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Tickets as part of Inbox notifications

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Dení C. Gloria
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Hey guys, I have a request for you. Here in our studio, tickets are a FUNDAMENTAL part of our communication network between artists and departments. So it would be really helpful if we could be able to activate inbox notifications of the tickets we get assigned. This would make our inter department communication more efficient. Because people have to constantly check their shotgun inbox AND mail in order to keep track of what's going on in our production, so having all incoming information centralized using the inbox would be awesome.

 

Thanks!

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10 comments

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    Permanently deleted user

    Agreed would be very helpful if tickets showed up in the inbox

  • 0
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    Jean-Paul LeDoux

    Yes, while setting up Error Report entities,  we were suprised today that threaded entities didn't register in the inbox.

  • 0
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    Jean-Paul LeDoux

    Actually - maybe a separate "My Tickets" would be better...

  • 0
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    Aaron Bradbury

    A bump on this one from our studio too. Ticket conversations are getting lost as most of our communication goes through the Shotgun interface now.

  • 0
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    Luis Fernando Villanueva Pérez

    Bump from our studio as well. ñ_ñ Inbox should be the center of workflow communications.

  • 0
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    Johnny Cochrane

    +1 from our studio having ticket notifications.

    Also, it would be nice to have notifications for Custom Threaded Entities and, if possible, the ability to toggle enable/disable. =)

  • 0
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    Permanently deleted user

    Ben Hadden mentioned some of the issues involved with implementing this in today's Shotgun 6.0 webinar.
    Would you be able to outline the issues here Ben? Maybe the community could provide helpful input? 

    Right now I basically never use the Inbox because the majority of my "tasks" are tickets and would actually like to use it a lot.

  • 1
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    Ben Hadden

    Hey everyone,

    Patrick asked me to reach out to this post and update everyone on why it's taken so long to bring Tickets to the Inbox. I'll do my best, but let me know if any of this isn't clear--or if it sparks good ideas for where you think we can find efficiencies!

    • Right now, the Inbox is designed to show updates on various aspects of the entities you track. This could be changes to fields on an entity, new Notes/Tasks/Versions/Publishes linked to an entity, or replies to Notes on on an entity. To simplify and speed up building your Inbox, we actually created another data table to store this info. So getting entities like Tickets in the Inbox, for us, means allowing those entities to generate updates to that table.
    • Technically, that's not a challenge, but from a design standpoint, we got bogged down in the details. Following a Ticket is different than following other entities because we're watching for different events. Fields weren't complicated...Tickets would work the same as any other entity. But instead of new Notes on Tickets, we'd be watching for new replies. That felt very similar to how Notes work (where we watch for new replies), so we'd essentially be rewriting a lot of functionality we already have on Notes and so it felt odd--both from a technical standpoint and design standpoint.
    • That led us to wonder if Tickets should evolve to be more like Notes. Maybe they'd even start using Notes instead of Tickets and we could migrate people away from threaded entities over time. That conversation ended pretty quickly since the fields on Notes are typically very different than the fields on Tickets and other threaded enttiies. So we moved on...
    • What if we let users create Notes on Tickets? Basically, instead of a lot of replies on a Ticket, you'd have a lot of Notes on the ticket--and you could reply to them if you want. This was the argument that Tickets should evolve to be more like Shots (so you get all the benefits of Shots). But then Ticket detail pages would look more like Shot detail pages. That seemed to be "too much" UI for what people needed for Tickets. Got us thinking maybe we need to offer different layouts for different entities. Shots might require a bigger, tabbed detail page like we have now. Maybe Tickets would be more condensed. But that expanded the scope of what we were trying to solve here.
    • So ultimately, we ended up in a situation where it was going to be a fair amount of work to support Tickets outright in the Inbox, but doing so also felt sort of "icky" because we were sidestepping the work of bringing together entities with notes (standard entities) and entities with replies (threaded entities).

    We definitely want to fix this issue. We're in the same boat, because we use Tickets and can't take advantage of the Inbox ourselves. So I guess I have a couple questions for the group:

    1. What do you think about Tickets becoming more like Shots (in the sense that conversations happen in Notes vs Replies)? What would you change about the regular Shot detail to make it feel more appropriate for how you use Tickets?

    2. We made a bunch of updates to the Note detail page (what you see when you visit a single Note). If we went down the path of supporting threaded entities in the Inbox, I think we'd like to keep them as similar, design-wise, to Notes as possible. What are your thoughts on this new detail page? Would you be OK using it for Tickets? 
    Also, consider this a medium to large feature which would take away from doing some other medium to large features. If you guys think this should be prioritized above some of the other stuff in this forum, that's feedback I'd like to hear, too.
  • 0
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    Maxim Doucet

    Regarding your questions:

    1. yes, as far as I am concerned, the way notes on shots works is OK for me. Only fields should be adapted to match what already exists in tickets.

    2. yes again: the note design is great. And, to be honest, it would make a lot of sense that tickets behave like notes in order to have the same look&feel and user experience

    As a side note: it would be super great to ensure that code formatting works in the note/future ticket editor :) (please have also a look at my ticket https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/requests/30891)

  • 1
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    Anthony Kramer

    inbox notifications for tickets please.

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