Is there a way to remind users about the following via e-mail?
- tickets being due within the next 24 hours
- overdue tickets
There's two steps here - finding the issues to remind people about, and then actually telling them.
First step - define a filter. Your requirements are pretty much the filters you need already, probably need more like "unresolved and due date < +1d" and "unresolved and due date < now()"
Second, for each filter, you've got two off-the-shelf options immediately
1. Use a variation on "escalation" - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Jelly+Escalation
2. "Subscribe" people to the filter - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Receiving+Search+Results+via+Email
There are other things you can do, but they need plugins/code/thought, so have a look at those two first.
This seems bit more complicated than it should be. There should simply be a checkbox or button for an issue that allows you to EASILY have deadline notifications setup. Please stop over complicating Jira.
Mmm. The difficulty with saying "there shoud be a button" is it instantly leads to the question "What exactly should the button do?"
You need to add something to define what the interval is (7 days? 14 days?) Then something to define which field you're interested in (created? updated? due?). Then you need to think about reporting - how do I know what is over the deadline or behind it?
How do I get the flexibility of a filter into one button?
The answer is: by a proper definition of a problem and its solution. Patric is right - there should be a simple interface for simple situations. You can still keep flexibility for some dark hour
The most simple case is following:
I need:
- an e-mail notification sent to the task assignee
when:
- the task is close to the due date by defined amount of time and still is not resolved
how:
- I need an entry to define the amount of time that will trigger the reminder
- I need a checkbox to mark whether the current task shall have reminder turned on or off
- optionally it would be nice to have a possibility to include/exclude watchers from receiving this reminder
Perhaps it is not one button but it is also not much complicated...
i also need a simple reminder for task. click a button, set a date, get an email with reminder that's it simple. don't wnat to filter etc, simple reminder.
I have to agree with most of the opinions in this thread: why is there not a simple reminder system for tickets with due dates. Nic is arguing for development specifics, but all reminder apps are pretty much the same: add an alert with a relative period from the due date. iCal, et al — it's all the same approach.
Instead, I'm having to manually add reminders to the Apple Reminder app so I am notified on my phone, and that's just silly; I shouldn't have to do this.
I find the filter subscription to be a great way to do this. You set it once and it works for every issue that meets your criteria without you having to do any more work. I would be annoyed if I had to set a reminder on each issue I wanted a reminder for.
It isn't just a handful of customers if Sales Force is offering it as a feature...
https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=activities_setting_reminders.htm&language=en_US
Er, Jira already DOES this.
The "handful of customers" refers to the small number of Jira users who want to remove the flexibility provided by Jira because they want it to be "more simple" (more simple = less flexible and hence useful to fewer customers)
I don't think the issue is wheter it will do it, it's the amount of work to make JIRA do it for single cases and not a broad catagory through filters or, making many filters and subcribing people to them.
Yes, I agree that the issue here is not about whether it does it or not, but about how to make it easy for all users. Which you can't because they all have different needs.
When someone asks for "the simple case", they mean "what works for me". Which is fine for them, but not going to work for the vast majority of other people (on a scale from "it's close" to "it's useless to me")
Nic: maybe not all do, but clearly there are many Jira customers that use it as a task management system. My company does. And tasks have due dates. And due dates pass by. Which is why reminders are nearly universal across task management applications.
Additionally, the approach used is also very common — from Sales Force to Apple iCalendary to AtTask. I don't think the "we need a spec" arguement, nor the "if it's simple it won't work for most people" arguments are very convincing. There's already a well defined approach to follow: look at Apple iCalendar. It's simple, and very effective. And it works for everyone that wants to set reminders.
Just saying... I agree with others that this is a legitimate request and I'd like to lend my vote for this as well.
The issue with the filter subscription approach (which has been recommended) is that it relies on the assigee to set up reminders for themselves. As a Manager, how can I enforce reminders?Or at least set them up for my team. I don't think I can. Can I?
I still think you've missed the point. Your idea of a reminder is still probably not mine. The approach used is very common, yes, and all I hear about reminders from all sorts of systems is the complaint that a) they don't work or b) they're not flexible enough. In all those cases, reminders quicky become useless because people learn to recognise and ignore them, or they work around them (email rule to bin them. That's what I do with allegedly "helpful" reminders)
The "if it's simple" argument remain valid. Define it. When you say "Look at Apple iCalendar", you're agreeing with me - as the recipient of one of those reminders, I set it up the way I want it. Not to some rule imposed on me.
As for "as a manager, I want to remind my employees", I really do understand it as I am someone who relies on other people to do work. And as an employee, I desperately want you to stop nagging me when I don't need it - it's disruptive and counterproductive. I'm afraid I need to circle back to "we need a spec" - that spec needs to include the way the people get the reminders work, and that means doing it for themselves, and being flexible enough to accomodate that.
