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How do I notify staff of new answers that have been newly published to our end-user pages or recently updated?

Environment:

Answers, Notifications

Resolution:

With new or updated answers, you can use report subscriptions to notify staff members of answers that have been newly published or recently updated. You can also use answer rules to send an escalation notification to staff members when an answer is saved and meets criteria you specify.

Create a Report and Alert to send to Staff

To create a report that lists newly published answers, you can first create a custom field to specify when the answer was actually published. You can then use the custom field as a criteria in a custom report.

For example:

1. First create a new custom answer field called Date Published. It should be a date type. For more information on creating custom fields, refer to Answer ID 1131: Creating Custom Fields. 
2. Whenever someone publishes an answer to your end-user pages, set the date in the custom field. 
3. Create a custom report with one of the criteria for the report based on the Date Published field. For example: 
   Create a filter based on Answers > Date Published with the Operator set to 'between' and the date range set to -1 weeks and -0 weeks.  For more information on creating custom reports, refer to Answer ID 2509: Creating a Custom Report
4. When you generate the report, the answers that are listed are based on the Date Published field.

You can add a report subscription to automatically send the report at a specific frequency.

Note: You can define data exceptions within a report and then use the Alerts feature on the Scheduling tab so that the report subscription is sent only if there is data in the report. For more information, refer to Answer ID 2192: Creating and Sending Alerts.

Use Rules to Send an Escalation Notification

You can use answer rules to send escalation notifications to specific staff members when an answer is saved and that answer meets the criteria specified in the rule.

Note: Even though the action to include is Email > Send Escalation Notification, you can use this action to simply send a notification -- even if you are not escalating the incident after a specified period of time.

For example, if you want to send a notification to a staff member every time a public answer is edited, you can configured a rule as follows:

IF Answer.Status equals Public (plus whatever custom public statuses you have)

THEN Send Escalation Notification (and select the assignee or appropriate staff members and groups).

With this rule in place, any time an answer that is a public status is saved, it will match this rule and send the notification.

When setting up rules for answers, it is recommended that you include at least two rule states: an initial rule state for new records and an existing state. In this case, the rule should be for the existing state. When you compile your rule set, your answers may have a null rule state. When asked which state these null values should be assigned to, select the existing rule state.