PageProof Academy: How to build & optimize workflows in PageProof

Hello everybody, it's Marcus from PageProof here to go through another PageProof Academy. So, uh, it is the middle of the year and here we are looking at workflows. So what I'm going to go through today is optimizing workflows. So we're going to take a look at building workflows and, you know, how— what sort of rules and things you can do to actually make sure those are best set up. And then what we'll do is actually using workflows because that's also an important part. There's a couple of places which you may not know that you can use workflows. So I'm going to go through those as well. Now, first things first, workflow templates and workflows in general, a couple of things which you need to know about workflows. And this is something that's quite important. In all PageProof plans, whether that's Teams, Teams Plus, or Enterprise, workflow templates are not limited. Okay, so you can have as many workflow templates as you like, and those workflow templates can have as many steps as you like as well. So that component is fully open for you to build all the workflow templates that you need. And you can have as many steps as you need. We don't restrict steps and we don't restrict how many workflow templates you can have. So that's an important thing. Number one, don't be afraid to create workflow templates. Just do the Goldilocks number, just the right amount, and you should be all good for that. Okay, so what I'm going to do is we're going to switch over and we're going to immediately start by creating a proof. And we'll get straight into making a workflow. So I'm going to start off here by dragging in a file, and we won't go through all the setup, but there's one little menu over here, which is reviewers. And this is where you can add a workflow. You can also, by the way, go up to your menu at the top of the screen, and you can choose workflows from here if you would like to make a workflow template without having to make a proof. So you can create new templates in the workflows area here, or you can do them on the fly inside a proof. I'm going to do it this way. So, new workflow. So the first thing you get is a step. You get the first step where this is actually the final step. Seems a little bit counterintuitive, but with workflows, you actually work a little bit in reverse. You, uh, you do the final approver first, or the final approvers, I should say. So that final step, I'm going to put somebody in there. We'll drop, um, Gemma in there, and she is the final approver. And it says down the bottom here, and always look at this little gray bar whenever you're working with a workflow, this step waits for the approver to approve. Okay, now you can put another person in there. So if I decide, okay, let's put in another person into that workflow, I've now got 2 approvers, and you can have as many approvers as you like. And you'll notice the bar at the bottom has now changed its language. This step waits for all approvers to approve, and the little all is underlined. What does that mean? Click it. So I click onto here, and now you can see I've got some options here. I can say just one. So now what that's going to do is wait for just one of those approvers to approve. So I've got two approvers in there. I don't care which one it is. I just want one of them to approve it. So you can switch that to just one, or you can choose the number here and you can type in the number of people that you want. So it just shows you this little gray bar at the bottom of each of these steps is really, really important. Now I want to add another step that happens before this one. So I'm going to go in now to this step. I'm gonna create a step here and I'll create a step above it as well. So this one at the top here, step 1, is going to be my creative check. And then the next one down here, this is going to be my legal. So you can see there are 2 steps. Now I can leave these steps empty. That's okay. That's probably more pertinent when it comes to the workflow templates in the templating area. But what I'm gonna do is add in some reviewers. So I'm gonna go in now and add Ray into here. We'll also go ahead and add in Clark. He's going to look at our, look at our proof and we'll add one more in here as well, which is Jansen. So Jansen can also take a look at this proof. And at the moment, all three of those are reviewers. Now for our legal team down the step below, we'll add in the person that's going to look after our legal side of it, that's Katerina. So I'm going to put Katerina in here and you'll see now I've got a workflow where everybody's a reviewer and at the bottom I have my approvers. Okay. Now what will happen? You can see again, the text is telling us what's going to happen. So the step flows through without waiting because everybody's a reviewer, which is the base permission, if you like, inside of PageProof. The proof is going to send out to all of these people and also Katerina and arrive at the final approver because we haven't got anybody here, uh, that isn't a reviewer. Now I'm going to change that a little bit. I'm going to say, well, hang on a minute, Ray is our creative director. So I'm going to