When it comes to notifications, some people swear by the more the better. However, in an age where our devices are constantly bleeping with incoming notifications, it is important not to lose sight of the important bits and what exactly is important enough to grab your attention is a very personal thing. Personally, during the day I have disabled all sound notifications on my phone except for a select list of contacts. It helps me focus on what I am doing and doesn’t pull my attention away every five minutes. But that’s me. Did you know my sister can even receive text messages from her dishwasher when it’s done? I’m not kidding.

Get notified, when colleagues are uploading content

Anyway, with this being such a personal issue, when deciding what notifications to provide in MediaLab, it is a fine line between providing a feature that is useful for the majority, not overly complicated and isn’t “in your face” if you don’t need it. Our real-time event notifications are a perfect example of this. If you work in a busy Lab, we think it is neat to know what your co-workers are doing by having small notifications at the bottom of your screen. We will even automatically update the contents when someone has added new files. However, we can also relate to those that don’t want to be bothered, because they may very well be working on their own project. Therefore, we support opting out of our real-time notifications by navigating to your profile and toggling the “Show real-time notifications” field. This brings us to today’s topic: upload notifications! While we have provided support for upload notifications for FTP uploads and regular uploads with our real-time events, we haven’t provided a proper way to subscribe to regular uploads when you are not online, until today! You can now head over to your profile and find the “Update upload notifications” button. From there, you can subscribe to each top-level folder, either by email or by notification in MediaLab and get notified when new content is added to the folder or one of its subfolders. In the next weeks, we will integrate this in the folder view so it will be easier to subscribe, so expect it show up in the folder workspace soon!

Keep things easy in your own Lab

As discussed earlier, it’s always a fine line when adding new features. For the upload notifications, we have decided to support subscribing per top-level folder only. You will then be notified when a file is uploaded to any of its sub-folders. This is unlike for example our group permissions, which can be set on any sub-folder as well. The main reason is to keep life easy, not only for us but mostly for you. It is easy to see which notifications you will receive and even easier to opt-out if you grow tired of them. No surprises there!

Hans

Oct 08, 2019
Digital PlatformFeatureNotificationsSaas ToolUploadWorkflow