Applications Administration Guide > Alerts >

About Alerts

Alerts provide a platform for administrators and other users with access to the Alert Administration view to send long, complex, and customized messages directly to selected groups of recipients. Typically, these messages are time-critical, but also need to have associations with data in the company database (for instance, literature or products) and to be customized for the recipient.

For example, to communicate product pricing changes to a sales team with members around the world, a sales manager would want to be able to distribute new pricing structures and product information as soon as they are approved. Traditionally, this would be done with email messages, phone calls, or mailed literature. This approach presents some challenges:

• To provide the necessary details, a large quantity of information may need to be distributed, with file attachments or links provided by the manager.
• Different team members may require different price list or product information, depending on their organization, division, or position.
• Distributing information to remote team members may produce a communication lag time.

Features of alerts include the following:

• The abstract of alert messages are displayed in an applet on the recipients' home page, listed in order of the priority specified by the sender. Recipients can click on the abstract to read the entire message.
• Literature items, products, systems, and subsystems can be associated with alerts.
• Access to price list and product information available to different team members may be controlled by organization, division, or position.