Turn Off Notifications of No Recipients

ker9

A new feature (unwanted by me) is to notify me if there are no recipients on a notification.  Well, Smartsheet, you don't allow me to keep the recipients when it's a template, so whenever we use the template now we get this ridiculous notification that there aren't any recipients.  Of course there aren't any recipients, you remove them.  How do we turn this notification off.  

My team will be creating upwards of 20 sheets a day from a template.  It is extremely annoying to receive notifications about something that shouldn't be a problem.  It's a template and the notification email address should be kept when the new sheet is created.  If you can't do that, eliminate the notification about no address.  Yes, I put in a product enhancement request.  Basically to unenhance your enhancements.

Shaine Greenwood

Hi ker9,

Instead of using templates, you might try having your team save a sheet as new. I use this for my workflows and find that since it allows me to save sharing, notifications (and other alerts & actions) as well as the rule recipients, I get a better experience.

I share everyone to the sheet as a Viewer so they can't edit it (but they're still able to Save as New and retain rules & recipients), then use a title like [COPY ME] <sheet name>

I agree with you that our templates functionality could be improved. When you have a moment, please submit a Product Enhancement Request and let our Product team know what features you'd like to see templates have (including, but not limited to retaining the full notification rule & recipients).

Scott Willeke

First, I apologize that this has caused a problem for you and I take full responsibility for the problem.

We did start sending notifications to users when their Alerts & Actions rules are disabled by the system (due to an invalid configuration) or are unable to notify the recipients (usually due to permission settings). This notification is clearly unhelpful in the case of creating rules from a template where recipients are not copied. I am already working with the team to resolve it so that we avoid sending the notification in this particular circumstance. I cannot say for sure just yet, but we are targeting to have this done in time for our March release.

Most of the time we hear of Templates being used when sharing the template with a new set of users such as another team. In this case the recipients will be different and that is why we don't provide the option to copy them. However, using the "Save as New" feature on a sheet (rather than an actual Template), you can preserve the recipients and this is often used by customers when sharing a copy of a sheet with the same team of people.

If you and others here on the community would like recipients preserved for Templates as well, please reply with a little bit more detail about how you're using templates and we will seriously consider introducing that feature to Templates as well.

Thank you for your feedback and thank you for using Smartsheet!

--

Scott Willeke | Smartsheet

Senior Product Manager, Automation

E: Scott.Willeke@Smartsheet.com

 

ker9

Hi Scott,

Please contact Kevin Tao for previous discussions on this.  I have a team that will more than likely start using the sheet rather than doing Save As New and that is why Templates are so important.  The team are all by necessity Admin on the Workspace where the template resides.  I do not keep the "real" sheet there so it can't be accidentally changed.  The sheet they use is full of instructions on what to do, including how to add the email address to the preset notification that is disabled and has no email address because it doesn't come forward from a template, and how to change the settings to allow any email address.

The use of Smartsheet for this particular application has been a phenomenal improvement over what we had previously but that doesn't change the technical level of the people we have doing this task.

Thanks,

Karin

Amecorwin

Hello,

How do I turn off the notifications when I "saved as new" and forgot to uncheck the alerts? There are several sheets that I created like this that are already being used by several people so I do not want to make a new one. How do I stop the flood of emails I'm getting every day?

Thank you,

Ame

ker9

@Amecorwin

There is an option to keep or remove recipients from automation when saving as new. If you retain them, then the only method I'm aware of would be to go into the new sheet and manual remove specific people from the automations.

You may want to start your own thread to get more responses.