Reviewing Notifications

Managers use notifications to communicate information to their direct reports and to others in the organization. If your application administrator provides you with the proper authority, then you can customize the behavior of notifications in your user preferences. For more information, see "Notifications Setup".

You access notifications by clicking the Notification button on the application toolbar (shown in Figure 3-2).

To review notification messages in the application 

1. Click Notification (the exclamation mark icon) on the menu toolbar.

   The notification pane opens where:

   • The messages that you have not read appear at the start of the list.

   • The messages that you have already read appear in the Previously Read section.

   • The message severity or level of importance attached to a message is illustrated by the color of the message, as described in Table 14-2.

   All notification messages are read-only. Figure 14-1 shows an example of a notification pane.

2. Click a message to open and review the details of the message.

   • Click any attachment that is part of a message to open and view the attachment.

   • Click any hyperlink that is part of a message to navigate to the associated view.

   • Click the message again to close it after you have read it.

     • The message moves to the Previously Read section in the notification pane.

     • The counter beside the Notification button on the menu toolbar decreases accordingly.

   • Tap Delete (the X icon) to delete a message after you read it.

     After you delete a message, the message disappears from the notification pane.

3. Click Mark as Read to clear all unread messages and mark them as read.

Figure 14-1 Example of Notification Pane

Notification Button and Pane

Note the following about the Notification button and pane, and accessing notifications:

• The counter beside the Notification button (the exclamation mark icon) on the menu toolbar indicates the number of messages that are waiting for you to read.

  Read messages are not included in the message number that appears beside the Notification button.

• If there is more than one message waiting to be read, then the Notification button appears in the color associated with the most important (highest priority) unread message.

  When there are zero messages, then the Notification button displays zero.

• If the Notification button is blinking, then you have at least one unread message with a severity of Urgent with Alert.

  The Notification button stops blinking after the message is read.

  The Notification button does not blink if there are messages waiting to be read with only a Normal, High, or Urgent severity.

• When you click Notification on the menu toolbar, the notification pane opens showing a summary of each message.

  Unread messages appear first and are sorted by message date.

  Read messages appear next in italic text, and they are also sorted by message date.

  When you expand a notification by selecting it, the details appear for that message.

Notification Levels of Importance

The level of importance or severity attached to a notification or to specific text in a notification message is indicated by the default color associated with the notification message. Table 14-2 describes the different levels of importance or severity that exist for notifications and the default color associated with each level in the preconfigured application.

The Notification button appears in different colors depending on the level of importance or severity attached to unread messages, and always in the color associated with the most important (highest priority) unread message. For example, if 3 unread messages exist, and if one message has a Normal level of importance, one message has a High level of importance, and one message has an Urgent level of importance, then the Notification button appears in the color associated with the Urgent message. If no unread messages exist, then the Notification button appears in the color associated with a Normal message.

Your application administrator can configure the color to associate with the different notification levels of importance by changing the style sheet for the application.

Table 14-2 Notification Levels of Importance

Notification Level of Importance or Severity	Default Message Color
Normal	Gray
High	Yellow
Urgent	Red
Urgent with Alert	Red

For each notification level of importance, it is recommended that you also configure the following user preferences on the Message Broadcasting form when setting up notifications so that users will be able to determine the importance of each notification message from its prefix:

• Prefix of Normal Priority Message

• Prefix of High Priority Message

• Prefix of Urgent Priority Message

For more information about configuring these user preferences for notifications, see "Notifications Setup".