I have a number of exciting Flowsana updates to announce today!
Auto-Adjust Workflows: Treat subtasks as dependents
Previously this feature would only adjust the first level of subtasks; now it goes down an additional level to also automatically adjust start/due dates on sub-subtasks.
New rule condition: If task is moved out of a column/section
Both Asana and Flowsana have rule conditions/triggers to act when a task is moved into a certain column/section. Now Flowsana lets you trigger a rule when a task is moved out of a certain column/section! This means in many cases you no longer have to create multiple identical rules to cover moving into every single column/section in a project.
New rule action: Set task's name to [some text value]
You can now set or modify the name of a task based on any Flowsana rule condition/trigger! This action is especially powerful when combined with the new variable substitution capability announced in the next paragraph.
New: Variable substitution in Flowsana rules
Flowsana’s rules now allow you to insert values from custom fields, as well as task, project, and section names, in a number of places.
and Flowsana will replace the string with the value specified by it.
Where can I use these strings?
In the following places:
The If task contains the word or phrase ______ rule condition
The Set custom field ______ to the value ______ rule action
The Set task name to ______ rule action
This opens up a whole new set of possibilities for using rules!
For example, say you want to prepend the name of the project to the front of every task in the project. Easy! Just create this rule:
If task is newly created, set the task’s name to {project.name} - {task.name}
Another example: say you want to add certain emojis to the start of a task’s name when the task enters into a particular state. Here are some examples of what you can do with this type of rule:
If task is marked complete, set the task’s name to {task.name}
If a task has custom field Status set to a value of Waiting, set the task’s name to {task.name}
I can’t wait wait to see what clever rules people come up with using variable substitution!
@Bastien_Siebman… emoji alert! Check out in the above post how you can now automatically add emojis to task names (or text custom fields) based on certain conditions…
Flowsana has some new updates to let you know about… plus a bit of news about an upcoming hotly-requested feature…
Dynamic Duration Workflows
Previously Flowsana always skipped weekends when calculating and assigning task dates. Now there is a Skip Weekends option; you can uncheck it if you want to include weekend days in your workflow.
When you marked a task complete, Flowsana always adjusted the dates of its dependent tasks to that completion date. Now there is an Adjust Dates of Dependents on Task Completion option; uncheck it if you don't want this behavior for a workflow.
Some inconsistencies occurred when you manually updated a task's start or due date. You can still manually change the start and/or due date of a dependent task. However, once you do, that task is now under your manual control and will no longer be changed automatically by Flowsana. If you want to adjust a task and still keep it under workflow control, the way to change it is to adjust its Duration and/or Lag Time fields; if you do that, it will remain under automatic control.
Auto-Assign Workflows
Just as with Dynamic Duration workflows, you can choose to include weekend days in a workflow by unchecking the Skip Weekends option.
Rules: New Condition
A new rule condition has been added:
When a new form is submitted...
What's that - Subtasks, you say?
One of the biggest requests I hear is, "Will Flowsana work with subtasks? I want to include subtasks among my dependent tasks" or "I want to build a rule that applies to subtasks".
I'm excited to announce that work to fully support subtasks in Flowsana is underway! I expect it should be available in the next month or so. "Watch this space" for more details soon.
I guess I’m old-school; since Flowsana is privately-held, I don’t typically discuss business metrics. But it’s doing really well and growing consistently - and there’s some cool new stuff coming later this year.
Most companies are excited to show their growth. Just curious as to the future. Is Flowsana growing and worth introducing to clients that needs these extras or was it just a fad and not really supported moving forward. You literally only had 2 blogs in 2020.
That’s because I spend all my time on engineering and support and not sales/marketing - and mostly because I suck at sales/marketing!
A fair point.
Flowsana started in early 2019; at the beginning, adding on average 3 new subscribing customers per month. It’s now at a little over 340 subscribing customers and currently adding on average 20 new customers per month. (And that’s with little marketing…)
And as I mentioned, there are some exciting Asana things happening this year which Flowsana is poised to take full advantage of!
Hello - I hope this is a quick question - but right now we are limited to 20 “rules” that can be applied to a project. Would Flowsana circumvent this and allow us to add more rules/automation to a single project?
@Phil_Seeman Question for you. Does Flowsana allow for email notifications when there is a task status change? i.e. Goes from form submission, to working, etc. Is there any functionality that allows for the submitter to be notified? Just curious. Thank you!
Question for you, so I can provide an accurate answer: in your case, does the submitter have an Asana account, or is it someone completely external to Asana?
So currently, the way Flowsana works in terms of notifying form submitters is that you can choose to have Flowsana automatically add the form submitter as a collaborator on the task that’s created from the form submission. Then you have the full power of Asana for configuring notifications for task collaborators.
This approach means that the submitter has to be an email address of an existing Asana user in your organization, since collaborators can only be Asana users.
However, we’re planning to enhance Flowsana’s rules capability so that you’ll be able to automate email notifications to go to an email address; that will give you the ability to notify external form submitters when any rule condition (like a change to a Status custom field) is triggered. “Watch this space” regarding that feature (the current plan is to have it available in the next 2 to 3 weeks).
@Phil_Seeman That’s perfect. Thank you so much. Last question (for now), I swear! I believe I read it above, but as far as licensing for Flowsana. I manage my team’s Asana space. I’m not an admin and part of a larger org that uses Asana. But I want to create automation for my team, along with the form responses. Would we only need one license or more in order to build out the automation if I’m the only one doing so?
No worries, please ask as many questions as you need!
Flowsana charges for “Billable Users”, where that’s full Asana users (i.e. guests are free, not charged) in teams that have workflow-enabled projects. So most likely given your description, you would be charged for the users in your team, but not for any other users in the organization outside of your team. There’s some additional info and FAQs about Flowsana pricing and billing here.
{task.name}
{task.name}
