Separate update requests

MichelleN

Is there a way to make sure update requests are sent individually?

Right now, I have a smartsheet process where a person fills in a form and a coordinator is notified. then the coordinator assigns a specific person (contact) to each row. When this person (contact) is assigned, an automation sends a request an update to that contact asking them to complete additional blanks in that row (I have selected the specific fields I want them to fill in).

The thing is, we want those update requests to be received as individual requests so it is clear which person they are for, but it is instead sending bulk requests. The contact person cannot see which people are in each bulk update request and they receive multiple bulk update requests. It is causing a problem where i have to go in and run the update request on specific rows manually in order to separate them.

The message they receive with the update request has placeholder text within it, but they don't get that message in the email when they get bulk requests. Also, it seems that even if the assignment of the contact is not completed simultaneously in the contact column but are assigned individually (way more time consumeing) the update requests are still grouped together. We want to bulk assign the person/contact to the correct rows, but have the person/contact receive those really needs each one to be received individually. How close together do the assignments have to be for Smartsheet to decide to group the requests? Is there a way I can get it to send them individually?

Annother thing: your links on the pop-up "update request" page is broken (see attached photo)

It would also be great if there was a way to bulk remove requests that were handled another way or not used.

kowal

Hi Michelle,

This is a very odd behaviour of smartsheet as each row is treated as individual "update request" and shall not be treated as bulky emails.

Can you show me how those bulky emails look like?

MichelleN

i think i found a way around it. by bulk emails, I mean that specific rows were assigned to specific mentors. when that person is assigned to the row, they receive an automation message with {{auto text}} from the row saying they are assigned. But when the mentors were filled into the row using a bulk assignment method, they got an automated message that did not include the intended message and told them they were assigned to the following 3, 4, 8, 10 people. It would list the first few and then say… something like "and 8 more assignments" (not the exact wording). But since they couldn't see who was assigned, it wasn't working because they could have 4 or 5 of these with different number of people in there where they didn't list the names in full, so they couldn't find the right person without searching through all of the emails. We changed to a card view report approach this week to try to work around this problem. Now each mentor has a report filtered to their assignments and the card view looks a lot like the email form looked before, but they can see everyone assigned to them and the cards are organized by a pulldown on status of completion. I would still love to understand how I could keep those items from getting grouped up in the notification email because the help documentation in Smartsheet said if they had {{auto text} in the message, they would not be grouped together like that. Thanks!

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