Can you prevent emailing task assignees when updating the task if you are the project owner?

[JonathanTr1]

Can you prevent emailing task assignees when updating the task if you are the project owner?

[EricLu2]

What we do is move the project back to an IDEA or PLANNING type status, make wholesale changes, then move the project back to an APROVED status. No emails go out when the project is in IDEA or PLANNING status. Eric

[JonathanTr1]

Thank you. So no emails go out when the project goes back to Current?

[JonathanTr1]

Just did the status change, and it did email when I set it back to active.

[EricLu2]

Hi - Do you mean you set the status to IDEA or PLANNING, made changes, and then when you moved the status back to CURRENT, it sent out messages for the work you did while the project was in IDEA/PLANNING? Eric

[JonathanTr1]

It sent out an email saying status of the project was changed to active.

[EricLu2]

Oh, yes, it will do that…can’t stop emails from going out when a project is made active. I hate to say it, but people eventually either: 1) Fine tune their notification settings so that they only get notifications that are important to them, or; 2) They learn to ignore everything that comes out of WorkFront. No one can drink from the firehose of email notifications; The height of learning to ignore notifications is when a user creates an Outlook inbox assistant rule that just puts all emails from WorkFront into the recycle bin/deleted items folder, or some other ignored folder. ☺

[GregBe1]

But your original question was to NOT notify users when they are assigned to a task, correct? Doing what Eric said will satisfy that. What we've done actually, is disable that email entirely. We never want to email a person that's been assigned to a task because we feel if they are on the project, they're going to know what tasks they are on.

[JasonMa]

This is one of the biggest challenges our Project Managers face. We want to make mass changes to dates, tasks, etc but don't want to drown people in e-mail. Moving it to a non-CUR phase is certainly an option but from a corporate governance standpoint, moving from phase to phase has meaning, so changing it randomly back and forth creates best practice issues. We can't disable e-mails, because as little as our users like e-mail, they definitely don't use the notifications. I think Workfront's upcoming Journaling option may solve for this somewhat (one huge e-mail with hundreds of changes?) but ideally I would love them to add a PAUSE button to the project that disables all notifications unitl changes are complete then you can un-Pause and a single confirmation e-mail goes out sumarizing the last state of the change.

[DavidCo3]

#ERROR!

[David_Fallon]

#ERROR!

[AnnaGr1]

Hi all, I am the product manager at Workfront responsible for Notifications and Emails. I understand the pain you are experiencing, and we are working curently to solve a part of the problem. With October release, you will be able to configure some notifications related to Projects you Own to be sent daily instad of immediately, and we will be working to enable this functionality for majority of the events. I will be happy to get your feedback once it is available on Preview Oct 19, and definetly after it goes to production later the same month. As Eric mentioned many users ignore emails, even Admins turn off notifications, because user's don't find them valuable, and it is considered as SPAM sometimes. Once the feature is released, my recommendation is going to be to set majority of the emails to be sent Daily. Like Greg mentioned, probably your users already know that they are going to work on some project, and you have reports setup or they are using Work requests area, but still getting summary email with all of the assignments will ensure they stay informed. Check out the attachment with an example of how it will look like :) Related to Pause functionality, that's one of the top requested features, we don't have any timeline for it right now, but I will make sure to share with you the news once we start working on it. Thanks again for all of your feedback! Anna G

[EricLu2]

{{Anna}} Thanks so much for jumping in and responding. I appreciate that you are reading these threads and are free to respond. Good job! Eric

[David_Fallon]

Thank you, Anna!

[ShellyLo]

Thanks Anna! The ability to send a summary email to users would be amazing. It would bundle all of their notifications for the day or 1/2 day and send. This type of notification would be much easier for the users to swallow and not overwhelm their email.

[DavidCo3]

Hi Anna, The screenshot you posted looks like a PM-oriented one. It looks promising, but do you have a screenshot to share which shows what a Work user would see daily regarding their new task assignments? Thanks, David.

[AnnaGr1]

We are working on the design right now, since actionable events will look a bit different. I will share with you once I have something in couple of weeks.