Email Notifications

Meridian Enterprise provides numerous features for integrating email into engineering content management:

• Copies of documents or links can be sent from the desktop client applications as described in Email Documents.

• Custom email functionality can be programmed with VBScript as described in NewMailMessage Object.

• Email notifications regarding vault activity can be sent automatically to different groups of recipients.

This topic and the following topics describe the last feature in the preceding list.

Notifications can be either implicit or explicit. Implicit notifications are sent to users who participate in workflows. The users do not need to do anything additional in order to receive notifications. Their participation alone implies that they are also notification recipients. Explicit notifications are sent to users who explicitly subscribe to specific documents regardless of whether they participate in workflows or not.

Notifications are only sent to the primary email address as described in Create and edit user accounts.

Email notifications are further divided into the following types:

• Project and document event notifications (implicit). These are configured by a System Administrator and require no user actions to receive them.

  Notifications can be sent to one or more groups of recipients, which are options of a notification definition:

  • To-Do Persons: Includes the persons listed in the To-Do Person property of documents in an active workflow. If the event named by the definition does not affect this property, selecting this recipient group is meaningless.

  • Managers: Includes the persons listed in the Managers property of documents in an active workflow. If the event named by the definition does not affect this property, selecting this recipient group is meaningless.

Notifications that are generated as part of a batch operation (for example, a workflow transition) are grouped together as a single email message.

• Document subscriptions (explicit). These require users to select and subscribe to the specific events for which they want to be notified. These must also be enabled by a System Administrator by selecting an option of a notification definition:

  • Subscribers: Includes the persons who have manually subscribed to documents. Subscribers can receive notifications for the following types of events:

    • Documents deleted or redlined

    • Project copies (Managed Change or Advanced Project Workflow Module) created, discarded, released from projects

    • Document type workflow and workflow definition actions

• Reminders (implicit). These are notifications that pertain to a specific set of documents and are configured by a System Administrator. These can be sent to any recipient group.

All of these types of email notifications are enabled when the connection to a subscriptions database is configured. Each type cannot be enabled separately but each type is configured separately.

Configuring each of these types of notifications is described in the following topics.