[From Wrike] Custom Item Types are Here! โจ
Hi everyone ๐
Today, we are very happy to bring you the latest update from our Product team - the release of Custom Item Types!ย
You may remember that last year, our team released Work Templates - which were phase one of this new functionality. Work Templates was a Wrike Labs experimental feature and went through a massive pivot to become Custom Item Types. We know that many of you have tried them and found them useful - thanks to everyone who provided their feedback ๐
What is Custom Item Types?
Custom Item Types is an enhanced platform capability that allows you to create work that mirrors your business processes in the Wrike workspace using your own terminology. For example, your team will be able to create and access domain-specific types of items like service requests, sales quotes, product bugs, objectives, candidate cards, and as many more as you can think of.ย
Custom Item Types and Blueprints
Blueprints in Wrike are used for recurring work and usually contain pre-filled content, assignees, or dates. Custom Item types are different in that - they act as frameworks for specific work and donโt have pre-filled content. For each custom item type, you can define which sections to display on the item view and add type-specific custom fields, automation, unique icons, and suggested subitems.ย
Our team is currently working on a solution that will enable you to use Custom Item Types together with Blueprints in the future. Please stay tuned for more information on this in the coming months.ย
How to Create Custom Item Types
There are two ways you can set up your custom item types. If a work item is relevant to all or most users in your account, account owners and admins can create account-level custom item types that will be accessible throughout your whole workspace. You can create account-level types from your Settings section - youโll see Custom item types in the panel on the left.
If the custom item type you plan to create is too specific and only relevant for a single team or department, create a space-level custom item type. This way, it'll only be available to members of that space. They can be created from the space settings by users with space admin rights.ย
You can create task or project-based Custom Item Types. Read more about them in this Knowledge Base article.ย
Custom Item Types Suggestions
You can make some custom item types visible in the context creation menu and under the + button at the top of the workspace. This provides users with quick access to the work they need to create often. For example, when users create a new work item inside a space, folder, or add a subitem to a project or task, they'll see the suggested custom item types in the list and can simply click on one of them to create work.
You can also remove any custom item types and regular tasks, projects, and folders from the suggestion menu. Please check out this Knowledge Base article for more details on how to manage the suggestion.ย
Custom Item Types and Use Case Templates
Wrike currently offers three pre-built use-case templates that have pre-made custom item types:
- Service Management that focuses on IT and other Service teams (ESM). This template helps you to introduce consolidated request management processes to reduce manual and mundane work via Automation, streamlined request, and knowledge base management.
- Strategic Planning that is based on OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology. The OKR template allows you to merge top-down and bottom-up goal management and planning by focusing on business results, outcomes, and relevant deliverables rather than just outputs.
- Team Agile that enables iterative work in Sprints. The template is based on Scrum Framework, and it helps with managing sprints and different types of work such as feature work or bugs via transparent processes and automation. It can be used for the IT or Product Development teams and other lines of business such as Creative.
You can try using one of these templates as-is, or tailor them to your needs. Please stay tuned as there are more templates with new Custom Item Types to come in the future ๐
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Weโll be talking more about Custom Item Types in the coming weeks and months, and weโre hoping youโre excited about this new and enhanced functionality. In the meantime, we canโt wait to hear what you think. If you have any questions, please let us know below ๐
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
That is the right way to go. But as long that i can't prefill some stuff I cant use it. Please do not separete this functionality. Otherwise it is to much work to set up everyting.
It would also make sense, that I have the possibily to create workflows directly in the space.
Hi Taylor Burch! The team has confirmed that currently, the icons are supported in the creation menu and in the task/project card. The team is working on icon support in other views ๐ย
Ivan Matosyan Thank you for this feedback, passed on ๐
Lukas Flatz Thanks for sharing your feedback too!ย
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa I totally appreciate the idea of being able to turn on or off certain elements and to move them around. But I do still wish that the option existed to keep the standard formatting if you want it. I know it seems small, but for some on my team, the challenge of mixing layouts might be enough to deter them from bothering with new custom items. If the entire UI layout is changing, it might be a different story, but having status updates, assignees, and dates in different positions on screen depending on whether you are in a task or a "meeting" (likely the first custom item I would create) could be disorienting.ย
I understand your point Kristi Horvath, thank you for sharing such detailed feedback, I've now passed it to our Product team.
