You are completing a ticket and want all of the ticket notes and time entries in an Autotask Ticket to be sent to the customer.
This can most definitely be done via a custom Ticket Notification. You will want to use the Ticket Time Entry: All Summary Notes or the Ticket: History variables. You’ll also want to an Autotask Workflow Rule (WFR) trigger to send this.
Create Custom Autotask Ticket Notification
For the Ticket Notification, let’s create a new one named “Notification with All Notes”. We’ll actually include a lot of variables to show what is possible.
- Title: Notification with All Notes
- Email Subject: [Ticket: Number] [Ticket: Title] All Notes
For both Email Body – HTML and Email Body – Plain Text, use the following:
all time with summary notes [Ticket Time Entry: All Time with Summary Notes] all time with summary notes and internal notes [Ticket Time Entry: All Time with Summary and Internal Notes] all summary notes [Ticket Time Entry: All Summary Notes] all internal notes [Ticket Time Entry: All Internal Notes] ticket history [Ticket: History]
Now save your new Notification Template.
What you will see is the following:
- All Time with Summary Notes. This is a complete list of Time Entries, including time and summary notes, but no Ticket Notes.
- All Time with Summary and Internal Notes. This is the most dangerous — shows Time Entry notes and any associated Time Entry internal notes.
- All Summary Notes. All Time Entries without the time.
- All Internal Notes. Probably tabloid fodder. Be careful.
- Ticket: History. All Time Entries and Notes. Includes internal notes.
Autotask Workflow Rule
You’ll want a trigger for this. If you want this to go out for all ticket completions, then replace your existing Ticket Notification with this one. If you want to send this only in some situations, you can create a new ticket status with a name like “Send All Ticket Notes”. Optionally, you could use a ticket UDF to trigger this which would you allow you to send the notification even for a ticket already set to Complete.
Caveats and Risks
This is actually a dangerous notification template! In a high-functioning helpdesk, especially larger ones, where ticket notes and time entry notes are well controlled, there is little risk of exposing potentially damaging internal communication.
However, my experience in working with smaller MSPs is that they often have comments in their tickets that they may not want shown to customers (e.g., “this user is constantly doing this same thing, not sure what their problem is”). Basically, water cooler talk that ends up tickets and can damage your customer relationships.
