The Boring Lab Releases Three New Features to Help Milestone VMS Admins Fight Email Fatigue
Email Fatigue Is Real. The pandemic has hit a lot of us hard, physically, mentally, and emotionally. The movement to remote work, while necessary to keep us safe, has stirred up more feelings of burnout, exhaustion, and dissatisfaction in our work lives. Due to shifting communication channels to solely virtual, email fatigue is one of the primary drivers in discontent and work-related stress. According to a recent survey from Superhuman, 30% of remote workers claim that an overflowing inbox and endless new emails are causing the most distractions in work productivity. This data begs the question: why would any company want to continue contributing to burnout, exhaustion, and frustration with an outpouring of email notifications? With more and more of our clients and employees working in this new remote reality, our mission is to make your life and communications with us more simple and stress-free. Note to Self: Don’t Bore Customers With Too Many Emails In thinking about how else we can help our customers to eliminate boring tasks from their workload, solving for email overwhelm was at the top of the list. We realized that we might be contributing to the problem. We put on our thinking caps and came up a plan that will set a new standard for how VMS admins receive system-related updates forever. We’re gearing up to release a new email notification strategy in the coming weeks that not only limits the amount of emails our clients receive from us, but consolidates all of the most crucial information regarding your VMS and camera health in a digestible and concise format. Our goal with these updates is to keep you informed and aware of everything going on with your VMS, without overwhelming your inbox. “Smart Notifications!” — Coming Soon to Boring Toolbox Near You The days of one email per camera error are over. Stay alert for the release of our new “Smart Notifications,” an update to our system health notifications that consolidate email alerts about camera errors into ONE, clean, simple summary email. New Health Notification Management Features Now Available For The Boring Toolbox You have already come to love our notification thresholds, which when set correctly, greatly reduces the number of notifications in your inbox. As a Boring Lab customer, you now have access to two more features in the Boring Toolbox that will give you more control over how, why, and when you receive notifications about your Milestone VMS. Maintenance Mode The Boring Toolbox’s newest feature release, maintenance mode, gives you the power to mute all notifications for a selection of cameras or recording servers and remove those devices from the live monitoring dashboard, thereby eliminating any unwanted alerts. You can schedule recurring maintenance modes for entire servers up to twice a week, for up to one full calendar day at a time or if you need more time, then Maintenance mode can be enabled manually on individual devices or entire recording servers. Critical Mode Critical mode is a global setting that is designed to only send live monitoring notifications for devices marked as critical. When enabled via the managed site configuration, critical mode mutes all live monitoring notifications system-wide. The Milestone administrator can manually select one or many hardware devices or recording servers and mark them as critical devices. Standard live monitoring notifications are then enabled on those devices marked as critical. In conjunction with Boring scheduled reports, Critical mode for notifications allows Milestone XProtect administrators to set a different level of importance to the devices in their VMS. By doing so, they can receive instant alerts when a critical device has a health issue and then review the health events of less critical devices once a week using our scheduled reporting functions. Download the latest version of Boring Toolbox and get started with these new features today! Update Your Toolbox Get Started With a 30-Day Free Trial
