Good topic Ben, thanks for starting the discussion!
The top request I hear is the desire to customize the format / layout of the Inbox email notifications. We provide some ability to do this with the legacy notifications, but there is regularly a need to adjust what fields are displayed, or how information is presented, in the subject and body of the notifications generated by following and the .
A digest feature would be great too - option to get a summary of the updates over a certain time period, rather than each notification coming in with every update. That can get overwhelming pretty quickly.
If any of these requests resonate with you, or if you have other ideas for making notifications work really well in Shotgun, please chime in with your own use cases or suggestions! I always like to hear if you have used another piece of software that handles notifications really well. I’m guessing Facebook is not it.
Scripting access would be a big plus. We have some scripts that posts notes or replies to inform people of things. But it’d be a lot neater if we didn’t need to post actual notes or replies that clutter up activity streams.
It could also help with people who get too many notifications, and want to tidy up their inbox. eg. There’s a long standing bug with Task Templates that sends notifications to users assigned to those tasks even if they’re not subscribed to those updates. We could script a fix to just mark those as read if we had access.
I think the biggest problem we have is with people not reading their inboxes, and it’s easy to see why some people wouldn’t keep Inbox zero when it can easily jump up to 99+ in an instant.
Hope this reply isn’t too dark. Apologies. It’s just the nature of our struggle
I have not been able to provide an effective notification system using Shotgun:
we don’t use desktop, so it’s “keep your browser open” (which is too much to do)
not everyone opens up Shotgun, some, never
all Inboxes are at 99+
email is the ‘single source of truth’
nobody has taken the steps to ensure that desktop notifications are enabled
I have to physically go to each desk to show them
it stops after a while, and rinse-repeat, and hence, it’s unreliable
Another problem is the unsatisfied need to have the notifications triggered by systems outside the realm of Shotgun, or, that the notifications are controlled by logic outside – so – in effect – the notifications need to be cross-system.
Specific example: the batch queuing system (farm) is not connected to Shotgun currently, and is an important contributor to events. Redis does the pub-sub’s for the farm.
The point I’m making is that unless all your production systems are completely tied to Shotgun you can’t get effective, real time notifications – at least you can’t convince crews that it’s a Killer App – the only thing that makes productions willing to change to a new way-of-doing-things.
Notifications have to be managed by a cross-systems aggregator, eg. redis, or rabbitmq… or hooks… or…? It’s all too alpha at this stage.
I’m looking into Shotgun-trigger nodes for n8n – meaning, Shotgun will end up being slaved to some other “event management.”
Also tried exercising Mattermost (in liu of Slack) but I’m not convinced anybody wants yet-another-communication-collaboration-system. After all…
I hate email… it’s Shotgun Kryptonite.
This all ties back to… One needs a Production Single Source of Truth
Looking forward to more wisdom from others on this topic! Happy Friday.
As we are only started to integrate SG recently we are new to how the notifications in SG work and started to integration to taking an i depth look at notifications now.
In the terms of the channel were the notifications are sent to.
Ideally we would like to use no email notifications at all and instead rely on both Slack (mainly) and the SG inbox.
We barely use emails and most of our communication flows through Slack.
Is the web-hooks feature in the building section of the roadmap being released anytime soon? We’d like to take a look at that for our Slack integration.
In terms of the notifications strategy, we will give the ‘follow’ setup a go.
We are thinking of integrating that into our Asset management UI’s.
For example, from an Asset loader or Asset manager an artist could mark an asset, task, or shot as following/unfollowing (same as from SG).
In terms of the notifications details, we would really like to customise the information presented to the user.
I guess that If a Slack integration was in place that’d be the case for slack messages.
But for now, we are not getting much with the notifications in the SG inbox.
As mentioned in this thread, we would really like to modify the details presented in the notifications.
An idea for us was to have the entity “Important Info” shown in the SG inbox notification.
Users could go to links from the notification, making a stronger case to use them.
Also any custom fields could be easily shown as per anyone needs.
As Jacob, we would like to be able to customise the info presented to the user.
It would be good to be able to customise the notifications per project, too.
Hey @jacobg appreciate the detailed notes here. Regarding the Webhooks feature, it is still in beta, but see this post for details on how to get in on the beta and try them out. Would love to hear about any notification solutions you end up creating with the new tools!
We have a number of pages set up that display versions based on statuses. (IE Items pending Director Review or versions with our “error” Status).
I would love to be able to follow a page or even set up a notification based on a page-style filter.
It would be nice to have a notification that emails me when the director starts flipping statuses on his review page, or a summary of how many versions have a certain status and adhere to a set of filter rules.
When I create a page in shotgrid - it would be really nice if I could configure notification settings on that page or enable a setting that emails me a snapshot of my page at the end of each day. This would be great for a widget style status report. Would be nice to add email addresses other than my own (for instance: non-shotgrid users like executive producers or clients). In the last case it would also be helpful to be able to manually send a page (once you’ve gone through and cleaned up the data).
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