[Status: Not planned] Dummy (Virtual) Users

This would be a great feature. I set up collaborator accounts for each department, allowing those departments to assign their own tasks to whomever they like instead of the project creator picking or assuming one person will work on the task over another. To do this, I needed a number of different departmental emails created so we could have our departmental "bot" accounts. If it was possible to create virtual users, that would make things so much easier in the future.

A very interesting suggestion, thanks @Vladimir and @Patrick!

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This would be great! Sometimes Executives own the tasks which I need to document....but I don't need their email bombarded from Wrike. These are tasks that would be followed up on in a different forum completely.  

Michelle brings up a GREAT point I didn't even think about. Most of our execs haven't ever logged into Wrike. Their assistants/directors do everything for them within Wrike, so sometimes we don't know the difference between an assistant or a VP working on tasks or project ownership. If the assistants could create an account assigned to the VP, it would make things much more organized and transparent within the executive branch. 

This would help us enormously! I too, need to set up virtual users so all tasks are assigned initially, but depending on the task it will get reassigned to a 'real' user at a later date. We need to ensure all tasks are not left unassigned and virtual users would be a good way of achieving this.

Has there been any further feedback on setting up dummy users? Is this possible? 

Just like Michelle and co, I want to plan in Wrike with tasks against  generic assigned or virtual users identifying a particular external System Integrator in my plans. 

Not everyone should have access to Wrike.  This is the same process as in MS Project for Resource assignment.  

How can we do that now?

Honestly, no virtual resources support?? This is a deal breaker.

Yes! Virtual users would be very useful and easier to plan resources and suppliers.

Desperately in need of this. There is another community suggestion Ability to Assign Task to "Generic" or General Assignees which says that it has been launched but I can't ascertain how this functionality can be used. I work with teams across multiple countries where they don't need to see the project plan but for other stakeholders the process is much clearer if they can see who is responsible for a certain task rather than it just being "unknown".

Hi everyone!

Laura C Turner The suggestion that you mention is launched as Job Roles are launched (more info here: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035989794-Job-Roles). Please note that for now, Job Roles are available as a part of Wrike Resource add-on and Wrike for Professional Services package. 

@All No updates on virtual users currently, but I'm passing on all your feedback and I'll let you know as soon as I have any news. 

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Wrike currently has no support for actual resources (and when I say that I mean assets) in its Resource add-on (which only deals with human resources and workload management), having had meetings with one of the PM for Resource it didn't seem like adding the capability to have assets was important to them (though I may have misinterpreted).

Dummy users would therefore enable the introduction of actual asset management solutions. Booking time on workstation computers / servers. Booking time on test rigs, etc etc would all be more possible.

Great suggestion which has my full support and would provide instant value to the Resource add-on too!

I agree this would be a very helpful extension.

+1

Thank you for your support here, folks! 

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+1 here for assigning projects to dummy users or job roles. Everything bigger than 8 hours is usually a project here so we have alot of projects to be planned out.

Hi Nils Troll, thank you for supporting here! Have you tried using Job Roles? 

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Lisa Strangely it is not possible to assign job roles to projects. As a project is just a group of tasks, but than with progress and a risk associated, it is a pity that they can not be used in a similar fashion. When we plan work, we don't want to allocated projects to users specifically just yet. Our projects contain a lot of projects, but I assume we are not the only one using it like that? 

Got you, thanks for your feedback Nils Troll, I'm passing it on to the team 👍

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Ability to add contractors that will never have wrike access but only require task assignment is an urgent feature for us. The workaround to make this work, takes far too long to setup dummy collaborators since we need to create dummy emails which our system doesn't allow. 

Thank you for sharing your feedback and adding your support for this request Marie Doloc👍🏼

We're trialing Wrike and just realized it didn't have a virtual resources feature when most everything else we have tried does. I thought that was just a base feature for "Resource Management."

We need to be able to track consultants and contractors that are outside our company. We can't justify paying for "users" for these resources, but they have major impact on scheduling.

Where's the response on this item.  WRIKE was at the top of the list of project management cloudware until we ran across this.  If I have a consultant that I want to track / manage  but they are outside of the user base how do I go about this?  🙃😒😞😔😟😕

Hey folks, have you considered suing collaborator licenses for that? Collaborators don’t take up paid user seats, but there's a limit on how many collaborators you can invite into your account.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Lisa you need a dummy email address for a collaborator account. When you are on SSO that is not something straightforward.

Agreed. Collaborator users are not a replacement or viable workaround for a virtual resource system. Having to set up actual accounts and email addresses for each is a cumbersome and needless workflow for the way I believe the folks in this thread would use them. There are no "real" people associated with the virtual resources, or at least none that would actually be using the dummy resource.

Wrike should take a serious look at a full resource management system, with resource types, similar to what the competition offers. I'll admit, after looking at several other offerings, I saw that Wrike had Resource Management and just assumed virtual resources were included in that system.

Thanks for your attention on this!

Totally agree, this is a HUGE blocker to our organization using Wrike. We need ability to use the resources/effort capabilities which requred the users to be added, however, these users will never actually log into Wrike. 

Thank you for explaining that, folks! I've brought this thread to the attention of the team again, and if there's any update, I'll make sure to let you know 👍

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Another upvote for this one. We don't need anything else currently provided by Wrike Resource, so we can't justify paying for that add-on just to have virtual users for project tracking. But we need to track projects that include subcontractors and external folks who will never log into Wrike. Dummy/virtual users is a must-have item for us moving forward.

We're already using all of our collaborator licenses, so that workaround isn't an option for us.

Our current workaround is to use a prefix on the task titles that lists who is "assigned" to each task, and leaving them unassigned. Not ideal, but at least the "fake assignee" shows up on the Gantt chart this way.

Thanks a lot for your detailed feedback here Laura Boylan, and welcome back to the Community! 

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