Add anyone as a watcher

I agree completely with this. I have a similar suggestion (a few days back in this forum) about being able to trigger a notification email to any email address. Fairly similar use-case.

I h ave a work-around for you though:

Create the person-to-be-notified as an "Occasional" Agent -- but one that is never given a login, and hence, never actually logs into the system. So you should never actually be charged for their account. As an "Occasional" agent, they can be sent notification emails and (I believe) set as Watchers.

I have a similar requirement.  I like your idea David.  However in my case I cannot use that method, and I'll explain why, so I"m curious if there's another way around this.

My current requirement is to send an email notification to one Contact any time any ticket is updated, regardless if that contact or any other contact originally submitted the ticket.  Basically someone outside my organization (i.e. not an Agent) as a point person to monitor any changed to tickets that are being submitted by his employees.

It appears the only way to set watcher or trigger emails are to only Agents, not Contacts.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

I think my suggestion would still work.

You create a Requester with the Name and Email of the person you want to be notified -- then you upgrade them to an Agent. It seems they are made an "Occassional Agent" by default. As an Occasional Agent -- you never need give them login access to the portal (so you never end up having to pay for them as an Agent). You can make someone a Requester or an Occassional Agent even if they're outside your organization.

So now that person is addressable in the automation rules.

This issue I ran into is that this Requestor does actually log into the portal and log/review tickets.  So I'm afraid promoting into to Occassional Agent will give him visibility into things I do not want him to have (I have restricted access and custom customer facing Customer portals with different skins.  

I also tried to just create an Occasional Agent to use your method but you cannot use an email address more than once (since this person would be set up as a Requestor and an Occasional Agent).

Thanks David, that's a good idea.  I'll try that out.