Workfront classic sunset

[MichelleBo1]

‚Is there any possibility that Workfront classic might be an option indefinitely? I have an entire team that despite being in the new experience for a while is still not on board with it. They have issues with things like increased latency and font size which are not things I can remedy or say it will just take some getting used to. It is negatively impacting their productivity. They would like to stay in classic forever. Any thoughts?

[AnthonyIm]

I heard that the 20.3 release is the last release to have functionality update in Classic interface. Going forward, things will only update in NWE (one of the reason I've lied to my people and said they have to all be in NWE by beginning of October ;) ).

If you have specific feedback, I would definitely share that with Workfront Support as they can work on those items to fix them. Like for us, we have too many people still using the old Resources Grids so let Workfront Product know that the Workload Balancer has to be working and able to be on a dashboard before we could really start transitioning and Vazgen and team have been working hard this year to get that for us.

No tool can be around forever without updating. Could you imagine still using the old interface for Facebook? HAHAHA! I have feeling some of this is them just not wanting to change and they are using font size (which can be fixed by zoom BTW, as I have users having issues with font size) instead of just dealing with truth.

I would recommend talking with your executives and tell them the reality, yes there will be some productivity issues (like one I've said is that the issue description is no longer in header of the issue so you have to keep clicking back and forth between Issue Details and Updates when answering items in a request). But is that productivity issue worth having potentially out of dated and unsupported technology in the future? And have them decide. I promised to continue to let Product know this would be a big help to us and does annoy our users, but now the the team decided no we need to move into the future. That feels better than it just being you who made that decision and everyone annoyed with you. ;)

BTW - to let you know, when we first showed NWE to people and moved some people over, almost everyone hated it. Several months later, now I have almost 9,000 users using it and everyone is fine. Some feedback here and there (which I share with Product), but otherwise it is working.

[MichelleBo1]

‚Thanks @Anthony Imgrund‚ I had done the same in "lying" to our people to get them on it sooner rather than later. I have shared my concerns with support. I guess I am going to have to just suit up for battle until they just learn to deal with the shortcomings.

[Exp_-_ChandlerS]

Michelle,

Thank you so much for the feedback. We don't yet have a timeline for sunsetting Classic. However, we are most certainly interested in understanding the issues you are facing and are here to support you.

We understand this can be a big change for users that have spent a lot of time in classic.

As Anthony mentioned, our most current product development and updates are all based around the NWE. This is where we will be adding the most current functionality and development.

We are committed to understanding the challenges you're facing and working our best to improve on pain points you're experiencing. If you're interested in sharing more details with us about your current pain points and experience, please let us know here and we can get something scheduled.

[MichelleBo1]

‚Thanks @Chandler Smoot - Inactive‚ I opened a case with support this morning to look into the latency issues our operators are seeing. It is all operators in the new experience (myself included). For some users it may not be such a big deal, but we use workfront as our daily checklist tool so we are marking several hundred tasks complete all day long very quickly one right after another. Since it is taking 3-4 minutes to update across the project, we have multiple people "reworking" the same task because it is lagging in the showing as complete.

[RandyRoberts]

In my experience NWE is incredibly slow. Especially when trying to access items in the waffle (main) menu. Sometimes I have to refresh after about 45 seconds of spinning ball, and sometimes it takes 4 or 5 refreshes. I don't blame anyone for not wanting to switch.

[CalvinFold]

Oh yeah, NWE is slow…and bugging our users.

Our other annoyance is sometimes you create a task and it vanishes on commit, sometimes for minutes at a time, and having to tell users to "keep refreshing until it appears" gets old fast.

What actually happens is I waste alot of time responding to these as support requests, or they keep recreating the task until one sticks, only to realize they now have three copies of the same task to clean up.

My last peeve is that we have about 24 training documents and two training videos that we keep having to update because WF did not get ALL of the NWE elements off the Classic interface style at launch. And every time they finally convert a section (like Task editing in 21.2) I have tweak the docs yet again to avoid confusing the users.

[jboston]

Hi Randy,

The experience you outlined is definitely not expected. Please submit this to Workfront Support so we can better work with you to isolate and improve this experience.

Specifically, if your are seeing 45 seconds on all pages of the application, then I would first recommend you double check to ensure your firewall (if applicable at your company) has the correct configurations. You can reference this article and I would double check that events.split.io and sdk.split.io is enabled as this could slow down response times. Workfront Support can help investigate why this occurring and provide better communication on any issue resolutions.

[JillAc]

I’m going to chime in too. The main issue I experience is that when switching tabs the page doesn’t refresh automatically. For example in a project, after assigning staff and clicking back to the task list, the list doesn’t update until I manually refresh the page to show the assignments in the task list. This didn’t happen in Classic.

[MarlaDr]

Josh, none of the links in your response are working. I either get the Oops message or the 404 error. Has that information moved? We are very interested in this information.

[jboston]

Hi Maria, sorry yes it does look like the link was updated. Here is the updated link.

https://one.workfront.com/s/document-item?bundleId=the-new-workfront-experience&topicId=Content%2FAd...

[ElenaDooley]

Just joining the echo chamber, that the latency of NWE has been a big complaint from my users as well. Not sure if submitting a ticket to Workfront Support would help, though, because it's difficult to replicate the issue; it's very individualized and could also have add'l factors like user's bandwidth, browser version and of course, amt of data of the page loading. I usually just ask the user to try basic troubleshooting tips and to keep me updated...

[jboston]

Hi Elena,

Yes, if there is a specific area or even a general latency issue please submit this to Workfront Support. As you mentioned, there are additional factors that Support can help you troubleshoot to understand where in the network these issues are occurring. On the Workfront side, we are working on improvements in key areas of the new Workfront experience to provide better performance. If you are seeing any issues, please let us know by contacting Support as this will help us focus improvements to improve your experience.

[CalvinFold]

I complained about the overall slowness and constant need to refresh the browser and the ticket was closed as a "we know, we're working on it"…00242555. But it was very general/generic, and no ETA.

[RandyRoberts]

Same here

[PaulaKo]

We submitted a ticket and did see improvements. Our agent spent time with us and we could not replicate but then spent time on his own and saw the issues. Things have improved for us drastically. Good luck!

[WendyCr1]

Thanks all, this is really helpful. I am just now working on transitioning user groups to NWE. The new 21.2 release this week states that performance has been addressed. Can anyone confirm that and to what degree - if slowness is still a Workfront problem? Also, Is there a recommended location where other NWE issues are listed so I can prepare appropriately or even delay transition? I do see a few other issues listed above I will test out. But, I have come across a at least one, so far, myself. Thanks!!!