Friday, May 9, 2008

Creating and Managing Buzzsaw Notifications

Notifications in Buzzsaw are a fantastic way of watching a project, folder, or file. And it’s also a way of putting Buzzsaw to work for you by monitoring changes and sending you an email when they occur. Notifications work even when you don’t have Buzzsaw open. So why open Buzzsaw to look for changes? Let Buzzsaw do it for you.

Although there a few different ways to set notifications in Buzzsaw, the easiest way may be to identify what you need to “watch”. Is it an entire project? A folder, and it’s contents? Or is it a single file that you want to watch? After you’ve identified what you’d like to watch, navigate to it, right click on it and choose “New Notification”. Then select one of two notification types, Instant or Daily Summary. That’s it!





By following some simple rules, you’ll stay well informed by the Buzzsaw Notification engine.

1) Understand what triggers a notification. Changes to projects, folder and files. If a file is added or changed a notification is triggered. If a file is deleted, the notification to that file is also deleted. If no changes have been made, there will be no notification.


2) Know when to set an instant notification vs. a daily summary.

These are the 2 types of notifications available (Instant and Daily Summary). Use instant notifications to trigger an email that tells you almost instantly when a change has occurred. There is a catch though. If you set an instant notification to a project, this project could potentially have hundred of files within files within files. And any change, anywhere in the entire project will trigger an instant notification. An active project could spew notification after notification after notification, and before long you’re trying to stop the flood of emails. Instant notifications, however, are great for watching individual files, or smaller projects.

The Daily summary is a “once a day notification detailing all changes”. And the nice thing is, you can choose the time that the daily summary notification comes in to your email. And yes, in a busy project, this daily notification can be a very long email…….but it’s better than getting several individual emails throughout the day. Is there such thing as “too much information”? Good question. I’d rather get 20 notifications that I didn’t need than miss 1 that I REALLY needed.

3) Know how to manage your notifications. This is all performed in the notification manager. It’s there that you’ll change notifications from daily summary to instant (and vice versa), temporarily disable notifications, permanently delete notifications, change the daily summary time, even create new notifications.