E-mail notifications are quickly driving everyone in our team crazy. While I can think of some workarounds, before I go about implementing that, I was wondering if there was any built in functionality to configure a sort of end of the day digest e-mail for any of the following:
- user input task notifications
- error messages
- emails from the send email smart service
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HI Marco, As far as i know there is no OOTB functionality which can fulfill your requirement. But you can handle these notifications based on groups. you can have dedicated groups for receiving these notifications. like admin group for error messages, UIT notifcations for assignees.
Why do you have so many emails? This seems like a stupid question, but if you have non-zero error messages, you should solve the root causes. And task assignment emails are important for the people to know about waiting tasks.
The error messages are during development. Every time someone tests something, if they didn't get it perfect, all the other developers get an e-mail. While yes, we can change the assignment of who gets those error alerts to the initiator or something during testing, it's an extra thing to think of that we'll need to remember to change again before we push to production. It's something that is really easy to forget about.
I REALLY wish that error emails were automatically disabled when testing a process model. The person testing can see on the screen that they screwed up. No need to send out an e-mail to the world letting everyone else know it.
As for task assignment e-mails, people in that task's group could be potentially getting many task notifications a day. They don't need to be getting a spam of e-mails that quickly become irritating. They can also see what tasks they have to deal with when they log into the app, so e-mail notifications are more of a backup than the main way of someone knowing they have something to do. A list of tasks at the end/beginning of the day that they need to attend to is sufficient. If the user could decide which type of notification they get out of Appian (single, digest or none) that would be even better.
Any process model MUST have its alert settings adjusted. Make that check part of your QA.
Task assignment alerts can be disabled. in the UIT properties.
The error messages are during development, so the admin group is basically everyone in the system at that point. Yes we can reassign the notifications to the person developing the process or the initiator or whatever, but when we're testing we can see on the screen when we screwed up, so sending out an e-mail notification is almost insulting at that point. Then when we finish development, we have to remember to set the alerts to the right group, which is a step that is easy to forget.
And yes, we can assign the task e-mails to groups (they are) but the users could get many tasks a day which they can easily see by going into the app. They don't need a spam of e-mails to also let them know what they need to do in the app as well.
Hi Marco, it's very useful to get error messages as notification. The problem is you are not able to manage properly. As part of best practices we configure custom error alert for process models. Now it's up to you whom you want to send these emails. It can be a company's dl (distribution list) or can be a adminstrator group. For UIT you can disable the notifications though as Stefan mentioned. And you can handle these notifications in your email inbox as well by creating a rule. I hope it helps.
I know the task assignment alerts can be disabled. I don't really want an all or nothing situation though. The end of the day digest is the happy medium (and again, if the end user could choose between the three, it would be best).
I could disable the alerts, record that they should have gotten an alert to the db and then have a daily process that sends out a single e-mail at the end of the day that contains all the tasks they would have otherwise been notified by for the day, but besides the hassle of setting that up for every task in the system (of which there are many), I mainly worry about the strain that could potentially put on the system to have a daily task sending out e-mails to potentially every user in the system all at once.
Would something like that be doable without dragging the whole system down?
Error e-mails are useful when the system is in prod and users who don't know what they are doing are breaking things, but when we're developing, we know our errors are happening without an e-mail notification because we're actively in the system breaking things. We see the red screen in front of us when we run our processes. The e-mail doesn't tell us anything we don't already know and is just annoying at that point.