[From Wrike] Custom Item Types are Here! ✨
Hi everyone 👋
Today, we are very happy to bring you the latest update from our Product team - the release of Custom Item Types!
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 🙌
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.
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 don’t 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.
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.
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 - you’ll 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.
You can create task or project-based Custom Item Types. Read more about them in this Knowledge Base article.
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.
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 🙂
We’ll be talking more about Custom Item Types in the coming weeks and months, and we’re hoping you’re excited about this new and enhanced functionality. In the meantime, we can’t wait to hear what you think. If you have any questions, please let us know below 👇
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 can see how to create them, edit them, and delete them... how does one launch and use them?
"Quick access: Account-level custom item types can be added to quick access in work creation menu within any space or location."
When will this be added to the quick access drop down, and will there be another way of accessing them?
Thanks!
I would love to see a video tutorial on using this.
Elizabeth Bayer I was able to add it to our quick access menu by clicking the Task Dropdown (far right) and clicking customize menu
Then I had the option to toggle on my new custom meeting type.
Just playing around with this now but our first idea for custom task type is to use it to manage meeting types as statuses - Client Meeting, Internal Meeting, 1-on-1 etc. This way, we can more easily differentiate these from actual tasks, and they stand out more visually in our to do lists (so I can look at tomorrow and see I have 1 client meeting and 1 quarterly review).
I'm excited for the endless possibilities this creates!
Is there a way to convert existing tasks to an item type?
Thinking about how to use this new feature to create a more full-featured CRM that allows our Sales team to easily record emails and phone calls, and easily see a report of all leads with last contact dates/times.
I set up 2 custom item types for the subtasks, and a "parent" custom item that allows these subtasks. So far so good! It's doing what I want in the custom item itself. But I would also like to be able to update custom fields when a specific custom item type is created.... i.e., to record a phone call, the sales rep would click to create a new subtask, choose "Phone call made", enter a title, then the automation would handle updating another custom field on the parent item for "Last phone call" to the current date/time. Same for emails. But it doesn't appear that automations support conditions based on custom item types yet... is that planned?
I can figure something out with Wrike Integrate in the meantime, but it would nice to use the built-in automation feature for Wrike-only changes like this.
Checking the API doc, and not seeing that it's currently possible to get the custom item type for a specific task or subtask yet. Did I miss something in my review? If not, is this capability planned?
Essentially, what I'm trying to do is trigger an automation (either internal or Wrike Integrate) that updates the Last Phone Call custom field on the parent task when a new subtask with custom item type of "Phone call made" is created, or the Last Email custom field on the parent task when a new subtask with custom item type of "Email sent" is created. Several other subtask fields will be changed at the same time.
I'm open to ideas!
Lisa - let me know if I should move all these questions/comments to the How To section.
I'm with Anna Wallace -
really nice feature, but how can I convert existing tasks to custom items?
Florian
Does anyone has an idea why the custom icon doesn't show up?
Thanks a lot for your comments, everyone! We are working on getting answers to your questions here 👍
Elizabeth Bayer Does Amanda's message help you with your question? We'll also be adding more resources on how to launch and use Custom Item Types in more detail soon 🙂 We are also planning to share video tutorials.
Laura Boylan The team has plans to add info on the type used in API for tasks and projects.
It's not currently possible to convert existing tasks to custom items, but the team has that in their plans 🙂
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 am a bit disappointed that we're not able to use these with blueprints right out of the gate. Doesn't seem that you can select an item type to be created from a request form, either. So many of our processes depend on this so it doesn't seem like we'll get much use out of this new feature at this time.
Also looking for a way to convert existing items to custom item types
Small bug:
Looks like changing order (of all/custom fields?) is not properly saved.
I'm excited and scared by this. Part of the reason that we left Cl*ckUp for Wrike was that the former had gone too far towards this kind of flexibility at the expense of reliability. This was exacerbated by me getting carried away with item types too 😅.
I'm excited by the meetings example above, thanks Amanda! Something like this will be great for us. Also my business produces both drawings and reports so I'm interested to explore having separate item types for those tasks. I just need to avoid the temptation to go too much further than that for now!
I can click the "Create task type" or "Create project type" and give it a name.
I'm unable to do anything else than that.
I have no way of editing the detail fields. They're all greyed out, not editable.
No difference if I try this in space settings --> Custom item types...
... or in account settings --> Custom item types.
