Introducing People Custom Field! šŸ‘„

English Forum News Product Launches
22

Itā€™s actually not a dropdown list. Take a look at the top image posted in Benā€™s initial post above - it works more like the ā€œtagsā€ field, or like a mention in a social media app - that is, you just start typing a user name, and if it matches, that match shows up. In this way, they can handle organizations that may have thousands (or more ) users. So yes, in effect all of your users are available, and up to 20 of them can be added to a given task.

2 Likes
23

Ah that makes sense. This is a nice addition and hopefully will work well for what we were thinking of using it for. Thanks for the info!

2 Likes
24

Hey all - one issue Iā€™ve seen trying to use this from the API is it only accepts GID people objects to update.

Would be really helpful to be able to pass email strings, and if person exists links that object else allows just displaying of email.

Just hoping to see more non-dependent data be able to create and update tasks.

1 Like
25

Does anyone have any more details on the rollout dates of this feature? Our team has just come across a use case that this would be perfect for - unfortunately it hasnā€™t been rolled out to our account yet. Thanks!

26

Hey @Patrick_Osborne and welcome to the Asana Community Forum :wave:

I guess in late August another update will be posted.

1 Like
27

Hi @Ben_Watkins - very excited to hear about this new field. Will it be available on the Portfolio level as well? I believe thatā€™s where my organization will find the most value with it. Thanks!

5 Likes
28

Will we be able to connect this to forms in the future?

8 Likes
29

@anon71362639, Iā€™m guessing that People Custom Field in Forms is a likelihood in the future, but Asana doesnā€™t publish a roadmap.

Larry

30

Iā€™m a little confused on how this is to be usedā€¦ Does anyone have any good use cases?

3 Likes
31

I used it today to assign a task to a team member that I also want another team member to do. The task is to review a report & prepare notes for an upcoming meeting. Why I like it: Instead of assigning x2 tasks I can keep everything on one thread and also keep all comments/discussion on 1 thread.

2 Likes
32

I am also wondering how this field would add value to a task. I am curious to hear some scenariosā€¦

33

@Ben_Watkins By assigning 2 staff members to an activity, is there a way to see this in the Workload? Our processes have multiple staff working on a single activity, and we use the workload view to see when our resources are available to schedule the next upcoming project.
Thanks!
Itā€™s an amazing feature btw :slight_smile:

1 Like
34

Two ways Iā€™ve used this recently:

  1. Managing a Credit Card expense reporting workflow: the custom field was used to define who is the Credit Card owner (we have 27 different credit card owners in this project). The task is not always assigned to the credit card owner - the task is assigned to who executes during each specific phase of the workflow. The owner custom field helps with creating clarity, reporting, filtering.

  2. RACI matrix - in a project used to scope some deliverables and define ownership, I created 4 custom fields Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

4 Likes
35

Hi - I have two questions -

  1. What is the difference between Assignee and People field?
  2. I am currently using Asana to track multiple projects for my colleagues, and each project has a different owner. However, majority of owners do not have licenses to Asana. If I use the People field, and enter the Owners name, will it automatically issue him/her an user license? (which I do not want to happen)
36

Iā€™ve started using it for a RACI matrix.

1 Like
37

Adding my voice to connect this to collaborators on tasks. Iā€™d like to avoid the extra work of having to add the same people in multiple places.

3 Likes
38

I know he said thereā€™s no way to assign people notifications that theyā€™ve been added to tasks with this feature, but is there any workarounds people have found for this? I donā€™t see the utility in this unless people are notified that theyā€™re added to a task. Maybe Iā€™m missing something here. Thanks!

39

Hi. I found that this type of custom field is not included in the in the Asana API Documentation. It is possible right now to change value of this type of custom field by request to API or it will be possible in the future?

40

@Mateusz_Stabryła, I was wondering the same.

@Zach_Brak - do you have a working example of this? I canā€™t find a request structure which actually populates the field values when creating tasks. An object with a gid is accepted, but results in an empty field.

I would expect to provide an array of User gids to match the way multi-enum values are specified, but this results in an error response:

POST /tasks
{
    "data": {
        "custom_fields": {
            "12028338781111111": [
                "859281111111"
            ]
        },
        "name": "Test people creation",
        "projects": [
            "120283381111111"
        ]
    }
}

Response
{
    "errors": [
        {
            "message": "people_value: Value is not an object",
            "help": "For more information on API status codes and how to handle them, read the docs on errors: https://developers.asana.com/docs/errors"
        }
    ]
}
41

Will it work with custom fields in reports? :slight_smile: