Hi Asana Community!
I’m Michael Chen and I lead product marketing for our Workflows product area. I’m excited to share some exciting new product updates, which many of you got a sneak peek on during our last Asana Together meetup.
As we ramp up in the new year, many of us are reflecting on our habits and finding ways to get more organized, efficient, and prioritize better. The same can be applied to the way we work and finding ways to collaborate and coordinate better with our teammates.
In the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a number of significant updates that will help you build, run, and improve the workflows that power your projects. Whether you are working on a solo project, or partnering with several teams globally, Workflow Builder, Home, and new workflow reporting (collectively known as Asana Flow) will help you create better connections between you, your work and the people you work with. Further, we are also kicking off the Beta phase of App Components, which advances our developer toolkit and allows for more apps to be built directly into the Asana UI.
Let’s dive in!
Workflow Builder
Workflow Builder is a new point-and-click tool to visually build powerful automated workflows—no coding required. With this feature, you can better leverage features like rules, forms, integrations, and more to connect teams across all levels and pillars of your organization and create effective processes from start to finish.
If you’d like to learn more about how to use Workflow Builder and see how we would use it to build a variety of workflows with it, you can sign up for our Workflows Learn-a-thon taking place on Feb 24, 2022 at 10:00 PDT. Claim your spot here.
You can also check out this series of new guide articles dedicated to workflows:
Template Library
To help get you started, we’ve revamped a number of our most popular templates to include more ways to leverage Rules, integrations, and more. We’ve also invited a number of our global customers to share a templatized version of their favorite workflows, so our community can share best practices with one another. These examples include Discovery’s creative production workflow, ClassPass’s campaign management workflow, and Awin’s automated localization workflow. You can read more about them here. Furthermore, we’d encourage you to save your favorite templates within your Asana domain, so others within your organization can leverage the great workflows you have created.
Home
After your workflows have been built, you and your team have a handy way to prioritize the tasks that need to be completed to move work forward. Our recently revamped Home gives you an opportunity to customize this launchpad, so you can quickly dive into the work that matters most. We’re starting with the following selection of widgets, and many more will be coming soon:
- The My Priorities widget provides a view into upcoming, overdue and recently completed tasks, as well as what projects they originated from, making it easy to prioritize your work and contextualize how it fits into the bigger picture.
- The People widget shows the teammates you collaborate with the most, so you can easily assign a task, send a message and view shared work.
- Using the Projects widget, individuals have quick access to recent, frequent and favorite projects where you can easily see the number of tasks that are due in each project and know where to dive first.
- With the Private notepad, you have a place to write notes to help remember and track quick ideas without ever leaving the Asana app, minimizing distractions and context switching.
Workflow Reporting
As your workflow gets used, you may want to see how the process is going and if there are steps that could be improved upon (or kept flowing!). New chart types like line charts, burnup charts, and stacked charts will help you track progress in the view that is most effective for your type of project. We’re also rolling out new reporting functionality such as completion and slippage metrics, which will help you monitor performance on your workflows and provide insights to help you iterate on those processes.
App Components
Lastly, we are continuing to expand our rollout of App Components and enhancing how you can leverage the Asana API. With App Components, developers will have an easier and faster way to build tools that integrate directly within the Asana UI. Whether you are building customizations for your own organization, or are building apps for the broader Asana community, we’re excited to partner with you in making Asana more useful.
With this launch, we are also adding 3 new integrations that leverage App Components:
- Miro: Building on existing Miro + Asana functionality, customers can now integrate Miro’s virtual whiteboard into an Asana task to see key information and activity, giving all teammates the context they need to turn ideas from team brainstorms, planning sessions, or other exercises into actions, without switching between apps.
- Jotform: By automatically sending form responses to Asana Projects, teams can standardize the way they intake data with Jotform, staying organized across collaborators by assigning, automating, and tracking form submissions as standalone Asana tasks.
- Google Drive: Coming soon, customers will be able to stay in sync in Asana when collaborating in Google Docs, Slides or Sheets. Whenever a new comment is added to a Google Drive file that is linked to an Asana task, collaborators will be notified to make sure open feedback or questions don’t slip through the cracks.
We hope you are as excited about these updates as we are. If you’re looking for ideas on how to dive in, grab a seat in our community’s upcoming workflow learn-a-thon, which takes place on February 24, 2022 at 10:00 PDT, and share your ideas or questions in the comments below!
Great to see that all these features will be rolling out soon!
