Crisisworks uses email and SMS to help keep users up to date with workflows within Crisisworks while they are away from the system.

Overview

There are three types of notification:

Workflow notifications inform users when items have an important change in their workflow — for example, when an item is assigned or becomes due.
Item Updates inform users when changes are made to content in their assigned items
System messages are sent occasionally when users ask the system to perform a long running action, or resulting from a user action such as resetting a password.

Assignment notifications

When an item is first assigned to a user (or one of the user's on-duty positions), then an assignment email will be sent to that user.

The assignment email contains a high-level summary of the assignment and its key fields, and is intended to introduce the item to that user.

Update notifications

Whenever an item is updated, Crisisworks will schedule a notification for the assigned users. The speed in which the update is sent is largely determined by the item's priority — high priority items are sent as soon as possible, whereas lower priority items are grouped together to prevent email overload and sent once per hour (see Notification Schedule below).

Unassigned items do not generate notifications because no user is responsible for the item.

Due date notifications

Some registers within Crisisworks support a "Due" or "Next Action Date" field (e.g. Requests). For these items, Crisisworks sends a notification to the assigned user(s) at the time the item becomes due.

Depending on the register, sometimes these fields support both a date and time to be specified, while others only support a date.

If the due date supports a time component, it will check if the time has been set to midnight (which is the default). If the time has been set to midnight then the notification is sent at 9am on that date. If the time is set to something other than midnight, the due notification will be sent at that time. If the due date field only allows the entry of a date, then the notification is sent at 9 a.m. on that date.
If the record is resolved before the due date, the scheduled notification will be cancelled.
Only one notification will go out to the assignee when the due date occurs, it will not constantly send out notifications after the due date.
If a new due date is entered for the record before the due date is reached, the previously scheduled notification is cancelled and a new notification is scheduled for the new due date.
If an item has an existing due date and the item is saved without changing the due date, no overdue notification will be received.

Notification Schedule

In order to help users keep on top of important notices and reduce the overall volume of email, Crisisworks has logic to batch lower-priority updates to send less frequently, and to send higher importance updates more frequently. Also, Crisisworks has intelligence to not send notifications where you made the change yourself.

Emails will be generated only if content has changed, and they are

Priority	Send schedule
High or Urgent	As soon as possible, often as a single targeted email
Normal, Low or None	Approximately hourly, often containing a batch of updates

Notifications for bulk actions are sent according to the priority of the highest-priority item in the batch.

User Profile Settings

The following user profile settings control how Crisisworks sends email and SMS to users.

User Profile Option

Meaning

Receive communications by Email

Crisisworks will send occasional emails to keep you up to date with your assignments, along with immediate emails for important things such as high priority, overdue or when a communication message is sent to you.

Communication messages sent by email will only be received if this setting is turned on however some coordinators do have the option of overriding these preferences for urgent messages.

Receive communications by SMS

Crisisworks will send an SMS whenever items are assigned to you, become overdue or a communication message is sent to you. Items that support SMS notification are requests, information, recovery tasks and fire prevention tasks.

Communication messages sent by SMS will only be received if this setting is turned on however some coordinators do have the option of overriding these preferences for urgent messages.

Troubleshooting

If a recipient is not receiving notifications, then check the following:

The recipient is on duty for the relevant position(s)
The user's profile has email and/or SMS enabled
The user's profile has the correct email address and/or mobile number specified
Ensure that the changes made were from a different user than themselves.

If the timing of the notifications is too slow, then check the following

For due date notifications, that the due date field supports a time component — if not, it will be sent at 9 a.m.
For updates, the lower the priority, the slower the update may be.