Siebel Applications Administration Guide > Message Broadcasting >

About Message Broadcasting

Message broadcasting provides a way for administrators and other users to send important information directly to the screens of users. Typically, this information is time-critical, such as a due date, or it is updated frequently, such as the status of a call queue.

NOTE:  Message Broadcasting is available for employee applications, and not for customer or partner applications.

The messages can appear in one of the following ways:

• If you use Siebel Open UI, messages appear in notification panes that users access by clicking the Notification icon.
• If you do not use Siebel Open UI, scroll messages can appear in the message bar at bottom of the screen.
• If you do not use Siebel Open UI, messages can appear in an alert dialog box in the middle of the screen and in the message bar at the bottom of the screen.

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

You create message broadcasts in the Message Broadcasts view of the Administration - Communications screen. Also, message broadcasts can be created automatically from Siebel Business Process Designer or remotely from a third-party application through Siebel EAI.

About Messages Order

Message Broadcast messages are retrieved from the Message table through the Siebel Application Server and sent to the message bar or notification pane of the targeted Siebel Web Client sessions. Messages appear on the message bar in no set order. The administrator and the user cannot control the message order in the message bar.

Messages in the Notification Summary pane appear in a set order. Unread messages appear at the top of the pane and are sorted by message date with later messages listed before earlier messages. Read messages appear below the unread messages and are also sorted by message date with later messages listed before earlier messages.

About Disabling Messages

When the administrator sets a component parameter that allows users to enable or disable broadcast messages, users can disable the message bar or the Notification icon and notification panes. The administrator can change this component parameter to override this user setting for broadcast messages.

About Message Broadcast Caching Versus Directly Polling the Siebel Database

The Siebel application obtains the display messages by using the following methods:

• The default behavior is read the messages from the Siebel database each time the message bar or notification pane is refreshed. This method can adversely affect performance if the bar or panes are set to refresh frequently.
• Message broadcast caching stores messages in each Siebel Application Object Manager. The messages are then broadcast through the Service Request Broker (SRBroker).