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Workfront 20.3 Release

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Level 5

This week we roll out our 20.3 release! You can find more information about the release on the new Product Release page, which includes downloadable content to share with your organization like the 20.3 Datasheet. Please reference the status.workfront.com page for the release timing for your instance. All functionality will be enabled by Friday, August 14th.

If you have questions that arise this week about any of the new features in the 2020.3 release, please comment below and I'll be sure to address them or get the right people here to respond.

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22 Replies

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Level 2

Hi Josh!

One of the biggest things my organization was looking forward to is being able to save a draft when making requests. However, I'm not able to see it on my instance when I go in to make a sample request. Is there something I need to enable in order to have this functionality?

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Level 5

Hi Sarah,

Thank you for the question. The save a request as a draft functionality was not released yet and we are working to get this available as soon as possible. Currently, we are estimating this to be available next week. We will communicate our status here in this community post but also in the release notes and Announcement Center message.

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Level 2

Hi Josh,

with this new rollout while I like having a the new view options for documents it is difficult to quickly check the updates on a document. You have to dig several layers to see updates or access a custom form that you have attached, Is there a setting that we can adjust to allow us to see the updates on the same screen as the documents?

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Level 5

Hi Jodie,

Thank you for the feedback. The changes we've included here are part of bringing together a consistent experience between how you see and interact with a summary of your documents, projects and tasks. There isn't currently a way to see this information on one page. We will be exploring this further.

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Level 7

Hi Josh,

I'm seeing the same as Sarah - no drafts! We sent out a communication to all of our users about this and they are very excited.

Also not seeing analytics? Anyone else missing this?

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Level 5

Hi Sarah,

Yes, we are working to get draft requests available to all customers. I will update our status here later today with when we are targeting to have this available.

Analytics should be enabled for all enterprise and business plans. To see it, an admin can add that feature to a user's layout template in NWE or classic or an end user can land on the page by just amending their URL to have analytics at the end (example. ***.my.workfront.com/analytics).

if there are any issues, please reach out to joelpettigrew@workfront.com

Thank you!

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Level 5

Hi All,

The 20.3 release is now available for all customers! As I mentioned earlier, there is one update that we have delayed enabling in your Workfront instance until next week. This is the new Draft area when creating requests and we plan to enable this next week. We will update the release notes and post here in this community thread with timing for when this is enabled. Please continue to ask your questions on this post that may arise and I can help ensure we provide an answer.

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Level 1

Hi Josh,

Thank you for the updates! I agree that some of the changes will prove helpful. However, I will reiterate what Jodie mentioned about the updated Document Summary section, and add to it:

  1. Updates - It is not helpful to have to click through to the document details page to see ALL of the document updates as we could do before. It will certainly lower productivity for users to click on "See All" and move to a separate screen to do this.
  2. Updates - While it may be helpful to have the "Reply in Proof" button instead of just opening the proof and hitting reply in the proof, we have lost the ability to reply to a Proof Comment without opening the proof. And more importantly, have also lost the ability to tag additional users on responses to Proof Comments (you can only Reply to the original poster in the proof tool). Is there the option of having a "Reply" and "Reply in Proof" option? The change as it stands will result in lost productivity and confusion in our communication process.
  3. Custom Forms - Similarly with Updates section. It now looks like when you click on "add custom form" it takes you to the separate Document Details page and away from the Project/Task/Issue to actually choose which form to add and to fill it out.
  4. Custom Forms - Similar to the point above, it looks like you can only see which forms are attached in the Document Summary section, but not the contents of the form. This seems like a huge step backwards as most of our projects include many multiple documents and the extra clicks to the Document Details page to access and update form information is not efficient at all.
  5. Document Summary Section - Is there a way in the new user experience now to have the Document Summary selected by default? I know it is only a click to pull this up, but is another instance where we are adding steps to how this worked before. It is possible it is an available setting that I may have missed.

As you can see, most of the concerns center around the extra clicks and back-and-forth from the Project/Task/Issue screen and the Document Details screens. I am curious if these updates were in response to feedback that it would be more helpful to work within the Document Detail screen instead of in the Document Summary section? We just don't see this as a more efficient way to work.

Please let me know if you are hearing any similar feedback and if it would be possible to address some of these issues.

Thanks!

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Level 5

Thank you Frank for this great feedback, especially the detail you have provided. I have passed along this feedback to the Product Managers and User Experience designers for this new functionality for Documents in the new Workfront experience. They will be responding to this post to help answer your questions.

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Level 1

Thank you for the quick response. It is greatly appreciated!

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Level 5

I'd also like to learn how this evolves as my guys just reported exactly the same pain.

