COMMENTS
I get the nuance behind what you have done but, unless I am misunderstanding things, it ignores the information-hungry people. Most important use-case is that I am a CTO and want to shadow all tickets. Emails are great because I can create lots of rules and alters in my Outlook for any situation that I desire AS LONG AS I am getting all ticket related emails. If a user creates any ticket (but most importantly a high priority one) it really messes me up if I don't get a real-time email. The necessity to first subscribe to an email before I receive an alert about it is counter-intuitive for those who rely on the first email to decide whether the ticket is worth tracking or not...
Hi Tolga,
Most of the CTOs that use Assembla Tickets were overpassed by the amount of emails they got.
We decided to make the deafult option to email real time alerts only about tickets you are following.
However, we know that you still need to see everything that happens. That's why you still have the option to get a summary of all the ticket changes per hour. Our next step is to improve these summaries, to make it easier to find important information.
Having said that, you also have the option to subscribe to the RSS feed of all tickets. And we will probably add an option to automatically follow all tickets (or more interesting, all tickets that match certain custom conditions)
Sergio,
I agree that the amount of email can be daunting. But I prefer all information as opposed to the inability to control the frequency and characteristics of the information that is provided. That said, I understand everybody has a different style and I am sure you are listening to a majority of your customers.
The future changes that you describe are fine with me so I will hopefully be ok until then.
In the new ticket list, there are
not enough room for the
ticket number column - normally we can only see the big stars. Please look into this issue.
@Tolga. Thanks for your understanding and your feedback to improve Assembla. We will certainly come up with a solution to your scenario after gathering some more feedback this week.
@Chuong. The ticket number column should look fine now. There was a style issue at the morning in certain styles, but you should see it ok now. If not, please file a support ticket with your space URL and browser settings
Before your last upgrade Assembla was sending emails from spaces under the names of the team members about tickets events. This feature allowed me, as CTO, to follow different projects and different people without opening emails, just reading From and Subjects. After the latest upgrade I lost this feature and now I have to open each project summary email to view the content of email! It doesn’t help me at all!
I tried to change settings to return back to the previous functionality, but unfortunately I couldn’t. Maybe I don't know how.
I don't know why did you decide to change that but for me Assmbla became less efficient - it takes more time for me and others to follow the results.
Hi Andrei,
I think you are confused. Such feature has not been removed. We got your concern by email earlier today and we answer it, Did you recieve our reply?
You can still get such emails (with the From and Subject you like) if you follow the tickets with the Star icon (or with the notification UI)
I am not much into emails, following activity using emails for large projects becomes impossible, I have found to be a better suit to follow using the stream tab and subscribe using RSS, it will be nice to filter the tickets by priority on an RSS and therefore subscribe from any reader to read on the desk or on the go.
Sorry,
I haven't received your email. Could you please resend it. Does it mean that I need to star all the tickets in 6-7 projects to monitor any activity on them? What about new tickets? I'm not sure that this approach is practical, because for me is the most important to follow the projects and tickets activity, than some individual tickets.
It will be nice if i have "Followed Tickets" link in
My Start Page like "My Tickets" which shows tickets assigned to me across spaces
Nice modifications.Really helpful. Thank you.
Much needed improvements, thanks, but you "forgot" something important: for messages, a reply to a message should inherit the recipient list specified on its parent message.
Also, I guess milestone updates are included in the summaries now? Or not?
You were 100% right to reduce the email alerting by default. The old defaults were just plain wrong, and unnecessarily marred an otherwise pristine product. The new strategy makes much more sense, and I couldn't be happier.
Our clients constantly complain of 2 things:
1) Getting too many emails
2) Having to deal with another login
Because of these complaints, we were resorting to setting up accounts on a client's behalf, just so that we could adjust their alert settings and take some of the pain out of accepting an invite. Or worse, we would just not invite folks when we were too busy to set them up properly.
This fixes that, and I couldn't be happier.
BTW, another workaround to ensure that all ticket data is available/searchable is to use the api to store the data into a database and report against it. We do it. It works great, and there are *lots* of benefits (it’s how we integrate billing for instance).
Love the product. Love the update. Thanks.
The change to the notification mechanism is a blessing !!! Nobody can deal with the amount of emails the system used to generate before. Data-eager people can keep the stream screen open and keep refreshing it.
