NOTE: THIS BLOG WAS AUTHORED BY BrianCafferelli , BUT DUE TO TECHNICAL CHALLENGES, BRIAN WAS NOT ABLE TO PUBLISH.
Companies around the world run time-sensitive, business-critical processes on Quickbase. And one of the ways this streamlines how you manage critical information is through our built-in email notifications. The ability to send alerts to the right people at the right time ensures that your team stays productive. We’ve upgraded much of the user interface across the Quickbase platform recently, such as reports and forms. And the next step in this journey is simplifying emails and making them more flexible. We’re proud to announce that we have re-built emails from the ground up. We are providing a new and modernized experience that supports new forms, allows you to pick the time of day an email is sent, and more. Read on to learn more what’s possible using new email notifications.
Using new forms and notifications together
We recently rolled out a new version of forms, providing a drag-and-drop building experience and giving you more control over the layout and appearance. However, using these new forms requires a separate legacy form to be built for emails as well. We are now making this build experience easier and more consistent, now that you can display a new form in a new email notification. This helps make your notifications more professional-looking and engaging.
Embedding reports and charts
Legacy emails in Quickbase allow you to send a single report to a group of users periodically. New email notifications will also allow you to send a chart, and even multiple reports or charts in the same email. This puts a lot of power into the hands of the app builder since you build these user interface elements such as reports, and can use them in many places such as dashboards and emails.
Expanded options for the From field
Being mindful of who appears in the From field of your email can help clarify who is driving the process at hand and help an email recipient to respond quickly. Quickbase enables you to set your From field to the generic “notify@quickbase.com”, or the user set in a User-type field. For example, an email on a compliance requests table could appear as coming from the user who placed the request.
Our new email notification feature adds a few options for setting your “From” field. You can have your emails appear as coming from the owner of the email notification. Or you can even have emails appear as coming from the user who triggered the email in the first place. This gives you a great amount of flexibility to set up email notifications to match your exact process needs.
Setting CC and BCC fields
With the legacy emails, you can dynamically set the recipient based on data in Quickbase. For example, based on the Assigned To field in your table. This maps to the To field in the email message. However, it’s not possible to populate the CC or BCC fields today. New email notifications enable you to CC and BCC people. (This ability must first be enabled at the realm level)
Attach files to your emails
Using legacy emails, you could include a file attachment as part of the form or report being sent. New email notifications will let you go a step further and take a file from a File Attachment field in Quickbase and attach it directly to the email.
Better bulk options
We have also added more flexibility for managing bulk emails. For example, imagine that you have created an email notification which is sent when a record is edited. If a user clicks to edit a single record, then saves it, the email sent will reflect the changes made to that individual record. But what would you like to happen when a user enters grid edit mode, and updates many records at once?
Legacy email notifications allow you to choose whether you want to send the email if many records were changed at once. Our new email notifications go one step further and make it easy to send individual emails (up to 10 at once), or to send a combined email that covers all the triggering records.
Audit Logs
We get support cases from builders asking to verify whether an email notification was sent, when it was sent, etc. The Quickbase Tech Support Team has access to that information today, but customers are not able to see it directly. When you leverage our new email notifications, account admins will be able to track usage of those emails in their Audit Logs.
A streamlined builder experience
We’ve also made it easier to build email notifications. We have combined the functionality of legacy notifications and legacy subscriptions together, allowing you to set up either a triggered email or a scheduled email. Need to change the trigger type later? No problem! Using the new email notifications, you will be able to go back afterwards and switch the trigger type without needing to create a new email from scratch. This also provides a more intuitive and streamlined experience, similar to how trigger behavior can be modified for a pipeline.
For scheduled emails, you will also be able to specify the time of day the message will be sent. This is a long-time customer request which makes it easier to plan out your workflows.
Our updated rich-text editor helps you to create impactful and professional messages, with new features like inserting report widgets into your emails. And you can still modify the HTML markup directly if you’d prefer.
Tips for new builders
To create notifications that are impactful, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Leverage the conditions in the trigger to ensure the email is sent precisely when you need it to be
- Write out your email in a way that makes it clear why the recipient is receiving it, and what they should be doing upon receiving it
- Use rich text and images like your company’s logo to create a more engaging message.
The future of legacy email notifications and subscriptions
In order to make all the powerful improvements above to email notifications, we needed to re-build the feature from the ground up. That means that you will need to create new emails to take advantage of these new capabilities. However, we realize that most of you rely heavily on legacy notifications and subscriptions. So those legacy emails will continue to be available and operate exactly like they do today, and we do not currently have plans to change that behavior.
Try it out today!
We opened up our beta program for new email notifications to all users in March 2024. Simply navigate to table settings, and when you click the New button for emails you will see the new “Build your own” option.
To learn more about new email notifications, please see the article in our help center.