Randall hit the nail on the head, "I would be annoyed if I had to set a reminder on each issue I wanted a reminder for." The filters allow you to set generalized reminders for all issues matching the filter criteria. It may even be possible to set multiple filters for different reminder times based on some custom fields. Those of us who use JIRA for tracking several tickets / issues at a time cannot be spending the extra cycles to manage a notification for each ticket that gets created.
Looks like Atlassian figured out how to do this.
JIRA 6.4: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/receiving-search-results-via-email-185729664.html
JIRA 7.1: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracoreserver071/working-with-search-results-802172637.html (near the bottom)
Well, not really, as those functions have been there mostly since version 3.
Oh, I see, you already referenced the JIRA 6.4 item in your post. That does seem to solve the basic need for me, but I see it doesn't solve the need to subscribe others to such a notification, unless there's a way to subscribe others that I can't see.
Implementing what Nic suggested above (option 2) in real action, I think we can
In such way, at that scheduled time, it will send out email to each assignee with the bug list due for him/herself if there is at least one.
This is an old thread but I just (2/2017) started looking for a solution to a similar problem.
The filter and subscribe solution is a kludge at best. We really just want to be able to send a reminder to anyone who gets assigned to a ticket based on upcoming due date, not state changes. With this solution, the assignee either has to subscribe themselves or be part of a subscription group. Just doing "everyone" for an org such as ours would probably grind the system to a halt. We have lots of instances where a number of people will only be assigned a couple times a year. Also the person is going to get the periodic reminder from the date they are assigned till it is due. These sorts of emails have a tendency to get filtered out as noise.
The best solution I can find is a relatively inexpensive plugin which has been around a long time which is probably why Atlassian doesn't have simple reminders as core functionality. Absorbing plugins discourages outside plugin development.
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.riadalabs.jira.plugins.notificationassistant/server/overview
And of course, this plugin only works for Jira Server and I'm working with Jira Cloud.
I am also trying to do something like this - send a single reminder based on the due date of a ticket, not based on SLA metric, as a universal rule (affects all users, not just me) and it seems either impossible or needlessly complicated.
...maybe I can create a queue specifically for tickets that are within a certain amount of time of their due date? Everything else I tried, like automation rules, depend on SLA metrics, which I don't want to use. I may be stuck with the filter...
Thanks to @Nic for pointing me in the right direction. The solution that worked in one setup, using Jira Cloud, was the following:
I'll chime in too... +1 for having reminders. If there's a due date field, there should be a concept of a reminder. It's silly that there is even debate about this.
Teamwork.com and basecamp send emails by default; it's strange Jira doesn't even have the capacity to set up a simple reminder.
Example: outlook and calendar events. User's can set a default reminder that's used every time a new event is created, but they have the option to change that reminder.
It does have reminders. It just needs you to define ones that work for you. Have another read of the conversations above and you'll see why it doesn't do "one size fits all" (because it's broadly useless), and your various options for getting them working well for you.
I read them before posting. It's for sure one size fits many.
I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people who have went through the trouble of creating a custom filter and subscribing to it, have one equivalent to this:
assignee = currentUser() AND status != Done AND duedate < startOfDay(2d) ORDER BY duedate ASC
It took me 20 minutes to do something that most competing applications/services do by default.
But start of day (2d) is useless to me in some projects. One size fails miserably to work for everyone. Even my PM and Consultants need different reminders to me, and we're all working on the same things in the same projects.
If you had read the postings properly, you'd have seen the one that says "The difficulty with the previous conversation is that it mostly seems to be people asking for a "simple" way to do this, and then not being able to define a simple case that works for more than a tiny handful of users." That remains true.
OK, so this thread is 5 years old and crazy long. I'm also looking for something that will email any assignee of a ticket that belongs to a certain project any time they have a Past Due ticket.
Is there's a step-by-step answer buried in this thread somewhere that I can follow?
If I have a ticket that was due yesterday, I want to get an email reminding me to close it or change the due date. And I want to basically force this on my team without them having to manually go subscribe to something.
Can that be done? Maybe I missed it in all the arguing in this thread but I finally just scrolled to the end...
Thanks!
As far as I can tell, everyone is going to have to set up their own list and subscribe to it.
+1 on what Ed said. What seems like a basic function is not supported by Jira and a number of people agree with Atlassian's position on this. There are 1 or more plug-ins available so people obviously want the functionality. They would just rather not have to pay extra for what seems like a basic function. Issue Reminders was the one I was looking at.
@John Corwith and @Ed Hayes III - in case you haven't found an answer yet, I'll mention that you can subscribe a group to a filter. So, perhaps you can set up a filter like this:
assignee = currentUser() AND resolution is empty AND duedate < startOfDay()
and then subscribe your team's jira group to the subscription. If you set it not to notify when the filter results are empty, it will only notify each person in the group who has one or more unresolved issues that are overdue. I just tried it and it worked as described.
@Ed Hayes III, yes, they are personal messages, not a group one. It runs the filter separately for each person in the group, so using assignee = currentUser() in the filter means it only notifies the user of his/her assigned items, not the whole group's list.