change Ray to mandatory. And now you'll see that the workflow has changed slightly. You can see now there's a gray bar showing up. And it says this step waits for the mandatory reviewer's decision. So if I sent this proof out right now, it would go to the creative check. All 3 of those people would receive an invitation. That's great. So they all simultaneously get the invitation. So the step is sent out wholly at once. Ray is mandatory, so it's going to wait for Ray to make a decision. Clark and Jensen, they're just optional because they're reviewers. Okay, so Ray is the one that PageProof is going to wait for. And you can see that by the orange text on the role. Whenever you see any orange on the role, it means PageProof is going to wait for that person. Now, I've heard that actually Clark needs to check it as well. So I'm going to make Clark mandatory as well. So now I've got 2 mandatories., and both of those people would need to make a decision before it moves on to the legal step. Okay, so this is how the PageProof workflow flows work. You flow control by putting in these, these orange roles. Now legal, same thing. I really want legal to, to be able to, you know, but I'm going to make legal a gatekeeper. Now, question here becomes, what's the difference between mandatory and gatekeeper? Well, let me explain. You'll see here that we start with a creative check. All 3 people would get their invitation. Ray approves it, Clark approves it, and now it moves down to Katerina as legal. Now gatekeeper, that role has everything that mandatory has, but with one addition, and that is the ability to send a to-do list back to the proof owner. So if Katerina sees something and thinks, oh no, this needs changes immediately, Katerina can actually mark up the proof and gets a button that says send to-do list, and Katerina can send the to-do list back to the proof owner, who then receives a to-do list and they can make changes and upload a new version. So the gatekeeper gets the additional superpower— there's a good word— of, of being able to send back a to-do list. Now that is a great thing, but it also can be a bit of a burden as well, because if you have everybody set as a gatekeeper, you run into trouble with your workflow completing. So if I did this, for example, if I decided let's make Ray a gatekeeper and Clark a gatekeeper and Janson a gatekeeper. If you do this sort of workflow, all you're going to do is run into delays, delays, delays, delays, because every single person can send back a to-do list independent of each other, and it's going to hold up the workflow and your designer is going to get overwhelmed. Honestly, not a good look. So I would highly recommend thinking about when someone needs to be mandatory and then when someone needs the ability to be able to send back changes. Now I'll give you a couple of tips on that. If we go back to that original setup where we have the mandatories, what's important here to note is that the mandatories can place feedback. So Ray can place feedback, Clark can place feedback, and then when they make their decision, it comes into Katerina, which is legal. Katerina can send back her changes and she can include the changes of Clark and Ray as well. So the gatekeeper can send back not only their changes, they can also include all the changes from the step above as well. So this is a great way of just having one person for right or wrong, one person gatekeep all of the feedback and get it back to the designer. Okay, so this is an important part of it. Now, you may also have someone who is an observer. So this is somebody who just wants to be involved with the proofs but does not want to comment. And if you have PageProof Enterprise, then you get access to the view-only role. And it might be that you have the senior executive of legal counsel wants to be on all proofs but doesn't want to participate in any of the feedback. So you can add this person into the proof as well. So you can come in and just say, hey, here's Roy from the law firm. We can make that person view only. So a view only role, they cannot leave comments or make decisions. They they can just see the proof and they can look at it, but they can't place any feedback. So view only is available on PageProof Enterprise, but it is there for that when you want to invite executives to your proofing, they want to be involved, but you don't necessarily need to have their feedback. Okay. So that is how you can set that up. Now, another thing to note, you'll see that there's a little green icon here. This icon, it's green for Ray, it's gray for everybody else. This is the Inviter role. The Inviter role, this is when you want to give other people the ability to add others to the proof. So for example, Katerina, she might be in charge of the legal department, but, you know, we want to give her the ability to add other lawyers to that step. So you just turn on the little green icon here., and now Katerina is able to invite and add other people to the workflow. It does give quite a bit of power to the person, uh, inside the workflow. So just make sure it is someone you trust and you know, um, but they're able to add people in, take people out, you know, do all sorts of changes