Don't let anyone persuade you otherwise :)
Eatai,
if I am traveling but still want to keep track of what's going on I can't have the stream screen open and keep refreshing it can I? Even if I am at my desk, keeping a screen open eats away my precious screen real-estate whereas email is anychronous and has a sound or visual alert built in to the paradigm.
I think you are missing the point of the "data-eager" people. You can't call their perspective wrong at all - it's their view and they can form it however they like it.
Just as it is very valid for you to want a different default mechanism it is also very valid for me to want the "data-eager" option.
I would highly recommend quickly reintroducing the old mechanism (or a variation thereof) back as an option as it was a life saver for me in keeping track of my project.
Perhaps the reason I didn't find the email traffic daunting was because my project is small with only a few developers and roughly 10 watchers.
I can see how the email traffic for a large project can get daunting, but I personally would probably opt to see all emails from even a medium to large project...
New notifications sucks. I don't want to recieve any emails. Before the change I disabled all emails in stream tab, but now It looks like it has no effect.
How can I disable emails from following tickets.
@Allan, if you create a custom filter in the Filters tab, you can subscribe to the RSS link at the top
@Kumaresan, Good idea
@Andrei, I will email you in a couple of hours (check the comments from Tolga in this blog post)
@Akil Franklin, Many thanks. This kind of comments help us keep going.
We are soon to release some changes to the Support Tool, we will make it even easier to deal with clients.
@Akumar, @Eatai. Thanks, :)
@Brad, very clever suggestion.
@Tolga and @Eatai. The default option will be the follow system. We made a fresh restart
to help most of our customers like @Eatai with a simple and default approach.
However, we still understand that there are guys like @Tolga and @Andrei
that have smaller projects and prefer to see all the ticekts.
We will restore an option. But we are deciding how it will best fit this new system.
@Tjeden. Just stop following tickets. We might later allow users to not get emails
from tickets they are following. But we know that managers want you to get them.
@Everyone, many thanks for commenting and giving us your feedback.
It helps A LOT!
@Sergio. That sounds great. Any improvement to how clients experience the system will hit us where we live. Each incremental improvement to the client's experience has equated *immediately* to more repeat business and higher revenues.
Another killer app would be dashboard-style reporting across all spaces that I own. Our clients and dev teams are organized into different portfolios and we desperately need to be able to analyze ticket and time information across them all.
I'm really frustrated with the new notification system. Why can't I get notified about my own changes?. Even when the ticket is assigned to me.
You may say, why you want to get notified about something that you did?, but I use my email tray to track all my activity with a GTD/Autofocus approach, now I have to check the bloated stream on Assembla page to find the info. The summaries are useless, unreadable, they do not have the important info and you can't triage the activity in a individually manner.
I think the new system is a setback in the road to have an Open and Collaborative team. Is pretty difficult to me help others on the team when I don't have a straightforward way to see what are they doing.
The new follow/unfollow features is pretty helpful, but why not maintain the options that we used to have?
Wow, I'm just starting to realize that not only has ticket notification *sending* changed, but also that none of the email replies sent to Assembla are showing up as ticket comments.
So *receiving* emails in Assembla is down for me. Is that a bug or an intentional "feature change"?
For me full two-way email integration is a must-have feature and one of the main reasons I chose Assembla. I'd appreciate a "reply to ticket via email" button next to "post ticket via email" in the web interface.
Especially since a lot of my partners have aggressive mail filters for notification coming out of Assembla (because the previous version was so verbose) I want to send messages from my mail client, not from the Assembla web client.
But most of all, Cc-ing tickets in to ongoing email dialogues is the most efficient way of adding tracking to otherwise dispersed activities.
@Tolga -
Two sides to every story of course, so what fits one company won't necessarily fit another.
Problem with talkbacks (comments) in general is that usually one wouldn't have an incentive to write a comment if they're happy. Hence - if you looked at the comments section of this post this morning, you'd think that Assembla just presented a new release that ruined everything for everone and created a 3-year setback in the product.... It was therefore important for me to represent the other side, which I'm guessing is actually the majority of users (but I might be wrong there). For us, the Assembla alerting mechanism was not really usable, and everyone have been turning it off because otherwise you'd get 200 emails per day from the system. Now we can breath again, and an "alert" can actually be an alert, rather than an annoyance.
