This has been raised by community members upon the launch of the new People custom field type, but I wanted to break this out as its own feature request.
My proposal is for the custom field “Edit Field” modal to include a checkbox to “Add selected individuals as collaborators on the task.” This would provide a choice for end users, some of whom may want identified individuals added to the task whereas others may not.
Alternatively, rather than establishing a setting at the custom field level, a new rule could be introduced that enables an action based off the values of a given field (i.e. for each person value entered into the People field, add that same value as a collaborator on the task).
Both of the above solutions would address the need to add collaborators to tasks much more efficiently than creating a rule for each value (read: person) added to the field.
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I agree this would be very helpful to have!
I am 99% certain this was actually part of the initial launch: I have seen this, I am sure! Maybe it was removed afterwards?
Hi @Stephen-Patterson, thanks for this feedback!
It is currently possible to set up Rules using the People custom field: Introducing People Custom Field! 👥 - #63.
You can create a Rule similar to Trigger: People field changed > User A added, Trigger: User A added as Collaborator.
It’s not possible to add all users tagged by the People field as collaborators just yet but this is on our Product team’s radar. I’ll let you know if this changes!
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Is this only available to Business suite? im using premium but i don’t see it in my Rules
Yes, it is available for Business only
@Rebecca_McGrath I am a little confused by the comment. I don’t see the People field type as an option in the forms? So it seems the only way to use what you suggest would be to manually update that field on a task in a project. If that is the suggestion, I don’t think it makes sense since it is as many clicks on just manually adding a collaborator.
Don’t see it either. @Jaro_Necesito : Can you please explain how to add a collaborator as People field inside the form? Thanks!
@Howard_Weinstein , @Malik_Dakdaki ,
Rebecca’s proposed rule would look something like this using a custom rule (Business plan and above)
You would have to setup one rule per person to achieve this. Note there is (currently) a limit of 50 rules per project so if you have many members then this may be limiting (apart from the manual work setting up all these rules and maintaining them). There is also a workaround if you need more than 50 rules. Hopefully this is something that will be solved with variables, perhaps coming in the near future. 
Similarly, but perhaps sooner, the People field should logically be soon available in Forms. To confirm, it is not currently available. (before you ask, I do not work for Asana, thus not aware of the roadmap which they do not make public).
If you can’t wait for all the above, you could create a single-select custom field with the names of all your members as the options of the dropdown question that can be inserted in a form. This field would populate your tasks from form submissions, therefore you could create rules that get triggered based on this custom field. Note, that the names of all the people in the dropdown will be visible to anyone using the form, which might be fine for internal use.
But depending on your use case, instead of showing people/members in the dropdown list of the form, you could ‘mask’ this to outsiders/clients by having them choose from a dropdown list such as ‘departments’ or ‘services’ - then you would have rules that for eg. trigger ‘HR department’ selected, thus add [members of HR] as collaborators and set [HR manager] as assignee, for example. Depends on your use case really.
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Thanks for the update, but that looks like a pretty kludgy solution and a maintenance nightmare to make up for a lack of functionality.
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Really seems like this should be the default functionality – if you have a field specific to user accounts, seems like majority of use cases would want that user to be involved in the task they are related to!
This caused some communication problems for us – it seemed so obvious that they would be added as collaborators that we assumed they were.
Very disappointed that a business level rule is the only solution to what should definitely be default behavior and require no intervention!
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+1 Vote for this much needed feature. The People field honestly has very limited utility if they’re not added as collaborators. Totally agree with @Billy_Valvo. This is recipe for confusion and I don’t know if we can utilize People until more functionality is added.
Hi everyone, thanks for sharing your feedback with us!
Today, I’m excited to announce we just launched a new pop-up notice in the task pane that allows you to quickly add users in people custom field as task collaborators.
Please note, the pop-up window will appear only when you add users to the people field who are not task collaborators yet.
We don’t have immediate plans to implement an option to automatically add all users in people custom fields as collaborators in all tasks, but hopefully this option would allow you to add collaborators faster when needed!
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out via the Tips and Tricks category!
Have a nice day!
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