[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
Thank you Lisa! What I'm looking for is to be able to have full functionality of custom fields for custom items (e.g. filter and display by custom field values).ย
Thank you for this additional feedback kittymomma, I've passed it on to our team 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 tried custom item types and want to use them to guide people better. So I made a CIT GEP Project with has not all subitesm allowed (see screenshot). When I use this now in a space and amde a project new UV camera. This is a CIT GEp Project. Now I expected not to be able to choose a "normal" task in this project as I did not allow it in the CIT. What is my mistake here?
Also I would have expected to see the CIT GEP Task in the menu (as I turned it on in the CIT GEP Project) but it is noch there.
Thank you for sharing this case Sven Passinger, I've asked our Support team to look into your question 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
I like the idea of a custom item type and made one for bugs and meeting notes. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to customize the menu of task types that come up.ย Sometimes I see "customize menu" (add sub item to a task) and other times it's not an option (add sub item to a folder).
Task:
Folder:
Is the ability to customize this list dependent on a setting?ย Or how do I show my new custom item types as options at all times?ย
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I thought it had something to do with Quick access.ย I see some references to a toggle but that does not come up for me (I am an admin).
in @Tuomo Suominen's post above - I see an example (where he may be in a specific folder) and the toggle DOES appear, then the next one where it says account-wide access where it does not?
Thank you!
Danielle
Hey Danielle Wilson, I've alsed our experts from the Support team to look into your question - they will contact you shortly 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
Thanks, Lisa/Team, for adding Custom Item types into Analytics!ย
Great to hear it's useful for you Bo Samreth 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,
we are currently using custom fields within custom item types. We have roughly 30 different fields which contain essential data however none of the fields appear on the printout when we click "print". This means there is now way of us to print any of the tasks/projects if we need a hard copy! Instead we get comments section/history which is irrelevant and can get very lengthy. Any idea if this is going to be looked into?
Thanks.
Hi Juan & Lisa,
Our team noticed an unexpected change in the UI - mainly that custom tasks now have " Show more" button which needs to be clicked to display custom fields. As a steadily growing business we converted our most used data into custom fields, away from inflexible descriptions. This interface change however, completely breaks usability, as we see no fields at first glance, only description. All fields are now hidden behind this button. Yes, we can expand but then the expanded window takes the full page width, shifting the description way down, below the screen. Previous UI was much better in that aspect, where the screen was vertically divided into description on the left and custom fields on the right so we could see both at once. Interestingly the old layout still shows in custom item type template configurator. Can we please have an option (button) to have this layout back? We made a business decision to move to custom item types based on old UI and spent last few months preparing to migrate but this change is honestly a dealbreaker for us!
Thanks,
Maciej.
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I have to agree with Maciej's comment. We had added custom fields to certain tasks and now we have to expand the menu to see these in tasks. It is not intuitive and our team fears that steps within our current process will now be missed. It is crucial that we have more ways to customize these item types.
The user experience in Lightspeed is not ideal. I have to click 1-2 times to access information that was once visible and easily editable with a single click (for example: location, custom fields, importance).ย Hiding information that was once visible is going backwards and not user friendly.ย