Summary

The documentation about Service Management notification is vague/confusing:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicemanagementserver/managing-service-project-notifications-939926348.html

The explanation for the recipient Customers involved needs to be changed, as it leads to a lot of confusion for our customers, because it's missing a lot of information.

In the documentation, Customers involved is defined as:

All customers involved on the request, including the reporter and request participants.

This notification is not sent to customers if they have turned off notifications for an individual request in the portal or a request's email thread.

After digging into the source code, we found that this information was incorrect/incomplete, because it's not making any mention of the Approvers, nor the members of the Organizations the request was shared with.

In reality, Customers Involved should be defined as follows:

All customers involved on the request, including:

• the reporter
• the request participants
• the people in an organization(s) that the request has been shared with
• the approver(s), in case the request requires an approval

Notes:

• This notification is not sent to customers if they have turned off notifications for an individual request in the portal or a request's email thread
• For the users which fall into the category people in an organization(s) that the request has been shared with, and approvers, this notification is turned off by default. This means that, if these types of users want to receive notifications meant for the recipient Customers Involved and for an a specific request, they need to explicitly turn on notifications for that request by clicking on the Get Notifications button after opening it

Solution

Replace the old definition of Customers Involved with the new definition.