Thanks George for the support on this post. That might be a solution for our enhancement request process from clients. At least we would get some type of reference number that is searchable.
It still boggles my mind that Asana has built a database that can search its own reference numbers that are placed in a url, but the only way to get or see that reference number is to find the task first and copy/paste the 16 digit reference number from the tail end of a url. My passwords aren’t even that long.
Hi Peter, yes over a year and Asana does not seem to care about this one. If we were not so heavily invested in the number of projects and tasks in the system we would have found something else that had the ability to have reference numbers. They are spending more time on their own sales process by sending email after email to members of my own team to see if they want to upgrade. Asinine.
Yep - Our IT team is ditching Asana purely because of this. My product team would like to stick with Asana but this lack of a simple ID number makes it hard.
Hi Tim, yes it is unfortunate but also consistent with their business practice. Some higher up at Asana decided “No ID numbers for you!” and it will never materialize. They will keep losing clients this way (even though a simple fix) but keep gaining more with their predatory sales techniques on already existing users. I would love to see how that have mapped out this business model.
Hi Phan,
Yes, it shows up in the search dropdwon, but not if you enter it in search and enter, it says No Results. But the whole point of this string is that they do not have it the ID number in the actual task. It is in the URL. Such a simple thing that they can’t get through their heads.
JIRA is doing a heck of a job in this regard. We use JIRA at my day job. JIRA requires a project code at the time of creating a project. All tickets are create with sequence number starting with 1. Let us say I gave my project Harwant Pannu a project code / initials of HP and ticket numbers HP-1, HP-2 and so on. Anyone who is in multi-project meetings going over a large number ticket will appreciate the value of easy conversations like “What is the status of HP-2?” . JIRA also auto link other tickets as soon as you put the ticket number like HP-2 in description or comments.
Kicking the can here, this would be a great feature to see in Asana, especially given the introduction of Forms that can be used to take requests from internal or external sources (e.g. clients). ClickUp has made a point to point out their task IDs for tracking. I don’t think it’s a great implementation but it’s something more than a super long string of numbers in a URL bar.
I’d love to let go of my ZenDesk subscription and just use Asana, while also not having to put together a hack using Zapier and other options to add a simple ID number.
It would be great to have task id’s in a similar matter like they in JIRA for example. There is a short id for project and then increasing counter number for each created task. So if I give our project an id of PROJ and create the first task, it would have an id PROJ-1.
That would be great if you could implement this. Or is there a support in your API to do this kind of extensions ourselves?
You could certainly use the API to add ID numbers to tasks - that’s how the 3rd party apps mentioned in this thread are adding IDs to tasks. You’d use either Events or Webhooks to know when a new task is added to a project, and when you detect a new task, add an ID to it (either to the task name and/or to a custom field). You’d need to manage the IDs yourself to insure uniqueness.
Asana does not currently send notifications when a new project is created. However, once this becomes available (I believe it is in the works) we will have this option available as well.
So for the time being, we only apply a unique number to tasks.
