Notifications Inbox

The Notifications Inbox enables users to quickly review and reply to new notifications from a central location inside Workzone, as a quicker and less distracting alternative to getting separate emails for each item. Accessed from the bell icon at the top of the screen, the Notifications Inbox shows a # of how many unread items (marked with a blue dot) that are waiting for your review.

The Notifications Inbox will allow most organizations to reduce the email notifications they currently receive from Workzone, by disabling these email notifications under Settings. Organizations who wish to continue to receive all the emails they get today don’t need to do anything; they will continue to receive the same emails without interruption.

The Notifications Inbox shows three tabs of information: Feeds, Direct, and New To-Do’s, which are shown and described in the annotated screenshots below. Each item shows the name and initials/avatar of the comment initiator along with the item name, workspace, project and comment text, in a format designed for quick scanning.

Feeds

This is the main tab, showing comments on all items (documents, projects, tasks, project requests, channels, and posts) to which you’re subscribed or mentioned. Quickly review all new items, dismiss items that don’t require a response and reply to items right from this list.

1. “Bell” notification icon shows a badge with the total number of unread notifications (sum of the unread notifications on each of the tabs). To reduce distraction, each user can choose to show a solid circle instead of the number (or turn the number off completely) under My Settings – Notifications.

2. When you select the row for a notification, it turns a lighter color to indicate that it has been read, and the notification total in the bell is reduced by one. You can use the arrow keys to quickly move from one notification to the next.

3. Click the “dismiss” icon (x) or use the keyboard Delete button to dismiss the item from the Notifications area, in keeping with the principle of having a clean inbox. Note that dismissing the Notification doesn’t affect the comment in its actual location in Workzone; it just removes it from the Notifications area and reduces the total number of unread items shown in the notification bell.

4. Click the “reply” icon (curved arrow) to make a quick reply to the item. This will thread that reply as indented under that notification's comment, shown on the details tray for the item.

5. Click the item name if you want to see the item details or the full list of comments for the item. The Notifications view only shows new comments from users other than you.

6. Click the “mark all as read” (checkmark) icon next to the tab name to mark all items in that tab as read and reduce the bell count accordingly. This does not dismiss or remove the items from view.

7. Click the “dismiss” icon (x) next to the tab name to dismiss all items in that tab and mark them as read. This is helpful for cleaning out your inbox after you have read all items in a tab. Messages will be dismissed automatically after 30 days.

Direct

Here you can view messages sent exclusively to you using Workzone’s direct messaging feature. The reply, dismiss, and mark as read functions work identically to those described above for Feeds.

Click here for more details on Workzone’s Direct Messaging feature

New To-Dos

This section shows new items for which you are responsible or involved (such as approval requests) in for which you would get email notifications. This list does not include your entire To-Do List, just notifications of new assignments.

1. New tasks assigned to me from the Add Task page or when “Email responsible” is selected from the “More” 3-dot drop-down menu for a task or project in Projects.

2. New project requests for which I’m a recipient.

3. New approvals requests where I’m an approver.

4. My downstream tasks when all predecessor tasks are marked complete.

5. Click the “dismiss” icon (X) to dismiss the item from this view and mark it as read.

View All Notifications

Clicking View all notifications from the top right in the Notifications Inbox will open a separate page laying notifications out in table form, allowing for notifications to be sorted and filtered in a variety of ways. This page is especially useful for users that receive a lot of notifications or want to reverse the order of their inbox, allowing for catch up on older notifications.

The Date column can be selected to reverse the sort order (oldest to newest) and back. Clicking under the Item column directs to that row's specific item, and there are controls at the bottom to select how many notifications display per page (5, 50, 100, or 500) and which page to show, out of the total pages:

The blue/white dot (showing only when hovering and switched with a click) on the left of each row toggles between marking the notification as New or Read and is especially useful in filtering:

...while the icons to the right (appearing when the cursor is hovering) provide options to reply to a message or dismiss it (if the notification is already dismissed, a circular arrow icon will allow the notification to be restored instead):

The Filters button at the top provides options to only show certain notifications based on Date (Today, Yesterday, This week, Last week, This month, Last month, All time), Status (All, New and Read, New Read, Dismissed), and Creator (name of user).