Hello,

After waiting almost 2 years for a function in OnTime that should have been included from Version 1, it seems we're still waiting.

I'm sorry if I sound frustrated, but I have raised this issue on this forum, and in the feature requests, and I've seen a number of posts from other users with exactly the same requirement. In OnTime 2008, Axosoft have added a single 'tick box' option which shows they heard our requests, but didn't understand them!

We need a way to remind users when items are overdue. This should be simple. Alerts should do it.

In OnTime 2008, I have defined a new Alert as follows:

• Filter Trigger
• Filter "Defects Due This Week" (a filter we defined testing the Due Date)
• Check every 10080 minutes (once per week. BTW, very inconvenient)
• Send one e-mail for all items
• Send alert even for items that have not changed
• Send to "Assigned To"

I expect the intend of this should be obvious.

The result is that everyone with an overdue defects gets the same e-mail, with EVERY overdue Defect listed (not just the ones they are Assigned To).

It seems that to get this to work the way I intended, I will need to:

• Define a (public) Filter for every user, selecting the Defects assigned to them
• Define an Alert for every user, using the above Filter

So, for 20 users I need to define 40 items. If I want to cover Features, Tasks and Incidents then I need to define 160 items.

Is this correct ? Or is there some other way to get this to work properly

I complained about this in regard to a Version 7 RC in February:

 http://community.axosoft.com/forums/thread/10011.aspx

In the meantime, the workaround is to uncheck "Send one e-mail for all items", which of course means that the recipients won't get collated emails, but at least they'll get only the mails intended for them.

Hello Raynor,

Based on your description, the Alert function does alert your team every week regarding any overdue items, but the problem is that it sends the same email to each user?

It does seem like you'd have to personalize the Alerts for each user if you wish for them to each get a separate Alert email. I'd have to do some testing myself to work this out, but wouldn't you be able to make one Public filter and add "Assigned To is in [CURRENT USER]" to your "Defect Due this Week" condition, and then use that same filter when building each Alert? That would cut your steps in half if that worked successfully- you should give it a shot an let me know if that one dynamic filter works.

So it does seem that you'd still have to configure a separate Alert for each user if you want them to get a personalized Alert email. Once you make that initial investment of time, would you agree that the Alerts would function as you need them to?

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Thank you,

Tom Harder
Axosoft Support
support@axosoft.com
1.800.653.0024 option 3
--'Fear the Bug' Podcast--

Hi Tom,

An unfortunate aspect of the suggested approach is that one would have to remember to add a new alert every time a new user is added.

It really would be a big help if, in each bundled filter-type notification ("Send one e-mail..."), only those items were listed that are relevant to the respective recipient. As currently implemented, we can't use bundled filter-type notifications, and I suspect this is true for most of your users. The reason is that programmers to whom defects are assigned don't want to scan through a long list of everyone else's overdue items as well.

Thanks and greetings,
John

Hello Tom,

We already have some filters defined that use the [CURRENT USER], but they do not appear in the filter list for Alerts (I assumed this was because the [CURRENT USER] has no meaning for Alerts).

Another problem is the format of the e-mail Alert sent. I have tried editing the template, but the {CHANGE DETAILS} parameter only provides the Defect ID, Name and Link. There seems to be no way to include other fields.

The {ITEM DETAILS} parameter doesn't seem to do anthing for Alerts. The received e-mails contain "{ITEM DETAILS}".

I have tried adding the {ALERT NAME} to the e-mail subject line, but that doesn't work (pressing << doesn't do anything, Bug?)

I added the Project Name, Due Date and Defect Name to the e-mail subject line. The following is what appeared on the RECEIVED e-mails:

OnTime Issue Alert: <<51:Project>> Due Date: <<78:Next Due Date>> <<40:Name>>

Another Bug ?

So, in summary, to get a periodic Alert to remind users that something is Due:

• Need to define 8 items per user (4 filters and 4 Alerts). Tedious.
• The Filters are public, so they appear on everyone's filter list. If we had 100 users, that's a long list of Filters.
• There is no way to set the time of day/week that the Alert fires (unless we manually change the database table entry)
• We need to express the interval in minutes (10080/week)
• The Alert E-mail identifes the Name of the item, but not the Project, Status, Due Date, Priority, etc
• There are bugs in the e-mail template system

All-in-all, it's very disappointing. Alerts are the major feature we have been waiting for. In OnTime 2007 we thought they'd work, but because they were only sent when an entry was modified, they didn't work for us. OnTime 2008 is a very minor improvement, but still not there yet.

Out of curiosity, how many end-users actually asked for the Project Wiki ?

Perhaps more time needs to be spent adding features that current users are actually asking for, rather than chasing new users. We're the ones paying annual maintenance.

Or, maybe it should have been released in 2008, with the extra time spent on things like Alerts.

Regards,

Brian Raynor

Hello Everyone,

After reviewing everything you mention, we've been able to verify the bugs you've described in your post. They've been logged in our system internally, and they're being fixed for our next release of OnTime 2008. 

I'm sorry to hear that Alerts in OnTime 2008 didn't meet your expectations. I know you've most likely heard this before, but I encourage you to submit Feature Requests in our Customer Portal for specific enhancements to existing features as you determine them to be critical to OnTime's effectiveness. We consider all of our customers' requests, and current users obviously have more experience with the product and can usually give more valuable feedback then new customers.

Again, we're in the process of fixing the bugs you mentioned and improving Alerts. Let us know if you have any more specific suggestions on how to make Alerts work for you.

