Question

Photo of Michael Garrison

2

Does Rock have a concept of "Tasks" for staff?

As we continue getting ready to roll out Rock, there are more and more ideas and expectations being expressed along the lines of, "When someone gets marked as doing X (say attending a second time), then staff member Y needs to be notified that they need to call them and follow up".

In the worst case, I know we could create and set an attribute and assign someone to run a report of everyone with that attribute once a week, then dole out tasks manually.

The next step toward ideal would be this: automatically when the event "X" is logged, an e-mail is generated and sent to the correct staff person. I think I'm gathering that will be (or is) possible using workflow triggers.

But what everyone is hoping for is that a staff person would have some kind of a "To-do list" and that in addition to the e-mail, a task would be created on it so they have a list of things to do, and the ability to mark them off (thus tracking completed tasks) when they're done. That way, the e-mail doesn't get forgotten with no way of seeing that it was (or wasn't) followed up on.

I don't think I've seen anything in Rock like that yet. Is something like that on a dream list for the future?

We could use the tags, I suppose...tag the person with the name of the staff member who needs to contact them, then search for everyone with that tag. But the trouble there is that indicating the task was done would just be removing the tag, making tracking difficult (for instance, when were they followed up with?).

The other alternative I've come up with (which has some merit) is using workflow triggers to create a timeline note on the Person who needs to be followed up with, then the staff person would create another note above that indicating it's completion. But the drawback to that is that notes would be difficult to programmatically correlate a specific creation with the completion note, if any. So running a report to see how long staff member "Y"s list is would be difficult, for instance. Or generating a list of people who need followups and have not gotten them yet.

Are there other alternatives for this kind of workflow?

  • Michael Garrison

    By the way, I'm having difficulty with tags, both here and on my own Rock installation...they don't seem to be saving. Is this a common issue or is it just me?

  • DJ Grick

    You are not the only one wondering this. It's on my to-do list also. I have just been trying to be patient waiting for the workflow documentation to come out.

  • Jeremy Hoff

    @Michael Garrison - regarding tags, which browser are you using? I've not noticed issues with Tags but would like to make sure that is taken care of. Thank you! :-)

  • Photo of David Stevens

    0

    Michael, 

    You're correct, this will be possible once Workflows are released.  There's a lot being built out behind the scenes, like a queue for tasks assigned to you and need following up with.  I've seen a complex workflow example and I'm super excited about the potential it brings to Rock.