We have many users who need to work with files in many projects (too many to manage in ‘My Projects’) and/or that work with Adobe CS3 apps and GIS.

When they need to open, link to or save files to/from a project that is in their ‘My Projects’ they’re golden, but when the files are outside of that list, they are forced to go to the project folder directories in Windows Explorer.

Our project folder naming convention is a five-digit project code, with no textual project name indicator. The users in question complain that they can’t recall nor take the time to refer to a list of project numbers to find project content.

So, our suggestion is that in addition to the ‘My Newforma Projects’ link within the Windows ‘Open’ and ‘Save As’ dialogs, there should be an ‘All Newforma Projects’ link that would provide shortcuts using the Newforma project name to all projects.

Something like might kill two birds with one stone for us.

Every so often, a user will inadvertantly move an entire project folder into a different Newforma project, breaking the link to it in Newforma. If we blocked access to the project folder shares from Windows Explorer, and thus the users would only be able to access projects via the shortcuts, it would be much less likely that folders would get moved by mistake.

Thanks! Sam

These are good suggestions.  We’ll add them to our +Feature list and see what we can do. 

What makes a long list of projects hard to manage in the ‘My Projects’ list?  Is it just the time required to add or remove a project from that list?  Or is it that these users never actually operate on the projects through Newforma?  For example, would a ‘recently opened’ project list help them?  I’m somewhat concerned that keeping shortcuts to all projects wouldn’t work well for some customers that have thousands of projects.  Does anyone have thoughts on that issue?

Allow me to clarify that this is a workflow issue on our end, perhaps more than a Newforma plus feature.

Having a link to all projects could be rather cumbersome, so, it’s not an elegant or ideal solution.

The user workflow at our office that I’m referring to is this: one studio in our office does a lot of small projects. They generate images and files for the distinct project and file them exclusively in the project folders.

At any given time, they like to ‘borrow’ files from an existing project for use in another. The user doing the borrowing is frequently not on the project team; they learn from their colleagues of some content that exists and they want to get it. So, they have to go to the project folders.

In other words, they may be actively working on a handful of projects -easily managed by ‘My Projects,’ but they want to easily navigate to any existing project to exploit existing files.

My suggestion to our users is that they create a ‘design library’ NPC project containing the type of content they know they may reuse. When they create content for a project that fits the criteria, they copy it to the shared library.

Then, they could all simply add this ‘design library’ project to their ‘My Projects’ list.

The users agree in principal, but state they don’t have free time or desire necessarily to so drastically alter their workflow (even though it would save them a lot of time and hassles over the long run).

So, my suggestion is not the greatest, but it was agreed that I would log it here as part of the effort to address a host of user challenges. That’s the back story.

Sam