Types of Alerts

Notifications, Incidents and Notification Templates are different, yet interrelated.

What is a Notification?

A Notification is an individual notice made up of a set of recipients, a message body and an optional set of required response(s). A Notification can be sent (executed) individually, or if a Notification Template has been created that contains several Notifications, all the template’s Notifications can be sent with one command.

Examples of Notifications include:

• One-time notice to employees that the office will be opening late due to weather conditions, with no required response.
• A reminder to parents that school will be let out early due to parent-teacher conferences.
• A broadcast to a group of employees with time-critical information, that all recipients need to respond to, to acknowledge receipt of the broadcast

For more information, see Notifications.

What is an Incident?

An Incident is a record of the sending and acknowledgment of one or more Notifications.

Incidents can be created:

• Manually, either by manually adding existing individual Notifications, or by creating new Notifications within the Incident interface, or a combination of both.
• Or automatically, from a Notification Template, including all that template’s Notifications.

An Incident can have a status of Open while it is still being acted upon, then be set to Closed when action is completed, resulting in a record of all Notifications that were included in that Incident’s record.

An Incident, with its included Notifications, can be saved as a Notification Template.

Example uses of Incidents include:

• A tornado warning has been issued for a region that is covered by a sub-set of your employees. A Notification is sent, with a map-based set of recipients, which the recipients are required to acknowledge. At a later time, the tornado warning’s area is expanded. The team leader or administrator then creates an Incident for this tornado, adds the first Notification into the new Incident, and from within the Incident interface is able to send new Notifications and track their responses.
• A Notification is sent out to upper-management about a troubling situation at the manufacturing plant. It is then decided that new Notifications need to be sent to various levels of management and employees containing information specific to each level. An Incident is created to track all of these Notifications in one place. Once the situation has been resolved, it is determined that this situation might happen again, and a Notification Template is created from the Incident to be used as a framework the next time this same thing happens.

For more information, see Incidents.

What are Notification Templates?

Notification Templates make it easy to reuse Notifications or Incidents for situations that are expected to repeat.

For quick access, Notification Templates are displayed on the Alert Console. In contrast, neither individual Notifications nor Incidents are displayed on the Alert Console.

Notification Templates are created:

• Manually, either by copying existing individual Notifications, or by creating new Notifications within the Notification Template interface, or a combination of both.
• Or automatically, from an Incident, including all that Incident’s Notifications.

After a Notification Template is created, it can be edited as desired, including adding or deleting Notifications, and changing Notification settings.

Notification Templates can automatically create an Incident if that ability is enabled in the template.

Example uses of Notification Templates include:

• A reminder to students and teachers regarding recurring event at the school, where administrators need to receive one Notification, teachers another, and parents a third Notification, with each Notification requiring differing acknowledgments. Before the Notification Template is sent, each Notification is edited to provide the name, date and time of the event.
• In an area where sever weather reoccurs, a Notification Template is created containing the basic Notifications that will need to be sent. A Notification is sent out to upper-management and other Notifications to various levels of management and employees containing information specific to each level. The template is edited before it is sent with any pertinent current information. And the feature is enabled to create an Incident to track all of these Notifications in one place.

For more information, see Notification Templates.