Alerts

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Steltor offers two kinds of alerts: reminders and notifications. Reminders are messages sent a specified amount of time in advance of a meeting or event, to alert users to the upcoming events in their agendas. Notifications are messages sent when a meeting or event is created, modified or deleted, to let the attendees know of the change to their schedules.

This chapter contains general considerations relating to the server-side implamentation of reminders and notifications. See also the documentation for Steltor's Wireless Data Server, which provides reminders and notifications via Short Message Service and Instant Messaging.

• Reminders
• Notification

The Corporate-Wide Services daemon is responsible for delivering reminders and notifications through e-mail and Wireless Data Server. When it has an alert to deliver via e-mail, it sends the alert by SMTP to the mail server specified by the unison.ini [CWS] smtpmailhost parameter (if present), which delivers the message to its intended recipient. When it has an alert to deliver via SMS, IM or any other technology supported by Wireless Data Server, the CWS calls the program specified by the unison.ini [CWS] smsnotifyprogram parameter (if present), which delivers the message to Wireless Data Server.

Filtering e-mail alerts

The CWS includes MIME headers in all e-mail alerts to allow users to easily filter them, either to specific folders or to another application, such as a pager delivery system. All e-mail alerts include the following MIME header:

X-Steltor: 1

All e-mail reminders include the following MIME header:

X-Steltor-Reminder: 1

Reminders

Types

Some Steltor clients offer reminders that pop up or appear in the user's agenda in advance of a meeting; these types of reminders are implemented on the client side. The calendar server is only involved in the case of reminders sent by e-mail, Short Message Service (SMS) and Instant Messaging (IM).

Format

The format of the reminder delivered by the calendar server is determined by template files installed in /users/unison/etc/reminder, according to the delivery mechanism (e-mail or Wireless Data Server) and language of the user (if set).

Controlling reminder behaviour

CWS operation

You can control the frequency with which the Corporate-Wide Services daemon/service checks for reminders using the unison.ini [NOTIFY] checkreminderinterval parameter, and the amount of time that the CWS will spend checking any given node for reminders using the unison.ini [NOTIFY] limitremindercheck parameter.

Old reminders

Reminders will not be sent for any event if the reminder time is set to a time before the current time when that event is created. For example, if a new meeting is created with a start time five minutes from now, and a reminder set to be delivered ten minutes before the start time of that meeting, that reminder will not be sent by the calendar server.

In any other case, if the CWS finds that the scheduled delivery time of a reminder is before the current time, that reminder will still be delivered up to 30 minutes after the intended delivery time. You can customize this value using the unison.ini [NOTIFY] ignoreoldreminders parameter.

Notification

Types

E-mail notification is handled differently from wireless and Instant Messaging notifications sent through Wireless Data Server.

When a user creates, modifies or deletes an event using a Steltor calendar client, he or she may choose to notify the attendees by e-mail. This e-mail is passed from the client to the CWS for delivery.

Wireless and Instant Messaging notification, however, is not decided by the user creating, modifying or deleting the event. Instead, users can specify in their calendar clients (if their clients support the feature) whether they wish to be notified via Wireless Data Server when meetings or events to which they are invited are created, modified or deleted.

Wireless and Instant Messaging notification, however, are sent automatically for each event a user creates according to his or her wireless preferences. These notifications are sent to Wireless Data Server for delivery.

Format

E-mail notifications are passed to the SMTP server with the same text formatting used by the calendar client.

Notifications sent to Wireless Data Server are converted to XML and formatted according to configurable templates and stylesheets before delivery to the user's mobile device or Instant Messaging client. See the Wireless Data Server Administrator's Guide for details.

Controlling notification behaviour

Disabling e-mail notification

You can disable e-mail notification entirely in all clients by setting the unison.ini [LIMITS] mail parameter to FALSE.

Limiting the number of recipients

If necessary in order to avoid strain on your mail server, you can limit the number of recipients for any given notification message using the unison.ini [LIMITS] maxmaildistr parameter.

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