Automated Notifications for Swim Lane Changes in Card View

Katie Gerhardt

Now that Card View has been unveiled (and I love what I see so far), is there any way to automate notifications based on status changes? For example, let's say that we are using card view for a Kanban board, with swim lanes for "Work Queue," "In Development," "In Test," and "In Production." There are different people who need to be notified when a card moves from one swim lane to the next. We do not want everyone receiving a notification each time a card moves. Is there a way to set up a Smartsheet so that each time a card moves from "Work Queue" to "In Development," for example, the developer assigned to the task automatically receives an email? In other words, can Smartsheet be set up with a work flow that includes automatic notifications to specific people as a task moves through the swim lanes?

Alex Vorobiev

Katie - we are working on it.  Don't have a firm date yet, but this is a high priority feature we are working very hard to built.  Really appreciate your patience - our goal is to make sure it is easy to use yet powerful to help customers solve a range of scenarios.

 

Cheers

Kennedy Stomps

Katie-- Prior to this, you might consider using a formula to trigger a change in a designated column if a specific value is selected in another column. You can set this up by creating a Text/Number column called something like "Notify". Then, enter a formula in this column that checks the value in the desired column and row and sets the value of the "Notify" column to 1 if it matches the given value. Here's an example:

 

 

This will check the value in the Status column on row 7 to see if it is "In Development" and if so, it places a 1 in the Notify column. With the formula in place, you can then set up a Notification for the Notify column which will be triggered whenever someone, other than yourself, changes any Status to "In Development".

 

Hope this helps!

Katie Gerhardt

Thank you both, Alex and Kennedy. We look forward to seeing what Smarsheets comes up with and in the meantime, we'll see if we can use the workaround that Kennedy suggested.

Alex Vorobiev

Katie - meant to also share the following: in addition to the option Kennedy described, while we are working on improvements to "native" notifications, you could take advantage of our Zapier or Azuqua connectors to create some of these conditional notification rules.

Shaine Greenwood

Hi All,

 

As mentioned, we're actively working on this feature. If you have ten minutes to spare, we'd love to get your participation in a usability study we're running.

 

For more information, see this annoncement:

https://community.smartsheet.com/announcement/weigh-smartsheets-next-strategic-feature