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About Alerts

Alerts provide a way 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 must 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 when they are approved. Traditionally, this distribution would be done with email messages, phone calls, or mailed literature. This approach presents the following challenges:

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

Features of alerts include the following:

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