to the workflow. So that is, uh, that is a pretty important one, but it is useful when, for example, there's a department that you don't know anything about. You give the person that you do know the ability to add others and they can do so as they need to. All right. Now, sitting inside of here, you can see I have got my workflow set up. So it's going to go to the creative check first. They're able to leave their feedback, make decisions. Then once we hit that threshold of all mandatory reviewers, so once both of these people leave their feedback. PageProof is going to invite the legal team. They can now go onto the proof, leave their feedback. Roy, in this case, can only view it. His decision is not possible, but Katerina can look after it. Once she makes her decision, and if she approves it to move on, it will then go to the final approvers, and these people can both approve it, and then the proof is fully approved. So that is the essence of a page proof workflow. Now, when you upload a new version, it will put this workflow back in place and it starts back at the top again. So if Katarina had sent back a to-do list, and as the designer, you've made some changes, and now you've uploaded a new version of the proof, it'll actually go back to the very top of your workflow and start again. And one thing you might decide is, oh, actually, I don't want Creave to look at it again. You don't need to delete anyone out of there. All you need to do, you'll see this little green icon here. It shows you that the workflow is going to start here. If you hover down the bottom here, you can actually start the workflow from here. So you can click and say start the workflow here. And what it's going to do is it's now going to send out invites to Katerina and Roy. The other 3 people will still be able to look at the proof if they happen to click through, but they're not going to get an email or any notification because I've started the workflow a step below them. So super useful for where you have that situation of people that you want to, uh, again, you want to start the workflow at a different place and you don't want to bother the others in the previous step. So just to show you that, and this icon here is showing you that they're going to skip over, and it gives you— so it's always good to hover over any aspects of the workflow because it's going to give you a descriptive hover over on what's going to happen. Okay, this workflow looks great, and you know what, I don't want to go through all the setup again. So you can save the workflow by going back to the top. There's three dots here. You can just choose Save as a New Workflow Template,, it'll prompt you to give it a name and it'll save it to your templates so you can use it again later on. And, that's extremely useful as well, being able to save your workflow templates directly from inside of here. Okay, so that's a little intro into workflows. Um, optimizations. Now, things that people, uh, you have to be super careful about using the roles, those orange roles. It's really important to use reviewers and mandatory most often. But when it comes to gatekeepers, as I said before, use it sparingly and use it where you want that person to send back changes. Typically gatekeepers will sit in a step by themselves because they have the ability to stop the proof and send it back. If you have it, have a gatekeeper amongst reviewers and amongst your, um, mandatories, it can be a little bit disruptive because they can stop it, send it back, and then all of a sudden the other people in the workflow step go, where did my red pin go? It's been locked. Who's it been locked by? So this is why gatekeepers by themselves are typically a good choice. All right, now let's go back. I'm going to pop out of here and we're going to look at a couple of different options for doing these. I'm just going to get rid of this draft here. I'm going to go into my collections over on the side. Now, something that's really, really interesting about uploading proofs. When I drag and drop, let's just take that PDF. If I drag and drop that PDF into here, choosing a workflow template, you can see here are the ones I've saved previously. So these are my favorites, and I'll show you how to favorite them soon. And I can just choose an appropriate workflow and it just loads the workflow into here and I click send proof. Easy. So using workflow templates, don't be afraid to use workflow templates because you can see the benefits straight away. Very, very quick and easy to do. So that's, that's tip number 1. Tip number 2 is you're also able to do this on collections. So let's just have a look at that. So I created a collection here called Press Campaign, and what I've done is I've dragged in my PDFs. But I have not put a workflow on them. And the reason I've done that is because I want to open these and check them before I send them out. So I think, well, okay, here I have a whole bunch of proofs, which I haven't actually attached a workflow to yet. And you can see each one of them says review is needed. And if I click into these, I can check them. I can look at them. That looks okay. That's what I expect. And then I can go back in here and we can just go back to