Project templates V2: what we gain, what we lose

@Linda_Preston don’t leave, Asana said they would fix most of those :slight_smile:

Ok, I’ll sit tight.

Thanks!

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@Marie I have heard one user saying their templates were migrated to V2, is the forced migration in progress?

I’d put 11 back on - we can add text to the “how we’ll collaborate” section, but any attached documents, project brief, etc. won’t carry over from the template to the new project!

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Good point, updated!

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#17 is apparently fixed, thanks @Phil_Seeman

Rules that were created from a template are not triggering…

To be honest, this “v2” feels more like a v0.1 alpha. It’s a mess.

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Team,

We need a way to make SURE that the Projects made from Templates do not override our personal notification setting. Our team has about 30 projects made from the same Template and I had to spend a significant amount of unprofitable time yesterday removing everyone from the notification settings, unchecking all those boxes.

We don’t even want the Project owner (the person who used the Template) to be getting notifications of things like “tasks added” and so forth, since there is a large pile of people who will be adding tasks to that project that aren’t germaine to the project owner.

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@Matt5 are you saying that if someone has “tasks added” unticked in their personal profile, the template overrides it?

I discovered some yesterday for sure. The only notification I had checked “yes” in my personal settings was Messages. Yesterday I went through a lot of projects that were created earlier this week and I had all three settings in those projects checked “yes” instead of only “messages”. I don’t know how many, and I didn’t recognize the situation for what it was, so I can’t really explain why.

I also need to try to figure out how the heirarchy works. I’m discovering that I have several Projects (unrelated to the Projects I mention above) which I created about two months ago that have me checked “yes” on all three options for some reason, despite my personal settings only having “messages” checked. Now, the rest of my Team is using these new Projects and I’m getting BLASTED with notifications of people adding tasks.

I really don’t know what the heirarchy is here. If I have my personal settings set such that only “messages” are checked, it seems like Asana should (by default) automatically synchronize that setting across ALL projects.

Admittedly, having the ability to override that personal setting might be nice. If perhaps I have a Project that I need to monitor extremely carefully, it would be nice for Asana to give me a warning saying “Checking this box will override your personal setting, do you wish continue”?

Having the ability to quickly find all the Projects where your notification settings are “not the same” as your personal notification settings would be helpful.

This may all sound like a bunch of whining, but our company has 17 users and we’ll be running hundreds of projects here soon with an additional 5-10 members. It’s going to cost our company a lot of money if we can’t get notifications reigned in. Or even worse, team members losing confidence in using the Asana inbox, assuming it’s just a bunch of junk notifications.

No, the default would only apply to future projects. Also anyone at the moment can change those settings on a per project basis. But I understand your frustration indeed!

I do not see a way to mark a task as a Milestone in a template. Am I just missing it?

@Katie_Kendle, You have to descend into editing the task (like to add metadata and subtasks), then:

Larry

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Ah, got it, thank you so much, @lpb !

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As @Bastien_Siebman and I discussed today, Templates in V2 can no longer be organized into Portfolios. They also cannot be sorted in Team view, so organizing templates has become nearly impossible

Holy smokes – did everyone except me know that completed tasks DO NOT get added to a template when you save the project as a template??

Seems like a really bad oversight (I can’t think of when that would be a good idea for most users).

Here’s an example:
Source project (used to create the template in the next screenshot)

The template created using the screenshot above:

And here’s the project created FROM the template, generated from the 1st project:

I personally don’t have a use-case where I’d want to have tasks already completed when I create a new project from a template. But I’m sure other’s would have a use for that.

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@FreshyJon - the reason it seems odd to me is because often a team will execute a large project, like an annual conference project, and when finished, they decide to turn it into a template for planning the annual conference every year. With the settings working this way, meaning not included completed tasks, they either have to:

  1. uncomplete everything, creating a massive number of unnecessary notification noise, and destroying data for when things were actually completed
    or
  2. Create a duplicate first, and again creating a massive number of unnecessary notification noise.
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Ah yes, that makes total sense. So you don’t want those “completed” tasks to remain as “completed” within the new project template. But instead you want them to actually appear in the template as incomplete (just like all the other tasks would be).

It would be nice if there were an option/prompt when creating a template from an existing project, if the “completed” tasks should come over too or not.

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Great use case for needing to allow inclusion of completed tasks in the template transfer!

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