How to Prep for Notification Center GA?

Hi ​@DannyPancratz , We do not expect Community Manager/Admins to manually turn it on when we go GA. The idea would be to automatically turn on Notification Center for all end users.

Thanks for the insight, ​@Dheepak G. If that’s the case, it’d be ideal to have an anticipated GA date, as well as the Gainsight documentation on the Notification Center, so that Community Managers can prep.  

Notification Center was just launched. Unfortunately there was no heads-up and there is no documentation available (as far as I searched). We didn’t have a chance to prepare for that, like Danny mentioned.

Not getting a heads-up about this is really frustrating. Moreover, it’s still not working properly, despite the extensive input we provided during the beta. How can this be deactivated?

Yep, I noticed also that NC is now launched.

I have enabled it a long time ago and I disabled it couple days back because there is issues with the new reply notifications. And now it is back, boom! Without any notice. With same problems.

The issues that were reported in the beta are still there. It's surprising it was launched like this. It feels like an unfinished function in this state.

Issues like this the one Revote raised are still prominent about the NC not showing the recent notifications.

During the beta there was also talk of adding a settings page, where users could choose what they would see in de NC. But the settings page hasn't changed so this isn't possible, increasing the unfinished product feeling.

When beta was launched NC worked fine and that was the reason I published it in our community. I dont know what have happened since, why all the notifications doesnt work.

Thought I’d come along and see when this update went live - was quite shocked to see the notification center showing on our forum Nav bar! 

It’s a welcome change - Certainly would like to have this function available for all front end users for a better interactive experience. 

Does appear that it’s notifying of all responses and updates across the platform rather than those directly linked/related to the end users engagement.

Again, love this being a function available on our platform, so although needing refinement, please don’t remove it! Ha 🙏

I share everyone’s disappointment. And also owe an apology, as my CSM told me last week that it’d be live by the end of January. I guess I should’ve come back to this thread (forgot about it tbh) and gave an update because it’s clear from this (and the language switcher awhile back) that they’re not interested in giving advance notice or proper documentation or doing the things that would avoid blowing up our days by just enabling a new feature like this without any documentation. 

Fun times. 

The most fun is that it’s live without any documentation. Sure, there are release notes, but those mostly describe what it does. Not how it works, or settings factor it, or the answers we’ll need to know when we get asked them by our community members. 

I guess we’ll just have to figure it out. 

But, hey… they got it GA before the end of their fiscal quarter and fiscal year. Kudos to them for hitting the delivery. After all, shipping an update is what matters, not customer success, right? That’s what Gainsight is all about? 

Oh no, I didnt think about this from this perspective.

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It seems that their Support doesnt know that NC is now launched.

Hmm. I am not sure do I like how the things are nowadays.

It seems that their Support doesnt know that NC is now launched.

Not surprised. 

I don't think you owe us that. Don't get me wrong, I respect it, but it's not your job to do theirs.

Since the discussion here they posted an update and release note, but it doesn't tell us much more than we already knew: it's here. We also raised a support ticket, but unlike Revote we don't have a resonse yet.

Maybe GS could take a look into how we got here.

​@DannyPancratz ​@revote Just out of interest, are you aware of anywhere via Control where we can edit the NC at all? 

No, there is no any settings for NC. Least at the moment.

+1

This ticket is raised 16.12.2024. We have had problems with the NC least that long 😀

​@BradleyOVO not my knowledge. In playing around with the Beta there didn’t seem any way to do that. 

Their actions (and mostly inaction) tells me that they imagine this is an intuitive feature to use and turning it on won’t be disruptive at all. And there’d be no need to customize it or disable it or even update documentation. 

While I can understand why someone might have that perspective (there are tons of similar notification centers on the sites we all regularly use), it requires you to deliver perfectly with a feature that is actually 100% intuitive. And preferably without the bugs I’ve seen this morning…

Even as a power user of this GS community, it’s not clear to me the relationship with the NC and email notifications.

• Should I be getting both for everything in the Notification settings? (I’m not) 
• Does disabling/enabling the setting apply to both? (a clear answer in documentation would be preferred to testing myself or trying to find the answer on a question I asked about the beta version of this (which could easily have changed since i asked it))
• What about users who had previous disabled notification emails? Are those same notifications disabled in the NC? And if they’ve disabled everything, will their NC just be empty? 

We raised it this morning when our users reported it to us, so we'll get a response later I expect. And by then they know it's live, hopefully. They might have a lot of new tickets about it I imagine.

It would have been super cool to announce this beforehand as we did have an idea submitted by a member. Also noticed that the change has caused our menu to be cut off when inside of a post: 

I’ve noticed that our menu is cut off in the logged-out view, but not logged-in. 

From my support ticket. 

The Notification Center wasn’t supposed to be released yet, as we’re still collecting customer feedback and addressing some minor bugs.
 
I’m working with our team to add a feature flag that will allow you to disable the Notification Center, which I believe is the best solution for now.
 
In the meantime, you can hide the Notification Center by adding the following CSS:
 

.notification-center { 
display: none; 
}

Thanks ​@DannyPancratz 👌

Edit: I started to think about, that just hiding NC with CSS might cause some problems. Because I noticed that when TC is on, you dont get notifications about the new private messages to your avatar / profile menu (number of new private messages). And vice versa.

Hmm.

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Edit 2: Yep, I did quick test.

Gainsight, why this is so difficult for you?

Hey everyone, a short update from our side as we’re looking into this. We’re sorry for any inconvenience the rollout of the notification center has caused. We hear your feedback and are actively looking into it, we’ll share an update as soon as we can. Thank you for your patience.

NC can be now seen only by the logged in users.

That is correct ​@revote thanks for your confirmation. We’re still looking into reports where notifications are not always appearing in a logic chronologic order.  

We will also share more information about the approach and learnings from this release with you as soon as we can.

Thanks ​@Yoeri. I am looking forward.