that, back to that press campaign. Now I want to send this out. I've got all the proofs in here. That collection's looking good. How do I send these out? Well, really easy. Over in beside the word dashboard, there's a little cog or gear depending on which part of the world you're from. This gear icon, if you click into it, shows you all the bulk actions that you can perform on the dashboard. Again, something a lot of people don't know, but what's really great is add workflow. So I can just choose add workflow. I can then just select all those proofs in that collection. I can choose which workflow I would like to use and then go add, and it will send all of those proofs out bulk at once to that workflow. And there we have it. So You can do this. This is a little, little bit of a diversion, but let me just show you this. If you want to use the bulk features here, you forgot— these proofs are all out in action. You're like, oh no, we forgot to add somebody. You can come in here and go add reviewer. You can choose the proofs that you want to add the reviewer onto, type in their email address, go add reviewer, and it will bulk add that person to those proofs that are in action. So that probably is the only way we can, we can help with that. There's also there the ability to go add owner. So if you want to go bulk add owner, select the proofs that you want to add the owner to, pop in the email address, go add owner, and it'll add the owner across all of those proofs at once. So I recommend you do that inside collections or do it somewhere where you can control where it adds them to. But look, it just means that you can do these bulk adds as well. So they can help with some of the workflows you might be doing. Okay, now let's go over to the workflow templates and take a look over there. So now click here and come down to workflows. This shows me all the workflows that I have created. So these are my workflow templates, and that's highlighted here by my templates. Something to note here, up at the top there is a search, so you can search for a workflow template, but you can also search for an email in here as well. Good example on why you'd use this is sometimes you might have a situation where, I don't know, James, who used to work in your creative department, has now decided to get a law degree and is now working in legal. So you want James to be moved out of your workflows. No problem. Do a search for James's work, um, James's email address. It'll highlight all the workflows where James exists and you can go into each one and alter them. So, uh, that's a really useful thing here. So if I type ray@pageproof.com, it's going to show me all of the proofs, all of the workflow templates where Ray exists. And there's the ability to export that list out as a CSV if you want to manage that in another way as well. So. That's super useful if you need it and can be, can be really great for being able to search for those. Now I'm just looking across here. There's also Shared with Me. So these are workflow templates that have been shared with me. So you can go in and say, hey, I want to see all the workflow templates which my team has shared across. And these are all the ones that have been shared with you by other team members. So another great feature of workflow templates or workflows is that you can share them with your team, which is super, super cool. And I'll show you how to do that in a moment. But one thing to note is if you remember back on the proof setup screen, I had my favorites and then I had all the other workflows. The way that you favorite workflows is just hover over the icon here and just favorite it. Just do that. And now it's going to jump to the top of the menu. So you've got them there. When you go to the proof setup, they'll be in that top bunch. Which is super useful. Okay, getting back into here, right? So here are all of the workflow templates that I own. I think that my template's really great. So if I click into this template here, I think this template is great and really useful for other team members. Now, you might be, for example, a designer working in a team. Let's just say you own— your team is responsible for the Toyota. I'm just going to use that generically. You're responsible for the Toyota brand inside your agency. So you want to make sure that all the proofs just go out to Toyota people and only the other team members inside your team can see the Toyota workflow. You don't actually want Toyota workflows available to everyone in the agency to see. That's no problem. You can go into Shared With and inside of here you can add, just hit the plus symbol, just put in the email addresses of your teammates and this workflow template will be seen by them and them only. So really, really, really useful. So I can come in here and I can put in the name of someone that I'd like to share this with. And you can come in and also allow them to edit the template. At the moment, don't, can't, but if I Turn that on. Now Gemma, in this case, can actually alter my template because I've given her the ability to do that. Or if you just want it so she can use it, just turn off the editability. And now Gemma will see in her workflow menu this workflow, which