Brain Murmurs

Hey all you Teams users - We’ve added new Email Preferences to Mentat this week and we wanted to take the opportunity to explain all of the new features that you may have noticed.

Let me explain how our email system works in general:

In our first rev of the email notification system, we chose to only notify specific key members of a task, in order to minimize the amount of email notifications being sent out. The idea being, that if some action were to happen to a task, such as a change in status from open to close, the key people who need to be notified of this event were the current owner and task creator.

We’re still keeping this functionality in place, and in some cases, like for task reassignment, the previous owner will be notified that he/she is no longer responsible for the task. But now we’ve decided to make our email notification a little smarter.

Here are some of the new configurable options available to our teams users:

User email preferences

All users can opt out of receiving email notifications altogether by going to the “Account” link. It’s as simple as checking a box.
This will guarantee that no email notifications will be sent to your email inbox, if you’re over-spammed or feeling skilled enough to keep up on the interactions of your team’s tasks on your own.

Also on the Account page, we’ve include the option of changing your email notification email address, in case you want to have all your Mentat related notifications sent to a specific email address other than the one you signed up to Mentat with.

SMS notification

If you’re using Mentat from your cell phone, things just got better for you! We’ve just included the ability to receive SMS notifications. There is a quick link from the Account page that will explain to you how to set this up.

Project cc: address

Good news for project administrators as well! We now offer you the ability of keeping your entire team informed by including a cc email to direct all of your email notifications to. This will allow you to keep your entire team informed of every transaction happening within your project. Within a few weeks, we’ll add in the ability to specify multiple email addresses, but please note that for now, we’re only supporting one email address to cc.

We’ve also introduced a new “Follow This” feature, which be found on each task row in the Project page as well as the individual task pages. By choosing to “follow” a task, you will receive all notifications (including updates on the comment threads and status changes) for that particular task. It’s on our feature roadmap to integrate a view to your agenda showing all the tasks that you are currently following (but are not assigned).

We hope that these features help keep you and your teams more informed of how your projects are progressing, and provide an intuitive and unobtrusive level of configurablity. If you have any suggestions about more features for email notifications, or tweaks to existing functionality, please don’t hesititate to send an email through our Support form.

Update from Daniel

In addition to the new features Garrett mentioned, I’d like to mention the following enhancements to the site:

Bug fix: task quotes and notes icons change color after you add a task or note as soon as the transaction completes. The system used to require a page refresh before this could be seen.

Improvement: The check box is now used to close tasks, instead of indicate whether or not it is in the Agenda list. As indicated in our previous post, this should be a fairly well-received change.

Improvement: Add-to-Agenda icon and Remove-from-Agenda icons. Items in your Agenda view project folders now feature a ‘+’ icon. Clicking on it will add the item to your Agenda list, where the + will be replaced with an eject symbol. Pressing eject will remove the item from your Agenda list and place it back into its project folder.

Enhancement: Tooltips for controls on the Agenda page.

Thanks for using Mentat!

Filed under: mentat by garrett