What is Adobe Workfront?
Workfront is a work management application that helps an organization keep all its work in one place.
It manages projects, tasks, resources and documents, allocates budgets, and produces reports and analytics. At heart, it standardizes processes and establishes governance across an organization.
A project manager creates projects and their tasks, assigns tasks to the team and sets due dates. The project status section tracks each project's state, based on the updates team members enter.
What can Workfront do out of the box?
Workfront comes with project templates, custom forms and approval workflows, all highly customizable. Its capabilities include:
- agile storyboard management
- resource management
- project and task management
- project planning and scheduling
- time tracking
- budgets, projections and spending
- status tracking
- task and progress tracking
- milestone, time and expense tracking
- alerts and notifications
- custom dashboards
Workfront integration with AEM
Workfront integrates easily with Adobe Experience Manager. You create projects and tasks in Workfront — for example, a marketing promotion with asset design subtasks — and once the assets are ready they are pushed to AEM. Once connected, asset metadata can be enriched in both systems while AEM assets are synced (pushed and pulled) with Workfront.
AEM-specific features in Workfront
- Linked project folders organize folders and taxonomy between AEM and Workfront. Folders, subfolders and metadata can be created and linked or synced between the two.
- Metadata sync. Create an AEM metadata schema (Workfront asset details) and send it to Workfront. Once linked, the AEM Assets metadata view gets a Workfront asset details tab where all metadata is synced.
- Version control of assets across AEM and Workfront.
- Content creation and sync. A content creation task can deliver its content to AEM as a Content Fragment model; using the same project ID, the assets can then be authored on a page.
- Automation. Actions can trigger activity in both AEM and Workfront. Once the connector is configured, AEM workflows can update Workfront tasks, attach custom forms to work types, and automate publishing based on predefined conditions.
Which AEM versions work with Workfront?
AEM 6.4 through AEM as a Cloud Service.
Workfront licenses and access levels
At the time of writing, Workfront had four paid license types, each giving a different level of access. Access levels are tied to licenses: as an administrator, instead of assigning a license to a user, you assign the access level attached to that license.
| License | Access level |
|---|---|
| Plan | System Administrator, Planner |
| Work | Worker |
| Review | Reviewer |
| External | External User — not a paid license; meant for sharing documents with collaborators who do not use Workfront |
Adding users
If the organization has been onboarded to the Adobe Business Platform, users are managed in the Adobe Admin Console: granting admin access, adding, deactivating, deleting and bulk-editing users, and importing them.
Built-in access levels
- System Administrator (Plan license)
- Planner (Plan license) — creates and manages work: plans and manages projects, builds and shares reports, adds users, edits project templates, creates portfolios
- Worker (Work license) — works on the tasks a manager assigns
- Reviewer (Review license)
- Requestor (Request license)
- External User (External Email license)
Permissions
| Edit | Create, edit, delete and share the Workfront object |
| View | Review and share the Workfront object |
| No Access | Cannot access the Workfront object |
Custom access levels
If you need a custom Planner, Worker, Requestor or Reviewer access level, copy the built-in one and set how much access it allows for each object type. An access level defines what its users can see and do with:
- projects
- tasks
- issues
- portfolios
- reports, dashboards and calendars
- filters, views and groupings
- documents
- other users
- templates
- financial data
- resource management
- Scenario Planner
- Workfront Goals
SSO and Active Directory
Workfront can be configured with SAML 2.0, with SAML 1.1 through ADFS, or with Azure Active Directory. Adobe recommends SAML 2.0.
Workfront's centrally managed single sign-on integrates with an existing corporate SSO solution, is easy to set up and manage, and is available to both OnDemand and OnPremise enterprise customers. The organization sets up an SSO application, such as LDAP or Active Directory, and Workfront is configured to talk to it.
If the organization has been onboarded to the Adobe Business Platform, users reach Workfront through it and are managed in the Adobe Admin Console. SSO is then handled by the Adobe Business Platform and enabled automatically, with no separate configuration.
Importing users
If users already exist in a system with SSO credentials, their IDs can be imported into Workfront from a CSV file.
Third-party integrations
- Built-in integrations — configured from Workfront or by installing the Workfront add-in in another application. They cover the most common business apps, such as Dropbox, Slack and Google Drive, and Adobe products such as Creative Cloud and AEM Assets.
- Custom OAuth2 applications — Workfront administrators can create OAuth2 applications that let other applications, including in-house ones, access Workfront data with the user's permission.
- Workfront API — a public RESTful API over HTTP for building your own integrations.
- Document webhooks — a set of API endpoints through which Workfront makes authorized calls to an external document provider, so anyone can build a connector for any document storage provider.
What is Workfront Fusion?
Workfront Fusion connects Workfront with other applications by automating workflows across multiple apps and web services — scenarios where the apps work together to complete a task. Workflows are configured in a visual interface, so development knowledge is not required.
Conclusion
Workfront improves operational efficiency and accuracy and reduces the need for extra resources through automation. Its integration with AEM currently centres on AEM Assets. Workfront is also one of the applications that use Assets Essentials as their asset experience.