What improvements to subscriptions and notifications would you like to see?

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I'm posting this on behalf of Matthew Moloney -- a PM intern who has joined us from Australia! 

He's got a query on what sort of improvements you'd like to see in the subscriptions & notifications space in a future release.

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G'day everyone,

I'm looking for feedback on a design for a subscription and notification interface that will allow users to specify which events they would like to be notified on. I would also like to get a few ideas on what would be the most common types of notifications that a users such as you would like to subscribe to.

Some ideas have been:

·         "I would like to receive an email when any of my Bugs have been updated"

·         "I would like to know when I have been assigned a new work item"

·          "I would like to be notified when a work item that was previously assigned to me has been assigned to someone else"

 

By collating such request into a set of common requests we can try to optimize a user interface.

The idea is analogous to the Outlook rules and alerts wizard. The intent is to have two different approaches. A wizard that will be able to facilitate the event subscriptions for 80% the most common cases, and a Query Builder driven approach that will handle the remaining 20%.

The most important input I am looking for is your answer to the following question; if an ideal subscription and notification infrastructure existed what events would you subscribe to and how would you like to receive those events? In order to quantify each of the answers please give an indication on the subscriptions importance (integral, very important, nice to have) and on the frequency of occurrence (all the time, regularly, occasionally).

Some things to consider:

If you could only subscribe to changes in queries as opposed to individual work items could that be enough?

For subscribing to a change in a query how would we define 'a change in the query'? 

·         When work items within the query has changed in a certain way; or

·         A new work item enters the query results or an old item leaves the query results

 

And, what kinds of notification endpoints are desired?

·         Email

·         Instant Messaging

·         RSS

·         Newspaper (A webpage collating events)

Thanks for your time,

Matthew Moloney