Hornbill Tasks (activities) send an email notification

[Nikolaj]

Hi support,

It would be very nice and helpful for our organisation if Hornbill will send out email notification for tasks ( activities) from service Manager and Project Manger 

to the assigned team and user.

Thanks

Nikolaj

[Gerry]

@Nikolaj

Thanks for posting the question.  Its not something we have supported thus far, we have always relied on our platforms notification system as we feel that if Hornbill is the platform from which you manage your work then you would normally be in Hornbill and/or you would get desktop notifications. 

That being said, although it's not supported today, there is really no technical reason why it could not be and it, as you can imagine, has come up a number of times before, because people still love email as their primary communications tool.  I have bookmarked this and we will have a look at it, its not something we can probably do instantly, as to do it properly I would expect customers would also want quite a lot of control over what notifications they do and do not receive over email. So we will look at it over the coming 2-3 months and see if we can get something going to work towards this.  In the mean time I would encourage your users to enable desktop notifications for Hornbill. 

Thanks

Gerry

 

[Nikolaj]

@Gerry

Thanks for your detailed explanation for this topic. As you say the point is that the users still love email as their primary communication tool and especially our external IT stuff. They are normally administrator for our HPC Cluster or Storage system and so on. The point is that they are also get some tasks via hornbill to do something but the don 't have it open all the time. I try to push it that they should use hornbill for our primary communication platform for our IT department but it is not so easy all the time.

Hope i can see some email notification in the future that would help us a lot in out organisation.

best Regards

Nikolaj

[Martyn Houghton]

@Nikolaj

As a workaround, if the request itself as well as the task/activity is assigned to them in Service Manager, then the analyst can setup their own preferences with the fairly new 'Service Manager Notifications' section under their profile to also get an email.

Cheers

Martyn

 

[Nikolaj]

@Martyn Houghton thanks, But that is not for human Tasks in Service Manager. It is only for request assignment. 

cheers

Nikolaj

[Martyn Houghton]

@Nikolaj

Indeed, you need to assign the request to them as well as the task, to use that as a workaround.

Cheers

Martyn

[RIchard Horton]

I note that Gerry's 2019 reply said this would be looked at in the next 2-3 months. Interested to know the outcome of that/current situation. 

Thanks

Richard

[Gerry]

Hello @RIchard Horton

I am afraid its still in the backlog. We are consistently asked for things and do what we can to implement everything, our priorities outside of our strategic endeavours are driven by customer demand, in effect the highest priority changes bubble up to the top and we add them to our work queue.  The devil is in the detail here, its what notifications to send and how to give users control over these notifications. Technically the sending of an email is trivial, but giving users appropriate levels of control over these is less straight forward, and its that aspect that prevents it from being a quick addition.  This requirement surprisingly does not come up that often, probably because for the most part, Hornbill is a destination application for the Hornbill users, which means they see/get the notifications they need through the system, request, work and tasks lists within. 

What we have done in the meantime is to implement Desktop notifications, which means you do not need to be "in the application" in order to get notifications relating to task assignments etc... I guess even with this, you still see a need to use email for notifications?

What work pattern is this for? is it the case that your users are generally not in Hornbill, but need to know when they have been assigned a task to do so an email is the best way of notifying them?  What about task reminders, task reassignments, task completions and other notify-able events relating to tasks? Or is it you would expect a mirror of all notifications in Hornbill that you get sent in your email also?  

Gerry

[nasimg]

Hi Gerry

For us its for analysts in Hornbill, but we struggle to get them to use activities.

Our joiner/ new starter process uses a lot of them (eg. email/ apps/ laptops etc) but I would take the notification that a task has been assigned as the main one we need. This should encourage use of the views for activities/tasks.

Sadly this morning I received another message from our SD teamleaders saying they are missing deadline as they can't easily see the tasks, I'm looking to see whether we drop them in favour of separate SR's for each activity.

Nasim

[Gerry]

@nasimg

Thanks for the feedback, I can certainly understand what you are saying, if we can add a simple option to send task assignment notifications via email that would at least be a start. 

Gerry

[RIchard Horton]

Thanks @Gerry   I did have a bit of a look at desktop notifications. This wasn't successful, though that's probably me rather than the desktop notifications. However I haven't delved further since discovering that this automation would do what I wanted : 

 

Our scenario is that people aren't living in Hornbill so we need to work out when they need  a notification

Richard

[AmyW]

We think this is helpful as well, maybe not an email notification but it appear in the alarm bell like what happens when you use the @NAME feature.