We'd love your feedback on our new app-only comment additions

English Forum Developers & API
1

We’re excited to tell you about a platform feature we’ve been working on, allowing apps to include richer information on comments in Asana.

To continue to make the Asana platform more accommodating for external content, we’ve developed a new field for comment stories on tasks. This new field in our API, named previews, will allow app developers to post rich content and have it displayed in a more structured and consistent way while also making it easier to differentiate between app-generated and user-created content. The structure also allows various fields to link to the external content, making it easier for users to access the source.

We are currently trialing this new capability with two of our Asana-built integrations: Asana for Gmail and Asana for Slack. These integrations have the ability to attach emails or Slack messages as comments on a task. With the new rich previews, this content is rendered with more clarity compared to regular comments.

Here’s an example of how comments from our Gmail integration will look in the product and API with this new feature:

"previews": [
            {
                "fallback": "From: Jane Smith <janesmith@asana.com>\nHappy New Year!\n\nHello!\r\n\r\nIt's been a while and I'd love to reconnect. Let me know when you are free?\r\n\r\nBest,\r\nJane\r\n",
                "footer": "January 9, 2019 4:56:21 PM PST",
                "header": "Asana for Gmail",
                "header_link": "https://asana.com/apps/google-gmail",
                "html_text": "<body><strong>From: Jane Smith &lt;<a href=\"mailto:janesmith@asana.com\">janesmith@asana.com</a>&gt;</strong>\n\nHello!\r\n\r\nIt's been a while and I'd love to reconnect. Let me know when you are free?\r\n\r\nBest,\r\nJane\r\n</body>",
                "text": "From: Jane Smith <janesmith@asana.com>\n\nHello!\r\n\r\nIt's been a while and I'd love to reconnect. Let me know when you are free?\r\n\r\nBest,\r\nJane\r\n",
                "title": "Happy New Year!",
                "title_link": "https://mail.google.com/#search/abcd@mail.gmail.com"
            }
        ]

Preview
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This feature is experimental and we expect the format and capabilities to evolve and change based on your feedback. As such, the new previews field will be read-only in the API while we collect input on use cases. You will be able to see the preview field populated if you retrieve any new stories posted by our Slack or Gmail integrations since 1/8.

The Asana Platform Team would love your feedback on this new feature and what you would like to see in future iterations. Specifically, we would love to hear how you’d hope to use it, so that our final implementation can be as flexible as our developers need.

If you have interest in using this field for your own app, please also fill out Rich content: developer beta screener and we’ll be in touch to learn more about your ideas!

6 Likes
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Very interesting! Will have to give this some thought.

1 Like
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Happy to see Asana moving to this direction. Opening the UI for extensions by third parties is a way to go, and something we’d probably be interested in utilizing in our Screenful add-on in the future.

2 Likes
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I really like this feature as it doesn’t drown out the task by extending the description box the width of the screen which makes it hard to see project and sub task details,

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@TonyC Is the team thinking of rolling in the task creation from email forwarding to use this functionality also?

Currently, the Email forward dumps all the email information into the description which, as I said before, expands the description text box and pushes the project and subtask off the monitor.

I think it would be great to have this as an option or standard function, as long as no one is using the description to drive anything,

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Hi @Jeffrey_Warren, great question and suggestion. We’re currently focused on integration use cases first so there aren’t plans to modify the email forwarder but I can see it being applicable to email forwarding as well which does fall in the area of “external content”. We’ll keep this feedback in mind as we progress on this area!

2 Likes
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Excellent! We’ve been copying and pasting email content as comments via the Gmail integration to keep a record of everything task-related together so this will be great for us. When can we expect to be able to try it ourselves?

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Hi @Alison_O_Byrne, if you use theGmail add on to create a task, the email will be displayed in Asana in the above format. Let me know if you would like to see this used in different ways!

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So it only works if we’re creating a new task? What about adding email replies to existing tasks in this manner?

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Our team would also use this function if we were able to search for a task and then leave the email body as a comment in the task. Hope that’s possible somehow!

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@TonyC: Considering the last update on this was over a year ago. Is this still an option being developed?

We have an internal project which would benefit from the preview option.

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@TonyC: Is there any progress on opening the ‘Preview’ option? We have multiple projects which would greatly benefit from using the preview option, instead of attaching files to the task.

I have submitted to the form above multiple times with no response.

Any update would be greatly appreciated.

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Does anyone have any additional information regarding this?

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@Ross_Grambo?

1 Like