I know this is a potentially unusual use case, but I am wondering if it is possible to duplicate a project and keep task comments?
It seems like everything else can be copied over when duplicating a project except for comments.
Our particular use case is that we are using a Project template for monthly operations reviews and my CEO would like to see comments carry over from the month prior so the manager assigned that monthly project can easily refer back to the comment history without having to navigate to the older / archived projects.
It doesn’t look like comments can be saved as part of the template, which makes a bit more sense, so I’m just wondering if anyone is aware of a way to preserve comment history.
Failing that, would be looking one of the following options:
- 3rd-party tool to import comments into existing tasks
- Best practices around maintaining tasks that never truly close.
Regarding the 2nd point above, I am thinking of an approach where we duplicate the project each month and then immediately archive it, making that the historical version, which would allow us to keep working off the main project with the history of comments. However, then we face the same issue with not having relevant comments for the tasks completed in the prior month in the now archived project.
@Ben_Brenner The only possible workaround might be if the it’s only a few tasks. I think Duplicate Tasks has the ability to duplicate comments. But as I am not on the web, I can’t confirm.
Jason.
Actually the Kothar tool I believe does something with comments. I just can’t remember if it duplicates in same organization… @Kothar will know this answer.
Unfortunately no support for comments in standard duplicate project functionality.
1 Like
I checked out Kothar, it looks like it’s moreso used for copying over projects to another workspace, which isn’t quite what I’m looking for.
My only other thought is to either manually copy over comments, which isn’t ideal, or to export everything to a spreadsheet via Bridge24 or another connector.
@Ben_Brenner I am the owner of Sendana Add Sendana Tools-Sendana Add- A Novel Way to Add and/or Transfer Projects and Tasks In Mass - #19 by James_Carl When I developed this tool I intentionally left comment off because of the processing overhead. It is not that it cannot be done if the API has access but I would have to talk to my programmer. PM me if you wish to discuss further.
1 Like
Thanks @James_Carl, @Ben_Brenner. The asana.kothar.net tool does allow copies within the same workspace, and copies comments, however there is a limitation: comments can’t be created with the original authors intact, as the tool is acting on one user’s behalf. It creates a single comment with a log of the comment history instead.
If you are rolling a project over each month by copying a copy of a copy, etc. this may lead to some weird effects.
Mike.
1 Like
Thanks, @Kothar , I’ll check it out again. Do you have any screenshot / examples of what this consolidated comments view looks like?
Nevermind, I figured it out. I supposed I could go in and edit the comment afterwards to get soem of the irrelevant commentary and task update history and carries over.
1 Like
Yep, it’s a bit of a blunt instrument at the moment unfortunately.
Ben is not the only one with this situation. We do the same as he. Because we integrate with Everhour for time tracking, and we have monthly estimated time for our “retainer” projects, I duplicate these projects each month including all items available, then complete and archive the old month’s projects. However, we lose the comment string. And another problem with this is that old asana email notifications link back, of course, to the old project. It would be great if there was an option to include the comment string in the duplicated project. I had to go into each task to look for comments and manually add them in to the new duplicated project - truly time consuming, and doesn’t alleviate links from previous email notifications. I doubt that this is an unusual request/need.
@Ben_Brenner - I just put the following comment into the Duplicate Project / Task & Keep Comment History? string from 2019. Did you ever come up with a solution that worked for you regarding comment strings when duplicating projects? I’d be interested to know.
My comment from a few minutes ago:
Ben is not the only one with this situation. We do the same as he. Because we integrate with Everhour for time tracking, and we have monthly estimated time for our “retainer” projects, I duplicate these projects each month including all items available, then complete and archive the old month’s projects. However, we lose the comment string. And another problem with this is that old asana email notifications link back, of course, to the old project. It would be great if there was an option to include the comment string in the duplicated project. I had to go into each task to look for comments and manually add them in to the new duplicated project - truly time consuming, and doesn’t alleviate links from previous email notifications. I doubt that this is an unusual request/need.
We never found a great solution and the the issue with not closing out comments is that Asana’s comment feed is pretty terrible. It only shows most recent comments vs. everything posted since you last viewed the task. As a result, you don’t have full visibility without expanding the comments which often jumps you to the top of the feed that might be weeks/months old. Also no ability to search or filter comments (within thread or search across Asana) kind of a deal breaker for us.
So did you move away from Asana? We were using FunctionFox for the past several years and moved to Asana + Everhour in September. Because we want to move our company to doing a vast majority of communication through Asana, we just because aware of the comments issue when I archived January projects, duplicating them for our February projects. We took a big hit - and it became impossible to use the Asana report “Tasks I assigned to others”, because the assigner on all of the duplicated projects disappeared. Sigh!
Not yet, but we’re in early stages of evaluating alternative options. Our issues are more so related to reporting on production level work at the same time as long-term planning. The inbox, which we were hoping to replace our Outlook inbox with, also lacking a ton of functionality and it feels like we’ve got more messages jumping between multiple systems.
