Notifications and Preferences

As mentioned earlier, part of the approval process involves notifications. Approvers and initiators of requests, as well as all delegated users, receive notifications of these events. How notifications work in EmpowerID is as follows:

1. Each time a user submits a request for a resource from the IT Shop – known as a “Business Request” – a Business Request Event is raised.

2. Business Request Events are submitted to the Business Request Notification Policy engine.

3. The Business Request Notification Policy engine determines if the event needs to be added to the Business Request Notification Inbox. To determine this, the engine first performs a granular scan of each person’s notification preferences, then falls back to the default system notifications if there are no personal notification preferences set.

4. Notifications are then sent to Business Request participants based on those notification settings.

Notification Policy Components

There are several components to Notification policies and how the Notification Policy engine delivers notifications. These include the following:

1. Business Request Events – There are four levels of Business Request Events that can raise notifications:

   • Created – Occurs when a Business Request is created. This can be used to, for example, create a policy that sends an email notification to managers of users creating a Business Request.

   • Open – This is used in Approval Flow Policies with more than one Approval Flow Step to notify progressive approvers that the item is ready for them to review once a previous step has been approved by the person delegated for that step. If the previous step is rejected, then this notification would not be sent out.

   • Approver Set – Raised when someone manually assigns an approver to a step.

   • Commented – Raised when a comment is added to a request.

   • Fulfillment Ready and Fulfillment Completed – These are only available at the item level. They are relative to a specific item. These items have been approved, and now they are ready to be fulfilled. This creates a notification at that level. Once fulfilled, notification events are raised. You added someone to a group in response to a request, for example.

   • Completed – Completed can be used at the step level and the Business Request Level to send notifications that a particular step is completed and when the Business Request itself is completed.

2. Business Request Participant Type – Individuals related to a specific part of a business request. These are fields in the BusinessRequestParticipantType table.

   • Initiator – Person requesting the resource

   • TargetPerson – Person receiving the resource assignments

   • InitiatorManager – Manager of the request initiator

   • TargetPersonManager – Manager of the person receiving the resource

   • Approver – Person who approves or rejects a step

   • Approver Manager – Manager of the person who approves or rejects a step

   • Potential Approver – Selected people who could approve or reject a step (delegated)

   • Commenter – Person who adds comments to a request

3. Levels

   • Business Request – Shopping cart submission

   • Business Request Item – Individual items submitted

   • Business Request Approval Step – The Business request is approved or rejected globally. The decision here is final.

   • Business Request Item Approval Step – Each item in the business request can be approved or rejected on a case-by-case basis.

4. Messages – Email messages delivered by the notification engine to Business Request participants in response to a business request event.