Short ID for tasks

Asana is a beautifully made, elegant tool, but without having short, concise task references, I couldn’t migrate our company over. It feels like that is such a simple feature to implement. It just requires a few changes to the URL structure including something like a unique company name set at the account level. Of course you would need to keep the old Id’s running in parallel to be sure the old links still work, but that’s easy enough. It literally feels like a 2 day job. There are at least 50 customers lost on this thread, and we know how many more have seen this but not replied.

Who is in charge over there? That seems like a lot of lost revenue for 2 days work ? It is quite a shame as I was pretty excited to migrate our company over. Your tool is amazing. We are doing a complete switch over to the new Jira in the next few weeks. This includes moving all of our internal departments (service desk, PM’s, developers) to a centralised tool. Once that happens there is no going back. We are speaking about 50 + employees here, so if anybody over there hears this, and you’re able to get this feature implemented in the coming weeks, reach out to me so we can speak further about costs and make a deal.

You know you could just hire a contractor to add this simple feature in you know !

I look forward to hearing from your team

Nima

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I am absolutely stunned this feature is not supported and remains unaddressed for over two years!

A human-readable means to talk about a task is crucial. A sequentially updating number (often with a human-readable prefix) is pretty standard (look at JIRA, Phabricator, Github Issues
)

Does the Asana development team manage their tasks in Asana? How do they refer to Asana tasks in their version control commits? Do you Slack each other huge URLs of garbled numbers?

(I can’t help but notice the discourse app used for this forum has URLs with a sequentially updating format like .../<post-id>/<comment-id>.)

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Indeed, Asana may be used within a lot of different companies, so maybe all of them don’t need this feature, but for companies in the IT world, it is really an important feature to have.

Can Asana reconsider? Or at least discuss the feature with the Product Owner team and give a feedback?

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Not at all to negate the request for Asana to add this feature, but FYI for those that haven’t run across them yet, there are some solutions that have been discussed in the forum for providing unique task IDs:

@Phil_Seeman Thanks for including the four possible solutions from 3rd parties, however, I have have two major concerns with these options:

  1. What happens if the 3rd party ceases to exist? Are we to invest both time and money into a solution that works for a while, then one day, it simply doesn’t?
  2. None of these solutions offer the level of customization that could/should be offered by Asana.

I’m really astounded that no one from Asana has chimed in on this thread considering how long users have been asking for this type of solution. Asana - please listen and realize that other platforms are being chosen over Asana simply because this one feature is not offered.

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We have fixed this problem with YOURLS (https://yourls.org/) it is open source (so not going anywhere and gets security updates as needed). We host it on our own server.

What I like is we have control over the id’s that are created (format and content) and as a nifty bonus it creates short URLs that we use to represent, tickets, user stories, and other deliverable documents. The other aspect I like is by using the intermediate of the URL we can reassign to a completely different technology the link. Change from one drive to google drive, no problem update links and the document id still works. Change from asana to another task management system no problem (well a lot of work but still your quality documentation remains functional because artifacts are tagged with the shortened URL

Please make this possible. We really need this for Asana to be usable. Thanks

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This issue seems to have been around since early 2017 and still no actual response from the Asana side. It more like sounds like this is totally ignored. We have been using Asana now for about half a year and as we do software, missing a clear human readable id is been a critical flaw for us. We can not talk as a team like: “can you look the task 1123242342343?” or mark on Github that this task is related into 1123242342343 in a way that it helps our team be effective. Clear short id’s like JIRA has PROJ_3 as id something that humans can read, remember and talk about.

Asana has been a great tool in many ways and good fit for us. But because of this is something that we as company really need and at same time, we are getting a feeling that this issue is not seen as important from Asana side, I am afraid that we are forced to look for other solutions for our project and task management .

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Yes Indeed, we will also switch to Jira soon because of this missing feature. It’s sadly hilarious.

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We were tired of waiting and moved over to Trello who offer a free third party addon called card numbers. It works well.

Adding nice workload screens is great, but this feature should really be scheduled
 it is really a high demand regarding companies working in the IT and marketing industries, at least, and it’s probably a high percentage of your customers.

Could you please give some feedbacks about it? You definitely don’t consider working on it?

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There have been a number of posts and request about this functionality, but Asana has not responded to any on them for quite some time.