 

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Thank you,

Tom Harder
Axosoft Support
support@axosoft.com
1.800.653.0024 option 3
--'Fear the Bug' Podcast--

Hello Tom,

For Alerts to work well for us, we would like:

• Scheduled Alerts (ie Time of Day/week, interval)
• Alerts sent to "Assigned To" should only include items that are "Assigned To" (ie apply an additional automatic filter)
• Option to define "Alert Only" Filters, or maybe "Private Alerts" that are valid only for the current user (and hence have access to that users Private Filters). Currently Private Filters cannot be used in Alerts, if a user wants to define an Alert for themselves, they need to create a Public Filter. This could lead to dozens of Public Filters.
• E-mail Template should work correctly
• Also, it should be possible to disable Alerts without deleting them. (There are times when we may be doing bulk updates and do not want to fire hundreds of Alerts)

The above list are the really important issues. One more issue that would be useful, but perhaps might be hard to implement, would be a way to block specific Alerts for specific Projects.

For example, we would like to define the default Alerts at the "All Projects" level, so everyone gets the same OnTime behaviour. However, there may be specific Projects that do not want to inherit the default Alerts, or maybe a Project will be "On Hold" for a period and we would want to disable all Alerts from that Project. This would be very hard to manage with OnTime 2008. I think if Axosoft want OnTime to be used by larger teams then these types of configuration options need to be provided. We are already finding that with 25 users and a few dozen projects it is difficult to ensure everyone uses OnTime consistently. As we grow further this will become a bigger management headache.

Regards,

Brian Raynor

Hi Tom,

I just wanted to say that the alert functionality requests described in this thread would be extermely useful.  I was looking through the forums to see if I was not understanding the way alerts work and am surprised to learn about its shortcomings.  I hope Ontime will implement a more functional Alerts system very soon.

Thank you for your wonderful support and attention to the forums.

Sincerely,

Mike Simmons

 

Further to this, a specific alert for when an email is added to an incident.  At present the only way to get this is to recieve alerts for all changes.

It would also be useful to be able to set which change alerts are sent.  For examle it would be useful to be able to specify which change notifications go to customers.  Rather than being notified everytime the description/notes/status or any other field is changed we should be able to specify which alerts we do and do not want to send customers.  At present it seems to be all or none.

Hello Nathan,

Are you configuring Notifications or Alerts? They're similar, but the way they're triggered is very different.

With Alerts, you can set a specific field change to trigger an email Alert. In OnTime 2008 you can configure an Alert to be triggered by just one field change, and have that email go to any number of your customers or internal OnTime users. To add/edit your alerts, select a project and select the Project Wiki tab, and then select the Project Alerts tab down in the Detail pane. Add an alert for one of your item types, and you'll see that under the Trigger Details tab you can add a variety of triggers based on individual fields. Also, under the Alert Actions tab you can choose which customers/user will be notified.

Let me know if you have any further questions. 

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Thank you,

Tom Harder
Axosoft Support
support@axosoft.com
1.800.653.0024 option 3
--'Fear the Bug' Podcast--

Thanks for the reply,

Currently i have the global notifications for changes to an incident to be sent to the Assigned to user.  When an email is added to an incident by a customer an email is sent to the assigned to user.  The problem is that this notification sends an email for any change to an incident, which causes too many emails in our case.

The alternative would be to disable this and create an alert that triggers when the last modified date changes, however this causes a similar problem.

I am trying to find a way to only send an email (alert or notification) when a customer adds an email to a case, i.e when replying to an email with the incident id# in the subject line, and supressing notifications/alerts for changes to an incident (status, description, etc).

Also a minor thing, with the changed incident notifications, when a new incident is generated by a customer email, 2 alert messages are sent simultaneously one for the new incident and one for the email being added.

The end result of too many alert emails is that users have a tendancy to disregard them and hence they lose their effectiveness as a propmt for some action required.

Many thanks

 

Hello Nathan,

Yes, the ability to trigger a separate notification based on a new email would be a great enhancement. We've had many requests for this lately, and I actually just requested it myself.

I suggest that you also take a moment to submit a Feature Request for this in our Customer Portal, just to add another customer request to the list.
 

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Thank you,

Tom Harder
Axosoft Support
support@axosoft.com
1.800.653.0024 option 3
--'Fear the Bug' Podcast--

Seems like we have a couple of topics here and I'll add my two cents.  The features requested and bugs in Email Templates I completely agree with.  I've just spent a couple of frustrating days trying to figure out how to make Alerts 'bundle' like it sounds others are trying (and have been trying since early 2007) with no success either.  And yes, Tom, I've logged them in your support system.

Also, I would mention that the 2 emails thing I have also logged as Defect 1991 which was closed as a duplicate of 1854 (which it isn't, which I added to my defect, which stayed closed anyway)  Doesn't matter anyway, was 1854 is still open.  My work-around at the time was to delete the Global Incident Changed notifications.  This isn't going to work for most places, but I was able to fiddle with Workflow notifications to the point that when the Assigned To changed via Workflow, the new Assigned To would get an 'changed' email so they would know they had a new Incident.

I don't know if anyone on this thread has updated to 8.0.2 yet, but if you are waiting for Alert Filter 'bundling' fixes in this release, keep waiting.  None of the issue discussed in this thread appear to have really been addressed.  The one exception being that the URL and Details buttons are now disabled (apparently since those are really for specific items). 

1. The problem of sending the same list to all receiptiants (to me this is the killer) is still there
   
2. The problem of not being able to control the columns in the list that is emailed also continues.
3. The placeholder fields in the subject line still don't work either.

I had high hopes too as I was told that these were "high priority bugs for Alerts and they should all be fixed in 8.0.2."

Hi Guys,

We have released V8.1 beta and some of the Alerts requests/defects you guys have been waiting for has been addressed. I really would like some feedback from you guys if you can install in a test environment. I already talked to chip about this but wanted inform rest of the group. You can email me arasha@axosoft.com or reply to this post.

Thanks,
Arash