24.1 About Notification Providers

Information about events occurring in Oracle Identity Manager is required to be sent to various users, such as requesters, beneficiaries, or administrators. This information about events is sent by using the notification service in the form of notification e-mail messages. The notification service allows you to perform all notification-related operations.

An event is an operation that occurs in Oracle Identity Manager, such as user creation, request initiation, or any custom event created by the user. The events are generated as part of business operations or via generation of errors. Event definition is the metadata that describes the event. To define metadata for events, it is important to identify all event types supported by a functional component. For example, as a part of the scheduler component, metadata can be defined for scheduled job execution failed and shutting down of the scheduler. Every time a job fails or the scheduler is shut down, the events are raised and notifications associated with that event are sent.

The data available in the event is used to create the content of the notification. The different parameters defined for an event help the system to select the appropriate notification template. The different parameters that are defined for an event help the system decide which event variables can be made available at template design time.

A notification template is used to send notifications. These templates contain variables that refer to available data to provide more context to the notifications. The channel through which a notification is sent is known as the notification provider. Examples of such channels are e-mail, Instant Messaging (IM), Short Message Service (SMS), and voice. To use these notification providers, Oracle Identity Manager uses Oracle User Messaging Service (UMS).

At the backend, the notification engine is responsible for generating the notification, and utilizing the notification provider to send the notification.