Well done asana for stepping up the game and allowing custom project templates! I feel this is going to be a great thing to have!
Now, I am looking even further, and maybe outside the scope of asana, but in the scope (and hopefully in the spirit) of this community. What about starting a nice new category where we can upload our own project templates?
I feel that already today our community has a group of amazing people who are sharing their knowledge (I learned from many of them) and this can be a fabulous way of helping each other.
It would be a great way of learning from each other and helping each other to make our own templates better.
PS: I know about templana, but I am more of a community-sharing driven guy!
Custom templates being enabled for me last night was just amazing, really brightened my evening! Especially as I had just finished doing a designer-focused onboarding template project.
I think it would be really interesting to be able to share our own templates here - I think they may be moving towards that in the future with that template importer from the trainings, but if not it definitely should be discussed!
The only drawback for me is that most of my templates include pretty sensitive information in the descriptions/etc. so I might not be able to contribute a lot, but I love the idea =)
This thread embodies the sense of community that I love about thisā¦wellā¦Community! Thanks for the idea @Carlo! I would be delighted to make this happen. Letās explore this idea further.
I am curious to hear @Lili_Jiang and @Matt_Bramlageās input, whether online or offline, about how we could integrate templates into this community and what sharing might look like. A few outstanding questions I have are first, how would we share templates? Simple screenshots or could we create a system that mirrors the templates we already have in Asana? Could customer templates from the community then live in Asana template options, as well? The list goes on. @Shannon_McNeil, Lili, and Matt, what questions do you think we should be asking as we consider setting up something like this?
@Carlo and @Caisha - what does your ideal setup look like?
I believe that technically it should not be a big deal: you can export a project and I am sure there is a way or importing it. CSV export/Import and the job is done.
@Caisha When I export a template, I generally keep it very non descriptive in terms of the data I manage. It would take me some minuted to copy a template, remove the details I want to keep private and export it.
@Alexis in my opinion, sharing templates should be as simple as this:
Descriptive title
screenshot(s)
CSV file of the project export
Description of the ins and outs of the template
I would also keep a sticky post containing the list of the āmost votedā templates, so newcomers could find them easily!
Thanks, @Carlo! Iām going to create a task for myself to consider creating a template sharing space for the Community. I canāt promise a timeline but I think it sounds like a great idea. Letās see what we can do!
As far as I have seen, you can export a project from asana in JSON or CSV. If we had the possibility to import a project from the same sources, big part of this would be achievable.
Now I may miss some details, but starting small is already a good start. If Templana allows a way of doing it, I am sure we are close to an initial version already!
Hi,
I am Bastien, founder of Templana! Thanks for quoting our website, indeed I believe we are currently the closest thing to what you describe as a ācommunity for templatesā. We have been around for three years and almost reached 50k templates downloaded.
Asana does not offer an import feature yet (or I missed it!). This is why Templana is currently the easiest way to import a template from the outside world. The way it works: we have a home-made tool in which I connect with my Asana account and then select a project I was invited to, the tool turns it into a JSON file, than we can feed into our system. When someone wants one of our template, the server fetches this JSON file and makes as many API requests as possible. A import feature in Asana would be a game changer, and I am not sure yet how we would pivot when it will be come out.
Anyway, our main obstacle today is people: many people want to submit their template, 90% of them stop answering emails when you ask for an access to their template, a title and a picture. We chose not to let people create template themselves but rather have everything go through us to ensure the content reaches a certain quality.
We are more than happy to host many more templates. In your opinion, do you think our creation process is the main problem here? Or do you think templana.com in its approach does not feel like a community? I am more than happy to work on a solution with the community!
@Carlo thanks for starting this conversation.
My case for this is slightly different. I was in the process of trying to work out how to share a project template with a guest so they could copy and use it in their own organisation.
So far I havenāt been able to work out how to do this.
If you go to a project you own, and click the drop down carrot (like you would to edit the name or description) - if you see a āsave as templateā then you are in the tester group.
@Jarrod_Kopp, I did not either but this is common. But I have been before. You were not the last person picked in gym class in school were you The good news is that it is in progress and if it is in beta testing it usually means its not to far down the road.
A very simple approach for very simple templates is to just multiple-select all the tasks in a project, hit Ctrl-C to copy, and then paste the list into a Community post like this:
Groceries:
Milk
Bread
Other Errands:
Dry Cleaning
Then anyone can copy the list and paste it on a new line in their own project. This doesnāt bring any other attributes like custom fields or even subtasks, but it might be useful in some cases. It would also be helpful to include a screenshot.
I would like to dig up this thread and offer my help again. I noted that @Carlo did not want the templates to be available publicly on Templana. What if I create a private section in Templana, password-protected or not, available on Templana, anything is possible with Asana for example, where we can all share our templates?
The only drawback at the moment is the creation process, I need to be invited on the project and manual import them into the system. My assistant can certainly do it, depends on the number of templates we are talking about.
@Alexis is there another plan to incorporate it into the Community?
@Bastien_Siebman I may have expressed myself badly or I havenāt dug enough in Templanaā¦ I think that open source templates are great! If my memory serves me well, I just thought that the community would have been the best place where to share them!
Honestly I am more than open to suggestions and to collaborations!
I think Templana would be the easiest tool to share a template right now, but it is not super easy to setup a template (yet), that is the only drawback.
This is still a possibility for the Community! My apologies for letting it slip. Iāll be happy to revisit the idea in the very near future! Needless to say, feel free to also carry on your Templana route too.
