Weigh in on Smartsheet's Next Strategic Feature

Tamara Gordon Berlik · 09/19/16

I can't wait for this to go live!

Alex Vorobiev · 09/19/16

Thanks everyone so much for taking the survey and providing feedback. Let me quickly address the quesitons posted here:

@stephanie, @brad - we are looking into letting users specify delivery times (or windows) in addition to the four options we have now - right away, once an hour, once a day, and once a week. It may not, however, make it into the 1st release of conditional notifications.

On a related note, @brad - quesiton for you: are you saying you want the notifications to be delivered to designated recipients based on their individual time zones? Here is what this means: say, you have a notification rule "at the end of the day let Bob, Sergei, Wang know about tasks that are at risk", where Bob, Sergei and Wang are in US, Russia and China, respectively. If delivery is based on the recipient's time zone, it will get evaluated and sent at 3 different times, and each person will possibly receive a different set of tasks - because those may change as the day goes on. Is that the behavior you are looking for?

@matt - we are looking into supporting nested AND and OR groupings, but this is an advanced feature for power users that otherwise adds complexity to the user experience for everyone else. We need to be careful to keep the experience simple for most people, so still lots of work to be done.

@brad - aware of request to group notification content by row, and will add your vote in favor.

Everyone - don't have a specific target date at this point, but we are working very hard to get this built. What may appear as a straighforward feature has a fair bit of complexity that impacts both existing and new users, and we want to make sure we do it right. Appreciate your patience and will share an update as soon as we have more information. Thanks

Mattisphere · 09/19/16

Thank you Alex. For the logic, I wouldn't say it's complex. In Salesforce, each rule is numbered and there is a simple text box where you can type 1 AND 2 AND (3 OR 4) etc... All it uses is AND/OR statements and parentheses - it works well.

Is this same conditional dialog coming to reminders and update requests?

Alex Vorobiev · 09/19/16

@matt - I hear you. Believe me that most (non-technical) users struggle with logic constructs, especially those that involve groupings and parentheses.

WRT reminders and update requests - our goal is to ultimately have as much consistency as possible across all relevant features, including filters, reports, notifications, reminders, update requests, conditional formatting... the short answer is yes, we will get there.

Tx

Jae Anderson · 09/19/16

Great way to sample and give feedback of new features. Very excited to see the enhanced notifications roll out!

Jae Anderson · 09/19/16

@ Brad Jones: I used Chrome and the features worked. For me the windows were stacked on top of each other so I had to move the top one to click when I finished each process.

Brad Jones · 09/20/16

Thanks @Jae. I think it was my adblockplus, or ghostery doing it. I block alot of junk, but some useful stuff too.

Alex Vorobiev · 09/23/16

@brad - re: your internationally distributed team scenario and the signficance of time zones. Please see my earlier post in this discussion - please let me know whether my understanding of your desired behavior is correct. Thanks!

Brad Jones · 09/26/16

@Alex

Hooray for being able to set notification times!!!

Your proposal sounds like setting the daily notifications based upon the individual users time zones, so their snapshot would be based upon the 24hrs preceding their notification setting. I think this could work even better than what we originally wanted. If this is possible, so that each person has a 24hr history based upon their time-zone, then it would be fantastic. We have many shift workers, but most work the same schedule, so I think this would be the best possible option. If someone changes shifts, they could change their time-zone and then their notifications would keep coming at the beginning of their day. Please implement this.

I understand that this would mean each person could receive a different notification, but as long that snapshot is custom to the person this should be less of a problem than getting the notifications at the end of your day.

Also, really glad y'all are considering grouping the content by row rather than category. This will make for a much easier read.

Thanks for your feedback and help Alex

Alex Vorobiev · 09/26/16

@brad - thanks! To clarify WRT timing - we are considering adding support for configuring more specific notification delivery times (or time ranges - e.g. "morning - 4 hour window, afternoon - 4 hour window...", etc.), but when this will be available has not been determined yet.

I believe what you were really asking for was time zone support. Today, we process all notifications based on the sheet owner's time zone. The scenario you described had an integrationally distributed team where recipients were located in different time zone. So, "end of day" was time zone specific. In addition to being able to configure delivery times, we are also considering supporting recipient time zones - as I described in my earlier example. Again, when this will be available in the product has not yet been determined.

Thanks for your feedback and patience!

Brad Jones · 09/27/16

Thanks Alex. Indeed, both time zone support, and recipient time zone support are both very interesting.

NOTE: I am the owner of all of my company's sheets (effort!!), so the time zone support would need to consider factors other than owner time zone.

And, it seems to me that the infrastructure behind both could also support one older request of being able to do manual pushes of notifications (like on demand time snapshots) Looked, but I couldn't find the original post. I know it could probably be done with a report, but if I could just click to get the changes of the last 24hrs - this would be cool.

Alex Vorobiev · 09/27/16

Brad, thanks. To be super clear, the way our "scheduled" notifications work today (by "scheduled" I mean anything other than "right away" - i.e., "once an hour / day / week") is as follows. Say, you set up a notification to be delivered "once a day". At a specified time, the notification job will run and identify all the data that has changed in the last 24 hours. It WILL send you a notification that will identify all the cells, etc. that have changed in the last 24 hours. What it WILL NOT do is list every single change that happened - for example, if a specific cell was updated five times with five different values in the last 24 hours, it WILL NOT list all the five changes.

In terms of triggering this sort of notification manually - it's not something we've been considering supporting, but I will take note of your request. In the meantime, you and other users can take advantage of the existing "highlight changes" feature which essentially does the same thing, sans attachments and comments.

Cheers

Brad Jones · 10/01/16

Thanks Alex. Yeah,,,, highlight changes is nice, but it's not as clean as something like a diff of the last 24hrs. This was supposed to be added to the list of enhancement requests already.

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/feature-request-customizable-daily-notifications-time#comment-8082

Either way, we really need to have notifications based upon the timezone of the team using the alerts. This is really hurting my teams now.

Alex Vorobiev · 10/03/16

Brad - roger re: time zone based alerts. Already being tracked.

Just so I am crystal clear on the other request. The link you shared is talking about adding the ability to set specific notification times - that's also being tracked. But you also mentioned a "diff of the last 24 hours". A true software "diff" implies old vs. new, side by side - that's not something we do today or have immediate plans to do. Our current notifcations just highlight the specific cells that were updated and include the new values. "Highlight changes" does the same thing - it will highlight the specific cells updated in the last XX.

Can you please clarify what you mean by "diff" and "clean"? Thanks!

Brad Jones · 10/05/16

Sure thing Alex,

What I meant by a diff was not 'strictly' from a software engineers perspective. (I'm an EE, not an SE ) I will try to describe it more clearly.

So, each day we receive a notification that is based on the last 24hrs. I'm not sure how your system does it internally, but it knows. This is a scheduled feature that is useful. We use it as 'shift reports' in our company, so that those subscribed can get them daily. However, in addition to our time zone differences, we also have people who don't needd to subscribe to the daily reports, and we have rotating shifts for our engineers. So sometimes the standard notifications are not as useful to all users.

Now, what I would like, and my teams would like too, is the ability to do a spontaneous 'shift report' that will generate the same email as before, but based upon the time of the request. So that if their shift times change they don't have to keep changing their settings in the menu. They come into work, click on the request, and get the notification email for that sheet in a minute or so.

I hope that is more clear. If not, please let me know.

Weigh in on Smartsheet's Next Strategic Feature

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