TSG has been working with multiple clients that required a simple way to create assignment or reminder tasks on a document and/or folder. Where the Alfresco Content Accelerator has always had simple notifications, the new enhanced notifications added more robust interface for both assignment and reminder tasks.
Basic Notifications
The original requirement for Notifications was notifying a user or group of work to be done on a document/folder in the system. This notification appears both in the user interface as well as sent as an email, with a link to the document/folder and a due date for the task. The interface to create a simple notification is presented below:
The only required field to be filled out was either user or group with neither the due date or the message being required. Sometimes users would send a notification to themselves as a simple TO-DO list. Viewing notifications were accessible by clicking the bell icon in the application header.
While this notification approach is useful in simple scenarios, the team found adding just a few new updates could exponentially increase the usefulness for clients.
Enhanced Notifications – Configure for your needs
The enhancement of the Alfresco Content Accelerator Notifications can now be tailored to specific client use cases by adding in additional information that can be included in the notification itself.
For instance, in a claim scenario, if Alice needed Joe to review an estimate against an evaluation report to confirm coverage, Alice can go to the estimate in the system, send a notification to Joe with a message and tag the notification as “Estimate” and assign a due date to it. Joe will receive a notification alert in the header of the system if he is working in it, and will also receive and email with the details of the notification. The notification in the system and email also provide a link to the document or claim, in this case an estimate, so Joe can jump directly to the document needing to be reviewed. When Joe views the notification in the system, the notifications will be sorted by due date, with the most pressing due date at the top of the list, as they need to be completed sooner.
When Joe sees that Alice has notified him of a more pressing task than what he is currently working on, he can also use notifications to get back to his task later. Since Joe is already working on a different document review, he can send a notification to himself with that document attached, reminding himself to get back to reviewing it when he is done with Alice’s task. In this way, notifications can act as a user’s to-do list while in the system.
In the scenario above, Alice added a notification type, or “tag”, to the notification. The update to notifications now allows for any additional data to be configured to be on the notification when sent, with the above case opting for one additional field called “type”. Alongside providing additional data on the notifications, we have also added the ability to filter and sort on the attributes available. This will allow a user to easily find all notifications of one type or sort all notifications by a date if needed.
Lastly, we have added notifications to their own dashboard for a different way to view them, and allow user to see their completed (archived) notifications. Take a look at all of the new functionality in the video below:
Summary
By allowing clients to configure information included in notifications as well as filter notifications, the new Alfresco Content Accelerator provides more “ToDo” list capabilities to allow users to quickly navigate between multiple notifications and reminders.
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