is, which is super, super useful as well. Okay, so one more thing. Share with my team. If you've created a workflow that you think is useful for anybody on the planet, Uh, well, not anybody on the planet, but anybody in your team, I should say, you can just go share with my team. And now everybody in your organization who has a PageProof, the ability to upload proofs into PageProof, will be able to use your template. So share with team is a broad stroke, one click, and you're able to do that. So there is that option as well. Okay. So that's all the things you can do with your workflows. Now, one last thing I wanted to show you inside of here. Inside of the team menu, you've got the ability to set up proof templates. Now, inside a proof template, one of the things that's really useful is that you can set a workflow inside the proof template. So now we've got a template inside of a template, which is extremely useful It means that you can use the proof template to set up all of the aspects of the proof setup screen. So you can set up the checklist, you can set up the owners, you can set up the workflow, share links, all those things. You can set all these options and even which collection it belongs to and save it as a proof template. So you can see workflows are also here. So you can see you're able to use those. So that means that when you go and set up a proof, so if I come into here, drag and drop my file, rather than fill out this whole screen, I just go up to this menu and just go choose and boom, everything on the screen has now been set up using a proof template, including the workflow as well. So that's extremely useful for quickly setting up your proofs. Okay, so that gives you a good run through of what you can do with workflows. They are extremely powerful. Couple of things to note. Once a workflow starts, it's the workflow. All right. So you can't change the workflow once a workflow starts because we already sent out the invitations. We've already got people with the ability to click through into the proof. So we can't just sort of turn off the workflow and change it to a different one because now people have got links that won't work, etc., etc. We've also got the same thing with workflow steps moving from one step to the next. Some people say, oh no, I want to send that, move that back a step. Well, we can't do that either, unfortunately, because we've already invited the people in the next step. So they've already got links that connect and all that sort of thing to that proof. But one thing to note, people in previous steps can still comment until the proof is closed, approved, or to-do list is sent back. People in previous steps can still comment and make decisions. So you don't lose the ability to comment if the step is moved from one to the next. So just bear that in mind as well. Over here you can see the manage icon. It's definitely worth having a look in here because you can see all of the options that you can, you can action inside of here. So we've got just for complete completeness of showing you this, you can compare two proofs on the proofing screen. So you can choose one proof from here, one proof from here, completely different proofs. The dashboard compare nudging archive. So that's the one you're looking for. So you go archive, you then check on the ones that you want to archive. Okay. All of those. Yes, archive and archive those all in bulk. So you can do that in one action if you want to using that feature. And you can see there's delete, replace approver, etc., etc., etc., change due date. You've got a whole bunch of options here as well. So that is some of the abilities there for that. And you can create templates that have blank steps in them, by the way. And let's just have a quick look. So if you want to create a workflow that just has— let's just say we're going to have a final step that has Gemma in it, and this one might be marketing, but we don't really know. And we're going to call this one Marketing workflow. All right. And I'm going to make it my favorite. Okay. So the great thing with this is when I go to use this, by the way, so if I come back into here and this is actually using a feature, which is called groups, which is part of PageProof Enterprise. So if I go marketing workflow, it shows me a blank workflow here. I can come into here and use the groups feature, which is just type the hash. Shows me all the groups that I've got set up inside of my account, and I can just choose marketing and boom, it just puts all the marketing team inside there with one click. So groups, super useful. Um, just go hashtag this and it puts all of those people in with all of their default roles as well. So, um, that is really useful. So you can have workflow templates with blank steps that are ready to be filled out, uh, at the time you use them in the proof. Okay. Well, thank you everybody for your time today. So that was a lot to carry inside of one half-hour session. Workflows, again, unlimited under every PageProof license, unlimited steps as well. So extremely useful. Do use them. They're really, really powerful. And, uh, hope you learned something about PageProof workflows. Have a great rest of your day, everyone. Thank you.