Notifications inform users, administrators and authors about the occurrence of an event such as a change in content, a feedback item added to a topic or a reply added to a feedback item. This will enable or force people to perform the correct actions and make decisions.
When users read HelpServer content in the web browser they are able to ‘subscribe’ to the notification system to receive a message when some event regarding the content has occurred.
Users, authors and administrators have an inbox to hold messages from the notification system. These messages suggest what the user should do when an event has occurred, for example, read the content, re-export it or read the feedback.
The notification system also sends a normal e-mail to instruct the users to check their HelpServer inbox.
Notification can be triggered in the following situations:
| • | When content is published. |
| • | When content is changed. |
| • | When the author of the content is changed. |
| • | When feedback is added to content. |
| • | When a reply is added to a feedback item. |
The notification source
HelpServer’s notification system is based on a notification source. A notification source defines the context or the scope in which the events on a content object occur. Any folder or topic can have its own notification source. A better approach however would be to indicate the notification source on a higher level in your content hierarchy to represents a collection of related content objects. This can be a book with its chapters, subchapters and topics, or an entire documentation project or a help project, a customer folder and its dependencies, a product folder and its dependencies, etc.
