Adobe Workfront Connector is a handy, out-of-the-box way to integrate Workfront with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as well as with Brand Portal. This allows you to keep your media assets at one central location (Adobe AEM) as well as allows your partners to access them in a secure and convenient way (Brand Portal).
Adobe Workfront Connector was originally built by Hoodoo Digital (now part of Rightpoint) but later acquired by Adobe. At the writing of this article, we are talking about Connector version 1.9.4 and the about-to-be-released version 1.9.5. Things change so much with the digital world these days. There is much to know if you want to ensure that the implementation and integration of these two great systems go well and AEM Workfront exceeds your team’s expectations.
First and foremost, AEM Workfront Connector does two things:
- Syncs Assets and its metadata with AEM (it can also sync back some of the metadata from AEM to Workflow)
- Publishes the Assets to Brand Portal
Now, let's talk about some of the real-life implementation issues you might encounter and how to handle them:
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Metadata Mapping: If syncing of metadata is important to you, there are a few things important to note: metadata mapping works best if it is handled via lists in AEM. Tags throws its own challenges, and people who have implemented this Connector have advised us to use Lists rather than Tags. There is a defect within the current Connector version which does not sync metadata if it is a multi-select field within Workfront. This should get fixed in the upcoming version 1.9.5.
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Reverse Syncing of Metadata: If you want to send some metadata from AEM to Workfront, that is possible too. For that, you would have to use the Workflows. I am sharing the actual workflow step which can do the trick for you (screenshots below). A real-world example:
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Custom Form Field Limits: AEM Workfront Connector has a drop-down which allows you to select Workfront Custom form fields for conditional, linked folder creation. If you have too many custom form fields, the Connector might take forever to load. This was the case with one of our customers and it was painful to make a single change in the Connector. Adobe has promised to fix this issue as a part of 1.9.5.
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Portfolios: The Connector only shows 100 portfolios in the drop-down and this can become a real issue if Workfront has more than 100 of them. In our case, this really became an issue. We had to set the portfolio name in the backend via CRX/DE in order to resolve the issue.
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Custom Form Fields missing: In our implementation, we found that some of the custom form fields were not showing up in the Connector. We resolved this issue by setting the form type to only Projects in Workfront. While you are defining the form, remember to set it to Projects Type in Workfront.
Hopefully, your team can benefit from Content Thread’s well-earned experiences uncovering these AEM Workfront Connector surprises during implementations. If you are interested in learning more, please let us know.