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Can you please add the possibility to duplicate the items? That would help me because otherwise i have to make the same automation rule several times.
This is really great! I have been waiting for sth. like this!
The following features would be needed to make this useful (mandatory) or more useful (optional) for us:
Thank you for your work on this!
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Thanks a lot for this feedback folks, it's with our Product team now ๐ค
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
I didn't read all the comments, but I have a custom item for a weekly meeting. I'm not seeing the permalink option to email information into that, which is a bit cumbersome.ย
Thank you for your feedback Lisa Bage! ๐ย
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
So. Work Templates had to disappear from Wrike and make room for Custom Item Types.
Our teams were really happy with the old Work Templates and made good use of them. Until they couldn't anymore.
Teams had 9 different packs of predefined, standardized sets of pretty well thought out subtasks they could precision drop into any project:
ย ย โข ย ย Animation production - 7 subtasks
ย ย โข ย ย Audio production - 7 subtasks
ย ย โข ย ย AV production concepting phase - 5 subtasks
ย ย โข ย ย AV production content production phase - 7 subtasks
ย ย โข ย ย Image production - 7 subtasks
ย ย โข ย ย Layout phase - 12 subtasks
ย ย โข ย ย Image production concepting phase - 5 subtasks
ย ย โข ย ย Photo shoots - 4 subtasks
ย ย โข ย ย Convert Word file to CMS format - 3 subtasksย
All those subtasks in the 9 standardized task sets had prefilled details:
Ever since ย Work Templates disappeared from Wrike, I've been hitting my head in the Custom Item Types wall.
I've been trying to replicate what was (for our organisation, anyway) a very useful format for predefined standardised sets of subtasks for very specific use cases.ย
With Work Templates, we were able to reduce the number of subtasks in our 16 project blueprints to zero. We create 700+ projects annually based on the blueprints. We used to have dozens of subtasks in the blueprints โjust in case theyโre neededโ. Those โjust in case theyโre neededโ subtasks were mostly left un-assigned and un-scheduled, because they were not needed in nearly all projects. But *when theyโre needed*, they are very important. So Work Templates were simply brilliant for the teams to deploy exactly only *when theyโre needed*.
Our teams are demanding the lost Work Template functionality.
As I see it, I have four options, and each scenario is more or less horrible:
Or could Wrike please just bring back the *Classic Work Templates*.
Pretty please?
I like the direction Wrike is taking with custom item types but there is still a lot of limitations.ย First, there is no ability to convert tasks or projects into a task type or project type.ย When using custom item types, we can't utilize blueprints.ย Also, if we need to import projects and tasks, we can't utilize custom item types either.ย ย
I agree with Tuomo Suominen. Custom item types seem to literally be less functional work templates. The reduction in functionality along with the inconsistent commination across Wrike tooltips, wrike support, and wrike help articles about work templates when the changes happened this summer cost me and my team a lot of time and effort going back and forth between processes and doing manual work across a ton of projects to ensure reporting works correctly. My team is still spending time cleaning up and fixing organizational and reporting issues caused by all the changes.ย
Blueprint functionality is mentioned as something coming soon and having some kind of timeline and information on functionality would be very helpful. Lisa is there any new information about when we can expect to see this functionality? Even if it is not coming soon getting this information would be helpful in avoiding similar issues that my team experienced this summer. Any more surprise changes will be very hard if not impossible for me to sell to my team.
thanks,
Taylor
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Agreed; 70% of our work is created from Blueprints.ย When will we be able to use Custom Item Types with our existing Blueprints?ย
Following this thread!ย
Visibility on the roll-out of integration with blueprints is very much needed please. We can't move anything over to Custom Item Types without the ability to pre-fill any informationย
The words 'Coming soon' really worries me in the Wrike context, especially as someone who has been following the thread on Task Reminders for some time now.
