This introduction article will help TDAdmin users to use the notification step within ticketing workflows using TDAdmin. The user must have either environment wide admin access or ticketing application admin access in TDAdmin.
Overview
The notification step will automatically send a notification to a recipient(s) or recipient role(s) when the workflow reaches this step. This uses a notification template specific to the workflow step, allowing you to customize the notification contents.
Where to Find This
This feature appears in the TDAdmin and TDNext interfaces.
TDAdmin is where the workflow is created and configured and TDNext is where techs can see the status of the workflow and the steps.
Navigate to condition steps following these paths:
- TDAdmin > Applications > [Name of the ticketing app] > Workflows > New workflow > Open the the workflow up and click new step
- TDNext > Applications menu > [Name of the ticketing app] > Find ticket with a workflow on it and open it > Examine the workflow for the notification step
Using the Notification Step
Recipients
The notification step allows you to choose people or groups as direct recipients of the notification. When a group is selected, only group members who have access to the ticketing application will be notified. When selecting an individual, the type-ahead is filtered to members who have access to the ticketing application, but you can choose a client user by using the lookup page. Customer records are not eligible to be recipients of a notification step in a workflow.
The notification step also supports relative roles, which will be evaluated based on the ticket's values. The following roles are supported for notification steps:
- Requestor
- Requestor's Manager
- Requestor's Resource Pool Primary Manager
- Requestor's Primary Group Manager
- Creator
- Creator's Manager
- Creator's Resource Pool Primary Manager
- Creator's Primary Group Manager
- Responsible
- Responsible's Manager
- Responsible's Resource Pool Primary Manager
- Responsible's Primary Group Manager
- Reviewer
- Reviewer's Manager
- Reviewer's Resource Pool Primary Manager
- Reviewer's Primary Group Manager
- Service Owner
- Service Owner's Manager
- Service Owner's Resource Pool Primary Manager
- Service Owner's Primary Group Manager
- Department Manager
Notification Template
The notification template section allows you to configure the notification that will be sent by the workflow. The notification template within the notification step works the same as those defined in the rest of the system, except that there is no default message.
The Subject and Body fields are both required, and both fields allow you to use the template tags that are available in the Insert Template Tag dropdown.
To learn more, check out Getting Started with Notification Templates.
Please note that custom attribute notification tags will not display by inserting them into the notification body. The only way that the CustomAttributes tag can be used in ticket notification templates is by using formatting similar to that provided in the help text. Clicking on CustomAttributes from the dropdown will insert these start/end tags, although it does not insert the name or value tags.
Instead of using {{CustomAttributes}} like the rest of the attributes, you must insert the {{#CustomAttributes}} and {{/CustomAttributes}} tags with the {{Name}} and {{Value}} tags placed in between. The reason for this is that, unlike fields such as description, multiple custom attributes can be provided for a ticket. Due to this, a custom attribute "area" must be defined with the start/end tags instead of simply inserting one tag.
If no custom attributes have values provided for a ticket, then this section will not be rendered in the email. Otherwise, all of the ticket attributes with supplied values will be displayed in the notification.
Creating a Notification Step
To create a notification step:
- In TDAdmin, click Applications in the left navigation.
- Click the Name of the Ticketing application you want to add a workflow to.
- In the left navigation, click Workflows.
- On the Ticket Workflows list, click the Name of the desired workflow.
- Click the View Builder button.
- In the Workflow Builder, click File in the toolbar.
- Select Check Out from the dropdown.
- Click the New Step button in the toolbar.
- In the New Workflow Step window, enter a Name that indicates what the step will do.
- Select the Notification Step Type from the dropdown.
- Add a notification step to the workflow, and assign as needed
Gotchas & Pitfalls
- Customer records cannot be configured as the recipient of a notification step
- There is not a way to conditionally prevent a portion of the configured notification recipients from getting the email from the notification step. The notification step will send out emails to all the recipients at all times.
Examples
Some workflows benefit from having specific points for communication throughout the lifecycle, such as letting a user know their request was approved or rejected, or even a step to let someone know a chunk of work is coming at a certain interval to properly set expectations.