Thanks,

Imre

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Employee

Hi Frank

I'm part of the product team here at Workfront. Thank you so much for your detailed feedback, that is really helpful and provides the team with great insight

Before I respond to your specific questions, let me just preface this by saying that as part of our New Workfront Experience we are pushing to have a more consistent experience across the entire platform, which includes how you interact with Projects, Tasks, Issues and Documents. Therefore, some of our changes are a result of creating a more unified experience. That all said, I realise that some of these have changed the user interface. We definitely want to move to fewer clicks and not increase the time and knowledge needed to get to the relevant information within our system. I'm sorry if the latest changes has not produced the right experience for you and the team

  1. Updates - It is not helpful to have to click through to the document details page to see ALL of the document updates as we could do before. It will certainly lower productivity for users to click on "See All" and move to a separate screen to do this. >> This is great feedback and we've had similar from other customers as well. The main reasoning here was to have a consistent experience with the rest of the Projects, Tasks and Issues. Our thinking was that if you wanted to "dive deeper" into the update stream then you would potentially want to gain more context to the document which is why we're navigating you back to the details. However, I can completely see where someone would want to stay in the document list and filter through the comment updates without having to navigate away. We are investigating this further to determine if we can introduce a better solution here
  2. Updates - While it may be helpful to have the "Reply in Proof" button instead of just opening the proof and hitting reply in the proof, we have lost the ability to reply to a Proof Comment without opening the proof. And more importantly, have also lost the ability to tag additional users on responses to Proof Comments (you can only Reply to the original poster in the proof tool). Is there the option of having a "Reply" and "Reply in Proof" option? The change as it stands will result in lost productivity and confusion in our communication process. >> The reasoning that we want the person to continue any comment replies in the same context as where it was made e.g. if it was created in the proof then the reply should be there also. With proof comments you can add additional context such as drawing markups which is not available in standard document comments. So if you just reply directly in the updates you might be missing that additional context and unable to provide relevant / accurate feedback. That said, I understand that tagging additional users on responses is an important part of the feedback process. You are however still able to do that directly on the proof once you select the "Reply in proof" option. If you want to add a comment that's not related to the proof comments then you're still able to do so outside of the proof comment thread.
  3. Custom Forms - Similarly with Updates section. It now looks like when you click on "add custom form" it takes you to the separate Document Details page and away from the Project/Task/Issue to actually choose which form to add and to fill it out. >> I agree, this approach is not ideal for all circumstances and we will investigate this further to determine how this experience can be improved.
  4. Custom Forms - Similar to the point above, it looks like you can only see which forms are attached in the Document Summary section, but not the contents of the form. This seems like a huge step backwards as most of our projects include many multiple documents and the extra clicks to the Document Details page to access and update form information is not efficient at all. >> Great feedback, we will investigate and determine how this experience can be improved.
  5. Document Summary Section - Is there a way in the new user experience now to have the Document Summary selected by default? I know it is only a click to pull this up, but is another instance where we are adding steps to how this worked before. It is possible it is an available setting that I may have missed. >> We actually intended this to be visible by default. The team is currently working through that and will introduce it in a future release

Let me know if you have any further feedback. The team will be contact to discuss your questions in more detail

Thanks,

Etienne

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Level 5

Just to comment the answer to point #2:

Sometimes the context is in peoples' mind or the user who wants to reply knows exactly what they reply and which part is that all about without the need to look into this (eg. a designer).

If you show the reply only in the updates it may appear for other users as it should be visible in the proof too, while that reply won't show up. I think this brings in some confusion.

Also a pring/export of the proof may miss this important information or reply...

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Level 1

Hi Etienne,

I appreciate the response to these concerns and am glad to hear that there are considerations being made for some of them. We actually have set up dedicated consulting time to discuss the proof tool functionality. Your answer to #2 is helpful and will be something we can walk through during the consulting session.

Please keep us informed of any progress with any of the other items above.

Thanks!

Frank

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Level 5

The new Draft area when creating requests is now available in production for both Workfront Classic and the new Workfront experience. This functionality was delayed from last week's release as we worked to ensure availability to all customers. If you have any questions or comments about this or other items in 20.3, please post here and I can help ensure we provide an answer.

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Level 5

Hi- I notice with the new document summary window that for proofs, where it shows the proof status (SOCD), the final decision isn't shown. It used to show in the document details tab to the right of the document whether it was approved, approved with changes or changes required which was helpful for me and some others to see really quickly to know who I may need to follow up with about next steps. Now we need to click a few times to find the approval decision.

Is there a plan to bring that back?

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Level 6

Hi Janelle,

Yes this information along with other proofing capabilities are planned. Our UX team was running usability tests for this particular feature. If you would be interested to see our plan and provide feedback just let me know

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Level 10

Hi Folks,

Fyi, I just spotted an "inserting parms through the API" edge case with the 20.3 release. I've raised a ticket with Support who are investigating, have designed a workaround, and pinged a couple of my technical colleagues with a heads up. In case this resonates for anyone else, though, I decided to also mention it here, too.

Regards,

Doug

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Level 6

New Release has caused issues in our Documents and proofing process

I have a ticket in but wanted to let others know of this in case it is effecting them as well.

Today the new release hit our team and I have been fielding calls all day about it.

In the past if someone was not part of our automated proofing workflow and opened the proof they would be added to the workflow in a section at the end labelled Workfront. We adapted to that. BUT today when the new release hit, if anyone even accesses the document details or the proofing workflow but never opens the proof it now ads them to that stage at the end and emails them that they have a proof to review. This is a problem for us. The project manager will often look at the workflow or the details to see the status of the proof. We do not want them added to the proof because they need to be added to a later stage. This will require the proof owner to delete them out of that stage every time before adding the correct stage needed later.

Hoping they fix it since this negates all the progress we recently made on getting the proofing process to work for us. 😩

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Community Advisor

I completely agree with Tracy. As an admin I had to remove myself from several proofs that I never opened only because I looked at the Proof details to ensure that my report was pulling the correct data.

I could see this being an issue for project managers that are reviewing the status of approvals but not actually reviewing the proofs themselves.