Platform Notifications

(new in Atfinity 17)

Definition

A Platform Notification is a message every user of the Case Manager has to acknowledge before they carry on working. Acknowledging it is the only way past it, and each user has to do that themselves, so nobody keeps working without having seen it. Use one for a change users have to know about before their next case: a new release, a process that now works differently, or a planned interruption.

Like everything else in the configuration, a notification reaches users only once you put it live.

When a notification is shown

A notification is shown while it is enabled and today falls inside its validity window. The window starts on a date you set, today by default, and runs for one week, one month, one year, which is the default, or always, which leaves the notification without an end date. The end date follows from those two settings, so you move the window by changing the start date or the duration.

Both halves have to hold, which is what the Active status on the overview means. An enabled notification that starts tomorrow shows nothing until then, and one whose end date has passed is expired: it is switched off and cannot be enabled again until its window includes today.

Acknowledgement

Each user acknowledges each notification once, and that is remembered for good. Editing the message, disabling and enabling it again or extending the duration brings it back for nobody who has already acknowledged it, while users created later still get it as long as it is shown.

A corrected message therefore reaches nobody who saw the original. To reach everyone a second time, duplicate the notification instead of editing it: the duplicate is a notification of its own that nobody has acknowledged, and it starts out disabled with the style, start date and duration of the original.

Several notifications at once are acknowledged one after another, oldest first, and users are told how many there are in total unless there is only one.

The style, info, warning or error, only picks the icon shown with the message. It changes nothing about who is shown a notification or when.

The message

The message is rich text and supports bold, italic, bulleted and numbered lists, and links. A link is the address you enter, so it can lead out of Atfinity or, written as a path such as /cases, to a page inside it. Title and message can be translated, but every user is shown the main language of your configuration, whichever language they work in.

Example

A notification titled 'Release 17.0', with the style info, starting on the day the release is installed and valid for one month, carries a message listing what changed and a link to the release notes.

Each user acknowledges it once, the next time they open the Case Manager. Someone who first logs in three weeks later still gets it, and nobody is shown it after the month is over.