Applications Administration Guide > Message Broadcasting >

About Message Broadcasting

Message broadcasting provides a platform for administrators and other users with access to the Message Broadcasts view to send important information directly to users' screens. Typically, this information is time-critical such as a due date, or it is updated frequently such as a call queue's status.

NOTE:  Message Broadcasting is available for employee applications. (It is not available for customer or partner applications.)

The messages can be displayed by one of the following two methods:

• Scroll messages in the message bar across the bottom of a user's screen, visible at all times.
• Display messages in a dialog box in the middle of the screen in addition to scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

Messages have severity levels (indicated by color) and activation and expiration dates.

Message Broadcasts can be created through the administration view, automatically from Siebel Business Process Designer, or remotely from a third-party application through Siebel eAI.

In What Order Are Messages Displayed?

Message Broadcast messages are retrieved from the Message table through the Siebel application server and sent to the message bars of the targeted Siebel Web Client sessions. There is no set order for the messages to appear on the message bar, that is, the order cannot be controlled by the administrator or the end user.

About Disabling Messages

Users can disable their scrolling message bar, but the administrator can override this setting for broadcast messages.

About Message Broadcast Caching Versus Directly Polling the Database

There are two methods for ways for the application to obtain the messages for display:

• The default behavior is to have the messages read from the database each time the message bar is refreshed. This method can adversely affect performance if the message bar is set to refresh frequently.
• Message Broadcast Caching stores messages in each application's object manager. The messages are then broadcast through the Service Request Broker (SRBroker).