Better way to notify the users about workflow items

Question

I want to notify the users about their assignment list/status of their work items via notification.

Instead of sending email notification, is it possible to show the notifications in Tridion itself? Say for example: having new item like "Notifications" under shortcuts-->mytasks?

Or is there any better way to notify the users apart from email communication, because the users dont want to receive so many mails in their mail box.

Answer 1

Yes. The list of items shown shortcuts is extendable, just like every other list I've ever looked at in the Tridion GUI.

Have a look at this blog post from Jaime to get started. The topic of how to extend is was also covered in this question, but Jaime's tutorial is probably a better starting point.

Once you get some experience with writing this extension, you'll probably run into questions similar to the one Nuno asked here (and that was answered expertly by Jaime and Boris).

Answer 2

In general I like to think of workflow notification in two broad groups - Active and Passive. Under active notifications, I really only include email notification, but you could expand the concept to push notifications to an iphone app or send a text message etc. When considering active notifications, it is very common for users to get fed up of having too many alerts from the system, so it is important to design it in a flexible way that allows your users to not feel bombarded with alerts. The most successful implementation I have implemented allowed users to say how often they receive notifications. Typically they set this to every 24 hours, and they receive a summary email of their pending assignments each morning. This allows users who are very active and use their task list regularly to never receive emails, as they normally get to the items before the following day.

Moving to passive forms of notification, if you keep in mind that you can expose a user's task list using the API's the SDL have provided, you could think about implementing the following forms of passive notification:

• Create an RSS feed for the Users's assignment list
• Create a Widget/Portlet for a company intranet to show a user their assignments
• Create some kind of desktop or mobile app which can pull the data
• Set the default start screen of the CMS to be the Task List rather than the Dashboard

The last of these options has been an "out of the box" offering from Tridion for a long time (but I think it was dropped by mistake at some point with Tridion 2009 or 2011. However, @Alvin has recently answered one of my other questions, which may help solve this issue (although it may not be supported). Essentially you can set the <defaultpage> node in the CME.config to /Views/Dashboard/Dashboard.aspx#locationId=cme:workitems. This will make the UI automatically open on the work list (BUT I REPEAT... THIS MAY NOT BE SUPPORTED).