Notifications Portlet

Owned by Laura McCord
Last updated: Jan 15, 2013

Brainstorming Notes

Kickoff with…. Talking with BYU, get announcements portlet talking to notifications and/or emergency alerts..have them all talk to each other. Use a mechanism similar to what the search feature is using. 3-5 in the notifications app that talk to the same backend api….but display based on scope/severity/etc

Imagine: Emergency alerts get moved to Notifications

- The portlet gets run and renders, lets imagine it kicks off an event. 

- An event type is a custom events jsr 286 event, standards compliant way to get these portlets talking. Does not require a new UI 

How to go about...

  1. Update the portlet(s) to JSR 286
  2. Add the ability to broadcast and receive events
  3. Implement Notification DAO
  4. Setup enough listener scaffolding for portlets to receive

Serves as a proof of concept to have any portlet feed to the notification system. For example, enhance courses portlet where they can broadcast course announcements to feed into the notifications portlet. 

You could theoretically get rid of announcements portlet and consolidate to one, the notifications portlet. 

Outcome: Have portlets interact with each other.

But a lot of people do not want to author announcements they want to use a content manage system and have those feed into the portal. 

Announcements Background:

  • Announcements works by using topics and includes the Emergency topic. Individuals get topics based on their relationship of that topic. 
  • There are 4 levels of groups in Announcements:  1) moderators 2.) audience 3) contributors (write new announcements) 4)admins 
  • 3 subscription levels: 1. push optional 2. push required 3. pull

Question: Can you push multiple instances of announcements? yes, that is an enhancement (Rutgers). Calendar has the same functionality.

Back to Notifications Portlet:

 Recognizing the Differences between the portlets:

  •  Notifications not authored in the portal vs Announcements are authored in the announcements portlet.
  •  Notifications, conceptually we are looking for small things  ("Registration deadline is…..").
  •  Announcements is a page sized announcement that goes to a group that is interested in a specific topic (i.e., "A ballet event is being held at 123 building at 4pm, etc….")

Envisioning:

 - Stateful: Hide, Mark Done, Audit

 - Strongly Typed: Title, url, due date, body, logo/image, urgency/severity half a dozen elements that are optional except for the title.

 - Weakly Typed: Map<String,S[]>

 - UI: to discover what is sent,  be forgiving,  and draw what it gets in a reasonable way.

 - Be able to ask any notice to allow: 1) the user to hide 2) the user to check its complete 

 - Light display UI to enhance very critical information option (i.e., "Your financial aid document is overdue, please complete asap!")

 

Question: Where are notifications stored? It will talk to sources that you point to, such as Blackboard (U of Manchester).

How far are we? Not that far at all, much of it exists, it's in the quickstart data, we would have to review the strongly type maybe make some adjustments to make required items optional, etc.... Need to bump portlets to 286 and add scaffolding. Would like to get both portlets in the quickstart.

Would like the platform API to be optional for flexibility in other platforms. 

In a nutshell, the portal pulls in notifications from other systems.

Mobile Functionality

 - Push notifications: via Native Mobile Client 

 - People care about mobile. We should get sophisticated here and get it speaking the right way to send those notices to the native mobile app. 

Question: Can there be an Expiration/Cancellation? We don't want the notice to be sent/visible for 6 months. The service should be able to send/not send the notice during a specific time frame or maybe we need to have something within the portlet to expire these notices? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Â