Collaboration - work notes on a record conversation?

Patrick Schult2 · ‎06-09-2015

Has anyone found a way to default the field-switcher in a record conversation to use Work Notes instead of Comments in Collaboration or Live Feed? By default, it wants to use Comments instead of Work Notes to post messages into, but I can't find how to change this. I do realize it's easy to switch to using Work Notes instead of Comments, but there is some concern about using Collaborate or Live Feed on incidents that have email notifications for comments (e.g. Incident) - a short conversation could send the user multiple emails as the comments field is updated with each message.

I really appreciate any and all input the community has on this topic.

Patrick Schult2 · ‎06-08-2016

The new UI16 activity formatter follows a user preference called "glide.ui.[table].stream_input", where the Value is either "work_notes" or "comments".

So if you wanted to default the checkbox for Work Notes to be checked by default, you would set up a User Preference like this. This is specific to a table, so I think you would need to duplicate this preference for each table you wanted the default set for.

Name: glide.ui.incident.stream_input

System: true

Type: string

User: [empty]

Value: work_notes

View solution in original post

brian_quinn · ‎06-11-2015

Patrick,

I'm not aware of any way to change that default setting, but have you considered other methods to prevent a flood of email notifications in a short time? You could create a new table to track the last email sent time for a given User/Incident combination. You can then add an advanced filter condition on your comments notification to skip the notification if the comment contains #LiveFeed and enough time hasn't passed.

Thanks

Brian

Patrick Schult2 · ‎06-12-2015

Our implementation of Collaboration is on hold pending some other new issues that popped up with it, but that's a good idea. Along that same line, it might be more simple to add a timestamp on the incident record for when the comments last changed, versus creating a new table, then use that as the deciding factor on whether or not to send the email.

Alternatively, we might just set up the incident.commented event to not be logged if the new comment started with "#LiveFeed".

Brian Arndt1 · ‎06-16-2015

Count me as interested in wondering how to change the default to work notes. Defaulting to comments may be what singly prevents us from activating what is otherwise a very nice new feature.

Would you be open to elaborating on the other new issues that popped up with it?

Patrick Schult2 · ‎06-16-2015

I opened a ticket with HI last week to inquire about changing the default and was told that there is NOT a way to do that currently. They recommended requesting an enhancement to add this feature in the future, which I was happy to do (that enhancement's number is FTASK22236).

The main issue we have found with Collaborate is that non-ITIL users can add work notes to a record, and view those work notes. To see this, you would impersonate someone with no roles, open an incident, click the "Open in Collaboration" button, then use the field switcher to Work Notes. You can then add work notes to a record, and view those same work notes with the Collaboration window. That was especially concerning to us because it directly contradicts more than 1 of our ACLs on Incident, and you can duplicate that behavior on an OOB instance. Live Feed does NOT have this problem.

Enabling "Compact View" (Settings > Compact View) option scrunches up the field switcher in Collaborate to the point that you can barely read the text.

Multiple emails are generated for messages added to a record by Collaborate/Live Feed. I'm not sure if this is specific to us, or if there is some kind of method you can use to throttle outgoing messages, but if you have 5 people having a busy conversation in a record with Collab or Live Feed, it's going to explode with outbound emails and the form gets hard to read. I'm sure we could get around that by NOT sending emails that start with #LiveFeed or creating some kind of throttle on outbound emails.