Enterprise applications often need to “push” information to the users. The purpose of the push is typically to inform users in a more timely manner without waiting the users to pull the information down themselves, by using the application itself.
Email is by far the most common notification method. Applications are typically capable of sending
email notifications from the application itself but when other notification methods such as pagers, etc. are needed, 3rd party software and hardware solutions are utilized.
Sending an email or a page from an application is easy enough technically in isolation, but there are
significant challenges when thinking in the enterprise context:
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Maintenance of user information for each application. Each application that needs to send notifications to the users need to maintain user data such as users' email addresses, pager numbers as well as users' preferences such as for when to send a notification to which user. There are significant inefficiencies as the same data needs to be maintained in many different places, which puts the burden on the administrators of these applications or the IT operations groups in general.
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Too many notifications. Users often ask for notifications to stop as they get too many of
them. Tuning when to send notifications to users is a laborous and takes a long time. Users often completely ignore these messages when there are too many of them, or don't want to receive them at all. Either way, too many notifications is the same as not having any. It defeats the purpose. -
Email does not cut it.Email is not necessarily the best way to inform users in a timely manner. Delivery can take time, email can be blocked for variety of reasons, or users may not get to read the email among the dozens of other emails waiting for their attention. More and more instant messaging systems are used as their primary communication tool by the enterprise users.
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Users have limited to no control. Users are given little control over how they get notified, for what, and when. Some applications allow users to specify for which events they want to get a notification, but most do not. Even when they do, it requires user to go to the application and figure out what to do, which is not always an option.
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One way communications. The communications between the applications and the users are unidirectional. Applications send the information but there is often no way for the users to interact with applications, hence users typically have to launch the application in question to do what they need to do. The communications among the users also handled from a different channel, email etc.
I believe that if the above stated shortcomings can be overcome, notifications solutions can play a
significant role in improving the productivity and the efficiency of the business (and IT) processes. RapidInformer, our latest product, is our attempt to tackle these challenges and provide a modern
notification solution to the enterprise, taking advantage of the latest communications and collaboration technologies. As a result, we believe RapidInformer is significantly different than existing solutions. Here is what I think are the characteristics of an effective notification solution for the enterprise:
- Support for more notification methods is essential. Email is not enough. More and more enterprise users are taking advantage of other communications technologies such as instant messaging, RSS, SMS, etc., hence to be effective an enterprise notification solution will need to support these emerging tools to bring the information to where users are.
- Empower the user to select the notification method. Users know best how they want to be notified. Users should be able to specify the notification method (email, instant message, SMS, RSS, etc.) and should be able to easily change their preferences dynamically. For example, a user may prefer to receive messages (notifications) via instant messaging client when at their desk, but switch to email or web interface, if they don't want to be disturbed, or SMS if away from their computer, etc.
- Empower users treat different messages differently. If the users don't have control over the notifications they are receiving, it can quickly become unmanageable. In more than one occasion, I've witnessed to users asking the notifications to be turned off due to overload. Not all notifications are created equal. Users should be able to define filters, prioritize and route messages to where they want easily.
- Sending a notification should be very simple. Developers, integrators and administrators should be able to send notifications via the system with ease from whatever programming/scripting language they are using.
- Communications should be bidirectional. Enterprise notification solution should
enable communications in all directions. Users should be able to “communicate” with the applications as well as other users. Ability to take the relevant actions by sending messages to other users or executing actions directly as a response to a message is much more efficient and has significant impact on the overall productivity. - One system to rule them all. Each application/system should not have to maintain their own store for user information and preferences. Users should be able to maintain their messaging preferences themselves in a single location. Applications, systems, and users should be able to simply send a message and not worry about figuring out and maintain how to reach the users.
- Simple and accessible for the users. This is a no brainer but should be said anyway. Solution should be as simple as possible to use for the users. Interfaces to the system should be available for the users via the web, IM clients, etc. to make it accessible from anywhere, anytime.
The first release of RapidInformer has some of these characteristics and missing others. The software is available from our website, including a community version. A live version of the software is also installed on this server, you can get a user account and take a look a quick look at it as well.
As stated in our open development manifesto, we hope to collaborate with anyone who may be interested to ensure that RapidInformer develops into a solution that solves your problems. Post your thoughts in the forum, request a new feature or report a bug in the issue tracker, sign up to get notified about anything new on this site (via RapidInformer).
