Alerts Administration

The features described in this page will only be available in the new enhanced desktop. The existing message server functionality (used for job completion messages and IRS Crystal On Demand reports) will continue to be supported in the classic (IE-only) desktop. This page provides a high level functional and technical overview of the main components of the messaging system.

Note:

The messaging system is reliant upon the session management engine to track active user sessions for the purpose of routing messages. Enhancements to the Session Management engine are a prerequisite for the development of the Alerts/Notifications/Reminders features and are described at the end of this document.

 

Messages are generated and distributed to system users in the form of reminders, alerts and notifications.

Reminders

The content of reminders is entirely defined by the user and can be setup as one-off or recurring reminders similar to other tools like Google calendar or Microsoft outlook.

Example "The payroll KPI report is due on the 5th day of each month."

Alerts

Alerts are driven by application data and are automatically triggered when a particular condition is met.

Example "Your next Probation review is due in x days." This is a data-driven alert and is based on a rule that references the Probation Review Due field.

Notifications

These are informational messages sent by the system or by the system administrator to users.

Example 1 "The salaries by department report completed successfully on dd/mm/yy." This message is automatically sent by the system whenever a job that runs in the background completes. Example 2 "Service maintenance will be performed on dd/mm/yy at hh:mm." This message is sent by the system administrator to all users as a means of notifying them of a future interruption of the service.

 

Messages are delivered to the user through the UI (desktop) and/or email.

1. Inbox (Moorepayhr User Interface)

The notification can arrive in the user's inbox. All messages (Reminders, Notifications and Alerts) are delivered to the user through the application UI (desktop) as either Notifications or Upcoming Events. The notification text and priority of the notification can be modified via the drilldown window.

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Inbox/Notifications

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A new icon has been added to the header area of the desktop.

The Inbox/Notifications screen will display:

a) Job completion Messages (e.g., when a payroll process has completed)

b) Completed Extracts (i.e., Crystal on Demand). A link will be provided to view the report.

c) Notifications sent by a client or system administrator

d) Reminders

When any new items are added to either list, a small red numeric indicator will be overlayed on the icon indicating the number of new messages.

Once the messages have been viewed, this numeric indicator will be removed.

View the Output of an Alert

When the alert is run and a user need is notified they will receive a message in their inbox.

In order to view the results of the alert, the user just needs to click on the View link. This link will automatically take the user to the correct screen and pre-fill the search results with any matching employees.

 

2. Email

Users could also/instead receive an email. In this case the email subject and text are customisable.

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Variables can be used to add value to the message being sent to the user.

Depending on the type of message will depend on what variables are available. The user can either be notified of each individual employee found by the alert, or just receive a summary with a count of new employees matching the criteria.

To add a variable to the text, put the cursor where you want the variable, click add variable, select the variable you want, and click OK.

Each message delivered to the user may be associated with a suggested follow up action which is in context with the message itself.

There are two types of alerts:

• 1. User-generated reminders/alerts

  This functionality has been moved as a future enhancement.

• 2. Triggered Alerts

These alerts will be triggered based on data within the Moorepayhr database. For example, an alert could be setup to occur whenever the expiry date on a Licence is less than 30 days from now.

Triggered alerts are setup via a screen in Moorepayhr :

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Each alert will based on a template that will be shipped with Moorepayhr .

After selecting the template, users can customise the criteria values, who receives the alert, and the message they receive.

The list of recipients is determined by the template that is being used.

The recipients must be marked as an Administrator on the Define Users screen.

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Technical Notes For triggered alerts, a job will need to be run each night (as part of the current daily job) to check for any alerts that need to be triggered. Message Server will not be used to deliver the message. These types of alerts may be best only checked during logon. The scheduled job can update PPF25 to indicate to the user that an alert has occurred. Scheduled Job A scheduled job would be run nightly to process the Rules. The job will be run by adding an entry in the HCPROGR file (list of programs run for each database daily). The scheduled job will build up an SQL statement to be run over the database table and the results populated into the Results table. All previous results should be cleaned out of the results table for each rule processed.