What we have today
A notification is triggered when a user saves an item and selects one or more distributions groups. (Distribution Groups can have one or more users)
The future
We have been debating how to expand on this. Some of the concepts on the table are RSS, subscribing to notifications, alerts within the Contour application itself (so only when you log in do you see any notifications). There are also questions around customizations. For example from a user profile we could see settings like; notify me on all Items I own or am assigned to or items I comment on etc.
This discussion is open to any ideas around notification.
Rather than email notifications, I'd like to see a sortable list in the tool of all the requirements that have changed in the "X" number of days as well as over a range of prior days (ie: What changed in March 07 for instance). This could be coupled with a subscription checkbox for individual requirements and for folders (this would then list only those items that have changed in the desired period. An email for every change doesn't work for people who need to review dozens of changes each day.
For people who only own or need to track a few requirements, I can see some merit to email notification on a subscrition basis for them.
"I'd like to see a sortable list in the tool of all the requirements that have changed in the "X" number of days"
We have already built an event log that will show everything that has changed, displaying; "# of minutes, hours, days, weeks, years ago".
"over a range of prior days (ie: What changed in March 07 for instance)"
I like the idea of defining a notification that maybe consists of a filter. So for example you could create a notification that could be scheduled weekly and would use filter criteria to only return items assigned to you that have changed.
"a subscription checkbox for individual requirements and for folders"
We'll certainly be implementing the concept of subscribing to specific items such that if that item changes your are notified.
"An email for every change doesn't work for people who need to review dozens of changes each day"
We are also going to implement an RSS feed so people can recieve this information via RSS rather than e-mail.
It also sounds like you're thinking it would be nice to display these changes within contour rather than via email. This would be nice as we build our dashboard and allow people to create widgets to be displayed there.
Thanks for the feedback.
And now for something even simpler - I mean real simple.
With the current notification code (1.6.3) that we are using - what would be nice would be something as simple
as customizing the header and footer of the email. We would like to add "this is an automatic generated message from contour"
or something like that plus the standard email disclaimer "if you received this in error, etc etc"... at the bottom of the email.
Is that available anywhere right now?
Thanks.
Hi Kim,
You can modify the email templates with a text editor - for instructions on how to do this, see:
http://www.jamasoftware.net/doku.php/config/emailtemplates
There are plans to move all text based templates such as these and the editor templates and store them within the application and provide an editor for making these types of modifications easier.
I'd like to put in a vote for email in addition to a dashboard display. With a limited number of user licenses I'd like to keep from requiring users to login just to see if anything changed.
