How To: Fix Task Notification Issues in Winter ’15

Since the Winter ’15 release began hitting production servers, there has been a noticeable number of questions appearing on the Success Community which either say: “Why am I suddenly getting a load of notifications that tasks have been assigned to me? I don’t want them!” or “I used to be able to send an email notification when I assigned a task to a user. Why can’t I do that anymore?”

In both cases, the answer is that one of the changes in the new release was around letting users control their own task notifications globally. Over to the release notes, which tell us:

Now you can expose a setting that lets individual users turn notification emails on or off for all task assignments globally. This new user setting replaces the checkbox on the Create Task page that triggers an email to the assignee of the task. 

So now your users can control whether they wish to receive notifications when someone assigns a task to them, and this per-user setting takes precedence, so the create task screens no longer contain the checkbox letting the assigner decide.

The change makes sense but, as these questions on the Answers forum prove, such a broad approach may not suit every use case, so auto-enabling the feature is going to catch a few people out. Especially when the setting defaults to ‘on’.

Luckily there is an easy way you can hide the setting from users and reinstate the checkbox where it used to appear. Here’s how:

To hide the user setting, in Setup, click Customize | Activities | Activity Settings and deselect Enable user control over task assignment notifications.

Deselecting that setting will put you back to where you were prior to Winter ’15 – the Send Email Notification checkbox will reappear on the task creation page (both in the core UI and when creating a workflow task) and users will receive email notifications according to whether the checkbox is selected. That will at least give you time to properly assess the impact of the change and discuss it with your users before deciding whether to turn it on for real.