E-mail notification ONLY to assignments that have changed?

MichaelL

I've got a workflow that notifies people when they have been assigned a task or assigned as task lead. If we add/remove a new person then all of the assigned people receive an e-mail notification. How can I restrict the notification to just the new/removed person?

NickStaffordPM

Would it not be possible to simply use the send to contacts in a cell (assuming all A,B,C,D,E in your example above are all multi-selected within the same cell). We use this for sending out training session summaries and I have sent and email to 20 people at once using the action block below.

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Genevieve P.

Hey @MichaelL

Can you post a screen capture of how you have your current workflow set up?

If you have the Action Block to send to Contacts in a Cell, it should only send the email alert to the specific contact. Here's more information: Action blocks: Specify what automation is triggered

Cheers,

Genevieve

James Keuning

You are going to have a hard time with this using your current configuration. Specifically, you are using a multi-entry contact field, and you want to only alert people who are added or removed from the field.

The thing I can think of is a scheme that copies the entire record to another sheet whenever an edit is made. If you do that, you can use COLLECT and LARGE to compare the most recent two records for any task. Comparing the two records will allow you to isolate the difference in the Assigned To and Lead fields.

The problem with this, and the reason that I am not optimistic even before trying this, is that Smartsheet does not give us a lot of options for working with multi-entry contact fields. Meaning it's hard to split and join contact fields. Here is a thread about it: Combine Contacts from multiple columns into a single cell — Smartsheet Community

Another option is to not use a multi-entry field. Use the family hierarchy. Add your people under the parent row as children. That will let you alert at the individual person level. A couple problems:

1. Smartsheet cannot join the individuals back into a multi-contact field, the contacts are stored as text.
2. You won't be able to alert a person when they are removed. But you could use a checkbox that indicates that a person is no longer active. So you do not remove them, you just deactivate them. In the scheme in the screen shot below, you can how unchecking a person can remove them from the rollup.

MichaelL

Thanks for the reply. Blue box is current workflow setup. If I add E person to an assignment with A/B/C/D then A/B/C/D/E get the e-mail. If I remove D person to an assignment with A/B/C/D then A/B/C get the e-mail.

I can force an answer with the red box but it isn't ideal to manage 15-20 people with custom assignment changes.

NickStaffordPM

Would it not be possible to simply use the send to contacts in a cell (assuming all A,B,C,D,E in your example above are all multi-selected within the same cell). We use this for sending out training session summaries and I have sent and email to 20 people at once using the action block below.

Capture123.PNG