Marketing and Design firm - Project managers need to be able to forward attachments

Hey folks,

We’ve been using Asana for a while now, exclusively in house and without clients being on or viewing Asana. Our previous work flow when sending drafts to clients was to mail the project manager with the latest draft, who would then appropriately forward on to the client.

This forwarding of attachments, in our case design drafts, is causing a real headache with getting and keeping the project managers on board. We have our fair share of usability issues with Asana, but this is the real stickler. It wouldn’t be even half so much of an issue if attachment links were viewable from without being logged in, or if we were able to check an option that allowed this.

I’ve looked at both IFTTT and Zapier to see if there is any integration with a cloud sharing service (something ideally like ‘Copy upload attachments to and forward public link to email’), but there’s nothing of the sort that I can see. The only integrations I can see are for other things.

How can we get around this and move forward? It’s honestly looking like it might end up forcing us to move a lot of our workflow away from Asana again.

If your an organization, client members take up no additional seats. Could you have a client representative be a member of your organization under a private project assigned to them. Then all attachments would be available upon forwarding through one of 3 solution

  1. Asana email system
  2. Sendana.net (Outlook)
  3. Gmail Extension ((Gmail)

We’re not massive, but unfortunately I still think that with the volume of projects we have and the often very non-technical minded clients, it’s not really realistic for us to get them onto Asana. I appreciate the suggestion, and it might be great for some clients, but not as an overall - at least for us.

Why can’t your PM’s download the drafts from Asana and email them to the client?

I ask because my team is looking at Asana (I work with graphic designers) and I am the project manager. We currently use Basecamp and that is what i do now, and was planning on doing if we made the switch.

1 Like

Honestly surprises me that there’s been no other activity here about this. I doubt anything will ever get added to let us do this, but I don’t see why it hasn’t been there from the very start. This and other things that have been missing since we started on the platform are still a genuine day-to-day disappointment with Asana - an otherwise great base tool.

I still have my question above-why did you find that you could’t do that?

Have you considered hosting those deliverables on Google Drive, Dropbox etc. and attaching them to Asana tasks instead of uploading? The native integrations are pretty powerful. This way you can leverage the file sharing and collaboration advantages of more specialised third party services and still keep your work management on Asana.

@anon39567004 You most certainly can download and distribute any attachments manually. Using upload/download from/to desktop as a workflow can get tiresome, however, when a client has you do version 99 of something.

Cheers
Daniel