Hi,
so i too wanted to set a Reminder for some of our Projects to only certain People.
This is a crazy long topic here but there is no real step-by-step instruction.
This whole filter thing is actually pretty easy, it just takes some time.
Also, i´ve added a custom field called "Reminder date" so you can have a Due date and a seperate Reminder date.
Setting up a custom Date picker field:
Jira Dashboard/Jira Settings/Issues/Custom fields/Add custom Field/choose date picker--name and describe it.
Check the Screens you want it to apply (actually i think this is not necessary, not sure).
To show this field on your create Task screen you have to go to screens and then your project screen on configure.
At the bottom "select field" type in your new field name e.g."reminder date" and drag it to your desired position.
No need to save.
Setting up a filter:
your project/Issues and filters/earch Issues
Choose your desired projects/type/status/assigne
then more/"reminder date" and Resolution/unresolved
now in range 0d to 1d ant on the top save as..Name it
you can use more fields if you like to.
Then view all filters/three dots/manage subscriptions/add subscription leave it as personal subscription or for teams as you wish.
Daily/once per day/ and then the Time at wich you want to get the reminder..i choose 7am
don´t check the box below.
Now you will get an email every time at 7 am if there is an unresolved Task, with you as assignee oder reporter or whatever you did choose, with it´s reminder date for this day or the next one.
If you want to apply this reminder to more Projects you just have to set the new field also on other project screens and define your filter for more projects.
I hope this helps.
notification assistant does work for this. its a paid plugin sadly.
I wanted to send a basic reminder email when a duedate comes up, one day after. This plugin has a great scheduling and frequency system.
The place where it really falls down is that i cant input any variables into the email, just templates with issue fields (which is OK), but i cant say Dear <USERNAME> because it wont let me add those fields to the email body like other jira email templates can. Forces you to add any variables at the very bottom which is meh. The wisiwig editor is also very limited, just giving you basic font sizes (h1-h6 type thing). Kind of like these comment boxes...
I couldn't use filters and subscriptions because for us, the user will be different every time. This is basically a form that people can make a request and then have it occur at a due date that they then need to be aware of to add additional information. So i set it to duedate = -1d using JQL and the plugin checks every day and sends an email at 7am to anyone whoes due date was yesterday. It simply sends them a reminder to fill out their paperwork.
example code below for the jql so you get an idea.
due = -1d AND issuetype = "Request" AND status not in (Closed, Done, Resolved, Canceled)
oblig: "this should be a built in feature of notifications obviously", to send them at a specific time based on JQL lookups. oh well, plugin works OK at it and its implemented for my staff now thus solving the issue.
The pig-headedness in this thread is mind blowing. Just because you don't think something is useful doesn't mean other people do. Many people here are asking for something quite simple: A check box or Issue Field that allows you to be reminded via email on a specified date. Very simple...
For anyone else looking for this, I created a filer with the following parameters: User = Current User, Resolution = Unresolved, Due Date = Due in next 1 day or overdue. I then subscribed myself to this filter so I get emails.
It took me 20 minutes to do something that should be built into JIRA.
I know this thread is old... I found it trying to do pretty much exactly what Jason wants to do and was very disappointed to discover this is mostly a long discussion of the solution I'm looking for, but the actual solution does not exist.
Not having the feature available as Jason described above is ridiculous. My team do not want to use filter logic / subscriptions to get notifications. They want - they need - to be able to talk to a client and then set a specific follow-up / reminder date based on instructions we receive from our clients without having to fiddle around with due dates to cheat the system.
If you don't need that and the filters work for you - great! But if you do need this feature, as Jason did and I'm sure many others like us do as well, then the fact that a broad, clumsy option exists does not excuse JIRA for not also having a more targeted, flexible option as well.
This is one of the reasons we are actively looking for other solutions right now... for as flexible and powerful as JIRA is, it has a huge blind spots like this one.
There absolutely should be a way to have some -- but not all issues with due dates -- have custom reminders... like when the client tells you "I'll get that to you next Wed" or you send a task for a client to validate before invoicing... you should be able to click "schedule reminder" and then fill out a simple form identifying who, what, when and how often.
It's not hard to tell how this feature could and probably should work - just look at the Issue Reminder plugin that is only available for the server version of JIRA.
Another related problem in this is that JIRA's current notification system is so verbose that pretty much everyone on the team deletes them all, automatically, making them utterly useless.
Having a "remind me" option on issues that can be set on-the-fly is an entry level feature in any project or task management tool.
I cannot believe I may now have to pay extra for a plugin or convert from cloud to server just to get a feature that should have been a core feature feature for many years already now.
If anyone has ever used Google calendar to create an event, then the answer for how to do it right is there - Jira should have this as a built-in simple option.
Then in addition - for more complex scenarios we can use the Filter & Subscribe features.
It's because of these (helpful) posts that this forum needs a permalink feature so that one can bookmark it forever and refer right back to it.
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