@Guido. Assembla does not have a web email client. The "reply to ticket via email" button just opens your default email client with the proper To field already set.
If you are having problems with the email gateway of your space, please file a support ticket.
@Sergio: thanks for the info. It turns out I must be careful to use the right email identity for sending mail into Assembla.
Dear participants,
I'm really like our discussion and the most important the reaction of Assembla team. I think that if you already have a feature it would be easier to add a new feature additional to old one. Development team introduces a new very useful feature for Ticket summary notification, but it should be additional to the old feature - Individual Ticket event notification, not instead.
Thank you Assembla team for listening to the customers and reacting appropriately.
Is it possible for users to receive a confirmation email when they submit a ticket via email? Right now there's no indication that it was actually created - and there's no indication when a user's ticket isn't created because of security issues. This is a major problem for us.
If user does not select his own changes in the alert interface at stream page, then you should not send summary that contains nothing but his own changes. It is a time waster to get these things.
Also, it would be a huge plus if you could add a third line to each entry in the summary report, containing the first line of a comment, message, commit, etc., for context.
I think that the first two lines you have in the report could be combined into a single line. you should include only important information and not duplicate stuff, especially unimportant things like the fact it is related to a "ticket".
I can't stop following ticket, when I'm assigned to it. I'm waiting for option to disable email notifications for followed tickets. My manager don't want me to read emails, but to get things done. :)
Two requests on this new feature please:
1. Can you tag the graphic images that represent stars somehow meaningfull like 'Yellow star'? A lot of my team are totally blind and we do not see these stars with our screen reading software.
2. Can you please add the ability to add the temmates in subscribe panel without having to type in the login IDs please? Something like a link that will open a list of teammates under the edit box for entering e-mails, where you can check or uncheck the checkboxes that will add the appropriate teammate to the list of follow-ups?
Thank you.
Serge.
In Opera: rows with star and 4 digit ticket numbers are double high. # Column are to tight.
The new notification settings are REALLY frustrating; before I get jumped by all of the people that are happy with them, the frustrating thing is not that they changed (since apparently most people appreciate the change), but that there is no way to currently achieve what we used to be able to do before which was critical for a few managers like myself. Our main modus operandi is to be able to respond to comments and ticket changes in real time by replying to e-mail but now we can't; essentially bringing half of my development team into a halt until people get the hourly updates and click on every ticket to see what the comments were and then respond to the tickets that needed their input if any.
Please enable the old way of being able to subscribe to ALL ticket activity in REAL TIME and not just by an hourly summary since the summaries are practically useless in our case when trying to read the comments. I'm not saying to make it the default, but to at least enable the ability to configure it and to remove the useless summaries.
Also like Mauricio said, I'm not being able to add comments on tickets by e-mailing the system which I used to be able to do and it is a critical way of operation for us. I verified that I'm sending an e-mail from the proper account but still no comments being added. I'll try to take this with support.
Last, I wanted to say that the new way of adding subscribers to a ticket, even though more powerful than before since you can add any e-mail address as a subscriber (weather they belong to the team or not) is not as intuitive as before since 99% of the time we need to add a team member as a subscriber not a random e-mail address, and unless you know their username or their e-mail, you are out of luck. Maybe you could implement an auto-complete feature where you propose team members as options based on their name, last name, email or username.
Thanks in advance, and keep up the good work
Abe
This is perfect! This will make me very happy as I am already suffering from information withdrawal syndrome :)
The ability to do either approaches is a good idea and I am very happy that you guys will go that direction.
Great! So I'm waiting for a new release. :)
Hello, All.
I am happy that you are planning to return back some of belovered features of tickets tool. I believe that you can also combine some of features from the old tickets and enhance the new follow up feature by adding the ability to open a pane with the checkboxes that can select the team members after the edit field for entering e-mails, where the administrator can select who should follow up this particular ticket simply by checking the checkboxes in fromt of the team members or watchers or add an e-mail if needed in the upper located edit field.
Additionally I would like to have an ability to edit the comments in the tickets, something like in Messages tool. Making a mistake in comments is not rear thing and there is no ability to make any corrections here and this is a bit annoying for me.
Any updates on the anticipated Sept. 13th release that will return the full email alert feature as an option?