Adobe Workfront, acquired by Adobe in late 2020, is a web-based project-management tool. It is designed for both IT and marketing teams, but can be implemented for any kind of project. Workfront offers all the features standard to project management platforms, as well as resource allocation, automation, and agile workflow.
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BQE CORE
Score 8.7 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
BQE CORE is a business management solution built specifically for professional service firms. BQE CORE is a combination of a billing assistant, project management, and accounting solution. CORE is designed to do the hard work of delivering actionable insights directly to the user's dashboards or inbox. BQE CORE replaces the products Engineeroffice, Archioffice, and BillQuick; the functionality of these applications is now found in BQE CORE.
Workfront enables us to manage all our projects effectively while providing a comprehensive overview of team resources. The Resource Planner helps the team identify their capacity to determine whether they are over- or under-allocated. This information is crucial for project planning and ensuring team members do not experience burnout.
I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.
Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact.
Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project.
Dashboards are the best tool EVER!
The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us.
Assigning contacts to particular roles - such as Invoicing, Contracts, etc.
Accounting Functionality - they are basically a project management accounting software, so in my opinion, they could learn some things from other accounting software such as QuickBooks etc.
All that I've said already is why. I suppose the clearest way to say it is that at this point? I cannot imagine running the 300+ active projects in eMarketing without AtTask; it simply wouldn't be possible and even more; I wouldn't imagine why we'd try to find an alternative tool when we have one meeting our needs.
We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.
Workfront is overly complex, but it is functional as a tool to keep track of projects. It is a shame that sometimes it takes a lot of clicks to find anything. Workfront is slowly modernizing its interface but at the same time, hides certain information away thus making the experience feels worse.
The foundation is awesome, like I have said before, however the house being built on it, the educational resources being provided to us (more of sales pitches that don't work), and flexible workflow opportunities, is making us look elsewhere for how much we will be spending on per user. It's crazy to think how flexible they are not when it comes to user settings. Lack of integration with other sources is awful.
Maintenance is required, but usually after work hours, Some days the proofing tool function is not operational, but this is a new function of the tool that WF is working out. the kinks on. Chrome is the best browser to use the system in and we find Firefox and Explorer lose some view functionality - Gantt Chart, Resource Grid
Workfront's performance has been very good. Everything always feels very fast and snappy in my experience. We have integrated it with custom scripts to create folder structure for media managing our projects. It works very well.
This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.
I know that this particular company has it's own Adobe Workfront employee that builds out things they need from the software, and meets with them regularly to troubleshoot. I'm not part of this process, but it's refreshing to see Adobe provide this level of customer service to people, and they're expedient.
As a new employee and CORE user, I talk to support on a weekly basis. I have never had to wait for more than 3 min to get connect with a support rep, and all my questions have been answered. The support representatives are polite and eager to help no matter how simple your question is.
The training is very easy to use and you can simply choose the topics included in the course(s) that are most important to your training needs. After each training course, you are tested on what you have learned. If you need a refresher course, they provide Course Catalogs as well as instructor-led courses & workshops.
Most people learn as you go, a lot of this stuff requires trial and error throughout so my suggestion is to provide as much information in the upfront and keep it as simple as possible. You can add other tools and features as you go but everyone should have the basics down so no bad habits can start to develop. Be persistent with everyone, and don't be afraid to correct and talk through steps again so everyone is on the same page
It's been a while since I've used another time and resource management platform, but I would say that Adobe Workfront takes the cake. Its newly refreshed user interface is simple to navigate, whereas other platforms can be quite confusing when "drilling down" on a project. Also, Adobe Workfront has features that I have not seen in other platforms, including collaboration capabilities and the ability to upload a document as proof so it can be reviewed for grammar, consistency, formatting, etc., before being presented or sent to a client.
Deltek Vision is far more advanced, more encompassing and offers more flexibility with what you want to do. However, it's also quite difficult to use, whereas BQE CORE is intuitive and user friendly. The trade off is worth it in some arenas but overall it's not suited for a larger fast paced company. Great for smaller companies.
As I stated earlier, I didn't have to pay for Workfront myself- I'm a user under a large organization. I know it's not cheap to implement, I don't know how the price scales for a small-business, but I do like the product enough that I'm going to look into it in the future for my own company.
We have been using Workfront for about 3 years. During this time they continue to be a very stable project management system. Workfront's overall scalability is able to handle increased loads of work. When using Workfront for a project management tool for the web team, we store documents, images & video's without any issues. They work with their customer's to provide the best project management system in the market today! I highly recommend Workfront for all project management needs. Workfront strives to deliver unique technology solutions to growing companies!
