Notification Methods

If you want to notify people about a business event, you should understand the notification methods that an agent can use. The notification method you choose should contain all information relevant to the event, and each person who must know about the event should be notified.

An IBM® Cognos® Event Studio agent can notify people about business events by

  • delivering an email to your audience
  • publishing a news item to a folder frequently viewed by your audience

The notification feature can contain dynamic information. This means that source items from a package can be inserted into the message. The values for these items are not retrieved until the agent is run because a notification message about a critical data item always contains the current values.

Both e-mail and news item notifications can contain dynamic information. In an email task, the email can contain dynamic content in the list of recipients, the subject, and the message body. For more information, see Add an Email Task.

The parts of a news item notification that can contain dynamic content are the headline, the screen tip, and the text. For more information, see Add a News Item Task.

Although email and news item notifications can both show content dynamically, only email notifications can change their target dynamically. By inserting email address items in the recipient fields, you can specify that the recipient list change according to the data in the event list.

Email Notifications

You can notify people by e-mail using either a report task or an email task. To help you decide which method to use, you should understand how they differ.

You can use either a report task or an email task

  • to send a single email text message
  • to attach a single report in the specified output formats
    Note: If you attach only one HTML report and leave the body field empty, the report appears in the message body.
  • to add links to a single report for the specified output formats

For an e-mail task but not a report task, you can also

  • add dynamic content to the message, which may result in multiple emails

    This means that you can insert source items from a package into the message. If you insert an e-mail address item in the recipient fields, you can tailor the recipient list so that it is specific to the data in the message.

  • send multiple reports in a single email as attachments, links, or both

    For example, you can attach a report about stock usage and a report on unfulfilled customer orders when a particular stock item falls below a reorder level.

  • attach the event list

Emailing reports from an IBM Cognos Event Studio agent is useful if you want the report to be tailored to a specific event.

News Item Notifications

A news item task publishes a headline to a folder whose contents can be viewed in an IBM Cognos Navigator portlet and in any folder view. When someone clicks on a headline, they can open IBM Cognos Analytics content or view a web page.