the stock WF training videos, and then immediately go into role-specific training with me (the admin) and their managers.

As an organization overall, we are heavily reliant on Confluence for all our process documentation so that's where everything for Workfront lives as well. @Kevin Quosig‚ When your team looks at wiki options, throw Confluence in for consideration.

The screenshot attached shows a snippet of the table of contents for our training in Confluence. Our overall Admin team can then jointly manage their respective documentation collaboratively, with additional in-depth pieces as needed.

If you wanted to create a Training dashboard with organized links directly from WF, it is possible although I've not had enough of a need to try it yet myself. https://one.workfront.com/s/article/Embedding-External-Web-Pages-into-Dashboards-in-the-new-Workfron...

[Lucinda_Workfront]

That's so helpful - thanks @Katherine Stibley‚ I feel the same about static documentation, but I think we may have to start off with that and evolve. Thanks for the screenshot - really useful.

Have a great day 😀

[CalvinFold]

@Katherine Stibley‚, thanks for the product recommendation in Confluence. Unfortunately we have zero budget for something like this, and can piggyback off an existing wiki system. 😀

I'm aware of the "embed pages" part (we're in Classic, but a similar functionality exists); and that might be something to consider once our Wiki is up; makes more sense for that than the Box folder. But something we should discuss.

[HeatherLa2]

We use Microsoft Office 365 products, so we are heavy in Teams, OneNote, OneDrive and Sharepoint. We contain our user training in a OneNote notebook, with Sections and pages for each type of license, workflow, proofing, FAQs, etc. We like One Note because it is easy to search, and we link that notebook to our Teams/Sharepoint sites. It is really easy to keep it updated as things change!