I am an admin for the Asana instance in our company - where almost all of our Asana instance is used by our Marketing Team (Enterprise Licenses). We are trying to encourage adoption of Asana for messaging, and for status updates so that all project, task and inititaive focused conversation is tied to the relevant project and/or portfolio.
For example, we have a team that works on and shares out a Monthly Business Review. They have been using an Asana project to track the work leading up to the review, review creation and review shareout - but historically have been sharing via email. We reccommended the team use Asana Messages to share the update with the audience and project by putting the project and individuals needing to recieve the update in the “to”. We since learned that while majority of the audience are individuals in our marketers in our Asana instance, there is a team that the update also needs to be shared with - that is not in Asana.
How can we share the update with the team not in Asana without duplicating the effort of share out? Are there best practices when it comes to collaborating and/or sharing information with people who are not Asana users? There are other instances of cross functional collaboration with other teams in our company that are not using Asana, so any reccommendations, and general information would be super helpful!
That might be tricky. Natively I don’t think there is functionality for that.
Assuming these updates are a kind of status-update, I’d use Status-updates instead of messages. This forces the person updating the status to at least add an indication of project health, and has other benefits. More info on status updates here: The 5 minute status update
The workaround I’d try is the following:
Enable email notifications for status-updates (under: Settings > Notifications > Email notifications > Communication
Create an email automation that: Checks if it is an update regarding this specific project, and if true forwards the email to the corresponding team.
This would require some tinkering and testing I’d guess. And as this is functionality outside of Asana and specific to your email client I don’t think this forum is the best place to continue discussing the specifics of this solution.
Note that this is a bit of a time-bomb, as this solution stops working as soon as you stop working there.
If you want some assistance with this feel free to reach out in DM to plan a free call.
Just want to be clear that if View Only Licenses might be of interest to the requestor, they require an Enterprise plan (and can’t be used with Divisions).
Thank you @lpb@Jan-Rienk@Ka_Nishiyama for your input. I am exploring view only licenses, but also exploring triggering an email send in outlook based on the completion of the task using rules. While this may not provide a status update to these non-users, I think it could get us closer to keeping key partners up to date despite not being in Asana!
Also, confirming its an enterprise license and we are not in a division/do not have divisions.
We had our Instiutional Research department create a Power BI dashboard that uses an API to export tasks into a single location. Anyone without an ASNA license can visit this dashboard to see updates (task status). There’s an option to email folks out of Power BI so that might be an option if you have the staff to do something like this for you.
Thanks again for the input, all! What we’re moving forward with in the particular case of informing key partners of a new Monthly Business Reviews (MBR):
In the project we’ve set up a specific section for the tasks that output the final MBR.
We created a task template for each Monthly Business Review that has the two sub tasks blocking the parent task - to create consistency and remind users of process. Subtask 1 is to create the MBR. Subtask 2 is to Link final MBR and Key Takeaways to Parent Task Description. Once both are complete, the parent task becomes available to complete.
We added a rule for any parent task that gets marked complete in this section to trigger an Outlook email to all those needing to be informed that pulls in the task description which has the final MBR link and key takeaways.
We also included, in the triggered outlook email, that replys be sent to the project (x+projectID@mail.asana.com). so that any replies get added as a new task in the project. Is there a way we could get these to link back to the original task? We have an additional rule set up that auto assigns these replies.
With all our testing, these seems like a decent workaround for now. Curious if anyone sees any holes with this plan.