There a couple of external services that can provide such functionality, or at least partially, however:

  1. Using an external service means:
  • additional cost for the organisation, which can be an issue
  • sharing your entire data with third parties, which can be a major security problem and is a concern for IT - they will never allow us to share our data with third parties that are not clear about their terms, etc
  • this increases the amount of housekeeping which is required, since now more systems and workflows need to be maintained

The best solution is that Asana develops a solution which covers at least the basics and then if anyone needs something extra or specific to search for a partner.

I would personally be very happy with the following

  1. each task to have an unique ID which is human readable
  • this way each task has a “unieque name” and can be referenced more easily
  1. each project to have an Asana custom field - providing unique numbers with user defined format for this particular project
  • this way each “process” that we map in Asana can give an unique number.
    For example lets say that we have multiple project that cover one workflow
    Project 1 - offers
    Project 2 - installations
    Project 3 - deliveries
    Since all of them generate different documents, etc. each one needs to have its own continuous numberring like OF0001, OF0002, INST0001, etc.
  • changing or adding to the task name a unique number in my opinion is a bad idea, since a task can be added to multiple projects and thus the name will become a mess.

Since this is an issue which has been raised a number of times, I would like to encourage Asana to:

  • respond to any of these threads with a bit more information
  • take this as a product feature request and plan for it

!!!

  • open its plan for development a little bit, because this secrecy is not helping big organisation, creates a huge amount of manual work for something that will be solved soon, etc.
  • very often even support and the person we talked to from sales could not give us even an idea of that will be developed next.
  • no details are needed, as those can change, but general idea of what is coming and which problems will be tackled will be greatly appreciated and useful
  • keeping the product roadmap secret makes sense if your users are people (like Facebook), but not if they are companies, since for companies planning is key (hence the need to pay for a tool like Asana)
  • competition should not be a worry, as if it is, that there are bigger problems that just some features

I have contacted support numerous times with product and feature request and we are always pointed to post in the forum, but my feeling is that it is not reaching the development and management of Asana and therefore it has little practical value.

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I am fully agreeing with @IvanStaykov

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Many customers of mine ask to me if ASANA can show an ID for every task, as JIRA does.
Thanks.

Human-readable Task IDs are desperately needed.

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When referring to a task among a team, it is helpful to say “look at #34,” or “See 2/5/2020 (#34).” We add these numbers manually to some of our task lists. It would be nice to have a unique identifier that is added automatically when a task is created, that we could use for reference and communication.,

There are already a couple things that might help.

You can directly link a task by opening the task details, and clicking the link icon as shown below:

image

You can also display row numbers by adjusting your settings:

Will look like:

Note: each user would have to do this for it to be a quick way to reference a task. Also notice the numbering starts over within each section.

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This is really useful for using Asana in Agile, for reading the boards. And it would be great if in the links to tasks that populate with @mentions you could see this info, too.

I am fearful of ending up with hosts of tasks called “refactor the code” as my Asana gets months and years old. How do you keep track of those without loads of effort to come up with some artificial way to name them otherwise?

I have just come back to this thread today because this need is coming up more and more as I work through my trial and decide on Asana. This, and a few other such threads, have me concerned about the development priorities of Asana:

The other tool I am considering is Wrike, similar problem - a ton of old requests of relative simplicity, including this same one in fact!, and little activity. I wonder if these two apps, essentially like Coke and Pepsi as they are very frequently compared to each other (as opposed to an array of related, but somewhat different stuff like Monday, Hive, ClickUp, etc.), have deep tech debt that they basically try to hide by ignoring users in public forums basically begging for simple fixes.

Asana and Wrike are both at this point over a decade old.

Hopefully somebody is reading these “protests” here in the community and there will be a movement to address this stuff. But for now one of the big red flags for me with Asana is the proliferation of these requests, and how much they are ignored. So at least in my case, if I don’t go forward with Asana, it will be partly because I am worried from what I read in the forums about their lack of addressing customer needs!

So could not agree with you more Ivan!

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Not to nullify your comment - I totally get it and sometimes I’m also frustrated by things that don’t get done which I think should - but just wanting to point out that it can be misleading relying too much on the forum. It’s one of MANY inputs that Asana uses to determine what to work on. They have tens of thousands of paying organizational customers and well over a million users (just stop and think about those numbers for a sec and servicing that many people and trying to keep them all happy!); the forum represents a vocal but ultimately small portion of that total. Their sales and service people get LOTS of input that we never see here. Honestly as a software developer and entrepreneur, I don’t envy them having to make the decisions they do as to priorities!

Just my $.02 USD


1 Like