Ironically, both locations have the same text on top: "Edit your custom task type below".
Tuomo Suominen I believe the "only" thing you can do here, is
The grey blocks are weird placeholders, to indicate in a real ticket there will be content there.
I find the overal UI rather sparse, and not very helpful. Hope it'll get better in time.
Hello, it has potential to become real game changer! But I see there are lots of thing to do. Can you share some roadmap for Custom Item Types feature?
examples:
- recurrance (existing for tasks)
- dependencies (existing for tasks)
- bi-directional links – similar to JIRA (new, very demanded)
It would be nice if the hidden fields on the items would not show up at all, rather than just be placed under a collapsed rollout.
Is there a way to make the custom item components have the same "look" as a task? I'm interested in testing this out for our team, but I wish the Status, Assignee, etc could be listed across the top like they are on tasks.
Normal task:
Custom Item:
Laura Boylan Thanks so much for your feedback and suggestions here! For now, it's better to keep all of it here as Custom Item Types have just been released and we're constantly referring to this thread with our conversations with the Product team 🙂
Anna Wallace Our team completely understands this need and so they are working on introducing the ability for Custom Item Types to work together with Blueprints, which will open even more opportunities for how you can set up and manage your work - it's their top priority at the moment 🚀
Jack Alvarez The team is definitely interested in that 🤗
Wim Janin Thanks a lot for reporting this, we will investigate internally. And thanks for your feedback on UI, the Product team is looking into it 👍
Tuomo Suominen To move or change the sections, you can use the little "eye" buttons or the dotted buttons. So, the idea behind the Custom Item Types is to allow you to have a wider range of types of work that you can set up and manage in Wrike, not just tasks and projects. At the same time, they don't have pre-filled content like Blueprints do. Instead, you create a "form" for the different types of work you need. When the Support of Blueprints is released, you'll be able to combine them. Blueprints will have the pre-filled content for work, and Custom Item Types will represent the pre-filled format.
Ivan Matosyan Thanks for reaching out! For now, the next important set is to allow Custom Item Types to work together with Blueprints - this is a top priority for our team at the moment. We will keep you updated on other features the team will be planning in the future!
Russell Sprague It's possible to delete them there as well 👍
Kristi Horvath Thank you for your feedback 🙌 The team has now introduced this new way of setting up work in Wrike to make it more customizable to fit any team's flow. This is also something that distinguishes tasks and projects from this new functionality. We appreciate your feedback though, it would be great if you could share more detail on why you don't find the new UI fits your needs?
Huge thanks for your feedback here, everyone, you can't imagine how helpful it is to the 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
Thanks Lisa. I don't see a way to delete the hidden fields, can you point me to it?
2 big things:
1) It looks like you can create custom types based on 'projects' or 'items' - is there a way to base it on 'folders'?
2)I love the custom icon types... can you make it so the custom icons appear in the navigation on the left hand side? I feel like this would be fairly simple to implement and would be how custom icons would actually be useful... during navigation. like I don't want to have to click on an item to see that I've made it's custom type 'fiscal year'... I want to see the custom dollar sign icon in the navigation that indicates how it's different
Russell Sprague Here's where you can do it:
You can remove custom fields but can't remove system fields.
Jack Alvarez Thanks a lot for your feedback! There are no plans to make folder-based types available, but I'll pass your suggestions to the 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
Lisa hmm, I don't have that option.
This is in Chrome on Windows.
Lisa oh I see, the remove option is only available for custom fields. It would be nice if it was available for all fields.
Just found out about Custom Item Types and diving in this week. Can't wait!
Thanks Russell Sprague, I'll pass your feedback to the team 👍
Ellie Brady Great to hear that! Let me know if you have any questions. And welcome to the Community👋
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.
When creating a custom work item the standard clipboard project icon is next to the name. I can click on it and select a new icon for the custom item. This new icon displays next to the custom item name in the custom item types page and in the new item drop down.
However once an item is created from the dropdown the icon of that new item is the original clipboard project icon and not the icon associated with the custom work item in the previous views.
Can you confirm if this is the intended behavior for the custom work item icons? If so what function are the custom icons supposed to provide?
Taylor Burch Hi! Good point. I would love to see icon in description and comments mentions, it gives mor context to the reader immedeately.
Lisa Hi Lisa, could you please pass to product team, that we miss "add follower" feature, we used it to mention @followers in comments, which is easier than try to mention everyone individualy.