Email notifications

Overview

As a Workplace user, you can choose to receive an email notification whenever someone:

  • 'likes' one of your comment posts,

  • mentions you in a comment post,

  • uses @all in a comment post. *

You can configure how often you receive these email notifications with a frequency of immediately, daily or weekly, from the My Account page. You can also disable these notifications by choosing the Never option.

Email notifications are not configured by default in Workplace.

Use the instructions provided on this page to implement email notifications within your Workplace instance.

* For @all mentions to function, then the @all mentions feature must first be configured.

Prerequisites

To set up email notifications for your Workplace instance, you require a Workplace user whose account type is system administrator in Workplace. These people are known as Workplace system administrators.

Read more about morphing an existing Workplace user into a Workplace system administrator in Changing Account Types of the Squiz Matrix documentation. An existing Workplace system administrator can morph an existing Workplace user to a Workplace system administrator account type.

A Squiz staff member with server-level access to your Workplace instance itself. These people are known as Workplace server administrators.

In order for users to configure their own email notification settings, then the news personalisation feature must be configured first. Otherwise, only Workplace system administrators can configure these email notification settings for any user on their behalf.

Last, ensure the general prerequisites have been met before continuing.

Configure Workplace for email notifications

Configuring Workplace for email notifications requires work conducted by Workplace system administrators and Workplace server administrators. As a Workplace system administrator, configure the required scheduled jobs and metadata in Workplace to set up email notifications.

Configure scheduled jobs

  1. Ensure you are logged in to Workplace as a Workplace system administrator and have accessed admin mode.

  2. In the asset map side nav on the left, locate the System Management > Scheduled Jobs Manager asset and expand its tree.

  3. Scroll down to the last set of job assets within Scheduled Jobs Manager and note the following jobs:

    • Send Immediate Email Notifications Scheduled Job

    • Send Daily Email Notifications Scheduled Job

    • Send Weekly Email Notifications Scheduled Job

  4. For each of these job assets, set the Site asset value to the Squiz Workplace asset. To do this:

    1. Right-click the scheduled job and choose Details.

    2. On the right, click the Acquire Locks button.

    3. Click the top Change button.

    4. In the Asset Map on the left, locate the Squiz Workplace Mk III > Squiz Workplace - Site > Squiz Workplace asset.

    5. Right-click the Squiz Workplace asset and choose Use Me from the pop-up menu.

  5. Click the Commit button at the lower-right of the screen.

Configure site metadata

  1. Ensure you are logged in to Workplace as a Workplace system administrator and have accessed admin mode.

  2. In the asset map side nav on the left, locate the Squiz Workplace Mk III > Squiz Workplace - Site asset and expand its tree.

  3. Right-click the Squiz Workplace asset and choose Metadata.

  4. On the right, click the Acquire Locks button.

  5. Scroll down the page and under the email-notifications-configuration section, modify the following property values (ensuring that you clear the Use default check box to set a property’s value/s):

    • Site URL - https://<squiz-workplace-url> and modify <squiz-workplace-url> to your own Workplace instance’s URL.

    • Staff profile URL pattern - https://<squiz-workplace-url>/staff-profile?username={{username}}

    • Email address - From - the 'sender' email address for your Workplace instance.

    • Immediate updates template - %globals_asset_contents:<updates-template-asset-id>%, where <updates-template-asset-id> is the ID of your Workplace’s Squiz Workplace Mk III > Squiz Workplace - Site > Services > Email Templates > Updates Template asset.

    • Notifications template (partial) - %globals_asset_contents_raw:<updates-template-asset-id>%, where <updates-template-asset-id> is the ID of your Workplace’s Squiz Workplace Mk III > Squiz Workplace - Site > Services > Email Templates > Partial Templates > Components > My Notifications asset.

    • User root nodes - set these values to the assets of any user groups (within the Squiz Workplace Mk III > Squiz Workplace - Site > Site Configuration > Squiz Workplace Users asset) containing the individual users who will receive email notifications.

      Individual users can be members of more than one group. However, users will only receive email notifications if they are immediate children of a User Group specified as one of this property’s values.

Configure Workplace’s crontab file

If the @all mentions feature has already been configured on your Workplace instance, then this crontab file configuration would have already been implemented and you can skip to the next procedure.

Otherwise, as a Workplace server administrator, configure the Workplace server’s crontab file to ensure that notifications from @all mentions in Workplace are sent.

Contact your Squiz Workplace server administrator to configure your Workplace server’s crontab file for you.

Test that your configurations work

  1. As a Workplace system administrator, create a new 'test' user in Workplace (within the Squiz Workplace Mk III > Squiz Workplace - Site > Site Configuration > Squiz Workplace Users > Squiz Users asset) or use an existing user (whose email account you can access) to test the configuration of email notifications.

  2. Configure this 'test' user to receive email notifications immediately by logging in as this test user and configuring the Email Notification Settings to Immediately.

  3. Ensure you are logged in as your regular Workplace user and in a new comment on a page, @mention the test user in the comment.

  4. Ensure the test user receives an email notification.

Customise the appearance of email notifications

The style, header and footer of the email templates are configurable by Workplace system administrators.