We miss a Create folder type button in the screenshot below
we want to create a folder not a project
One more question:ย If we want to have a new item created with the + button
and be put in a folder/project is the correct way to use automation for that? Like:
when combining custom items types with request forms it is possible to select custom fields that are type single select. But is it also possible to place short answers in a custom field instead of the description? We also would like this on type people with limited list of users.
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Hi everyone! First of all, thank you so much for providing your detailed feedback on this release, it's really important for our team, especially as the feature is in the early stage ๐ I'm happy to let you know that Blueprint support in Custom Item Types is coming really soon. Unfortunately, I can't give you an exact date at the moment, but this is close to being released now.ย
Taylor Burch If you'd like to get some help from your Wrike Account team with that, please let me know and I'll be happy to connect you. I apologize for the inconvenience.ย
Jacco Stam I've asked my colleagues from the Support team to look into your question about Automation ๐ To your other question, it's not currently possible to add the short answer type of questions to a custom field.ย
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Is there a way to bulk create Custom Items like you can with tasks or projects through the Import from Excel feature?ย
Use Case: After the team leads have set their team goals for the year, and identified the projects they want to request budget for, they all submit their Excel lists of goals and projects to a central location. We upload those lists as "projects" into a private space in Wrike and assign priority and resource impacts to those projects.ย
I'd like to be able to utilize the custom item types to make an item that is a Team Goal and another item that is a Planned/Budget Requested Project so that we can filter on the different types of goals and planned work for each team for the upcoming year, but doing it all manually to select the custom item type is going to be a lot of unnecessary effort.ย
I can't tag the item, it's like it knows where it's at, but unless I drag it, I can't move it or tag it to multiple locations.ย Why??
Hey Sarah Dungey! The team has Excel import in their plans ๐ To clarify, do you mean importing items of the same type, or there are mixed types?
Richard Herzog Hi! Just to clarify, this is the work created out of a custom item type, correct? If that is so, I'll ask our Support team agents to look into this ๐
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Hi Lisa! I was thinking of mixed type where you could have a column on the Excel sheet for Item Type and include the exact name of the item type, but I'd be ok with it if you had to separate the lists to only have one type of item per Excel import.
Lisa I found it.ย It's location on the right as it's more functionality than just another data field.ย Just not where I expected it.ย IMO, that should be at the top always for consistency with the rest of the application.
Thank you both for the additional feedback ๐
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Hi there! I am surprised this has not been asked yet. For Custom Task Types, how do assignees log time to the task? We can't use the custom task type without being able to track time to it.
Hi Felicia Jarvis, there is a hidden section where you can find the time tracking ๐
Hi Lisa - would you happen to know if you will be adding functionality to create a recurring CIT? I would love to create a "Recurring Report" Custom Item Type where we can also set it to start recurrences like a task, but I don't see that option today.
+1 for recurring Custom Item Types. This is what is preventing me from creating aย Meeting Custom Item Type to use as the basis of a bunch of recurring meetings throughout the lifetime of our projects. Iย imagine this would be useful for many.ย
Thanks for bringing this up, folks! Our team has this idea in their plans ๐
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Hello,
I know it is probably not the best place but my team has spotted a strange issue with custom item types.
On a Project we have defined that only one certain type of CID is allowed and a Folder to add categories etc.
When creating from add new item I can choose both:
When I create a folder it is not possible by any way on adding "log entry" to the folder - it gives me options only for standard Tasks/Project/Folder.
Can you please fix it as the only workaround now is moving the created CIT outside into the folder. But this is so annoying across the team.
Thank you in advance.
when will CIT come to mobile?ย
Not all custom fields that are used on a project are visible in tab "Field" using android