Notifications

Ektron's Notification system creates and transmits Notification messages through various agents, based on Ektron activities. The activities may be performed by a community group, membership user, or an Ektron user.

Activities are events, such as adding content, joining a community group, and submitting a micro-message

Notification messages consist of text and a triggering activity. When the activity occurs, the message is sent to eligible recipients.

Recipients could include a user’s colleagues and members of community groups to which he belongs.

Agents are providers that transmit the messages. Agents include email, SMS and Activity Streams.

For example, Paul is a membership user who wants to notify colleagues whenever he uploads a document to his profile page. When he does, an Ektron event is fired, which causes a Notification agent to send the following email to his colleagues.

“Paul added a new document, ‘How to Write Code’, to his profile page.”

Users can decide

which activities should send a Notification to their colleagues or community groups

which Notifications they want to receive from colleagues and community groups

Notifications help you build a tighter, more robust community. They drive users to your site by notifying them of a recent event, then directing them to the affected page.

This section also contains the following topics.

Notification System Overview

The following section presents an architectural overview of the Notification system. It is intended for developers and database administrators.

1. A user performs an activity in Ektron.

2. Ektron raises a corresponding event.

3. The activity’s data is written to the Activity table in the database.

4. Activity information is sent to the activity queue.

5. Ektron verifies that the Notification system is enabled.

6. The Notification service gets a list of users who signed up to be notified about that activity when performed by that user. That list also includes the agents that send the message (for example, Email or SMS).

7. The Notification service gets the message associated with the activity, formats it, and sends it to the appropriate Notification agents.

8. Notification agents send the message to users compiled in Step 6.