Setting the default notification options

Depending on your BSCW installation, several event services are available that may be con­figured individually.

o  Event icons indicate recent events on the user interface level.

o  The periodic e-mail report contains events or microblog messages that occurred in your work­spaces the previous day or the previous week.

o  Direct e-mail notifies you immediately about relevant events or specific types of microblog messages.

o  The BSCW RSS event feeds provide recent events as RSS formatted news. Using these RSS feeds, modern browsers (or other RSS aggregators) may poll BSCW for online infor­mation on what is going on in your workspaces.

The availability of RSS event feeds and the e-mail event services depend on the configuration of your BSCW server.

There is a specific way of displaying recent microblog messages in BSCW:

o  The display of new microblog messages at the top-level interface. Clicking on the icon  left of the logout icon lists all new microblog messages since you last visited the display.

To specify on what event types (read, create, move or change events) or microblog message types you want to be notified of by which event services,

•      choose  Options    Preferences  from the top menu bar.

•      The ‘Edit Preferences’ action form provides the section ‘Notifications’ with the sub­sections ‘Active Event Services’, ‘Event Types Subscribed’ and ‘Microblog Mes­sages’ where you may speci­fy your default notification options. The subsection ‘Mi­cro­blog Mes­sages’ will appear only if microblogging has been activated for your BSCW server.

•      In the ‘Active Event Services’ subsection you may check those event services that you want to use. For the periodic e-mail report you can choose between daily and weekly reports and can also specify whether you want to be notified about events and micro­blog messages that you yourself have generated or posted. Such events and messages are not trans­mitted by the other event services listed.

•      In the ‘Event Types Subscribed’ subsection you may specify for each active event ser­vice the event types that this service is you to notify you of.

•      In the ‘Microblog Messages’ subsection you may specify the message types that the active event services (with the exception of the RSS event feeds) are to notify you of. Note that the display of new messages is always active; the other services have to be activated under ‘Active Event Services’.

The specific message types offered are:

o  Personal messages: Messages that were directed to yourself in your personal mi­cro­blog and that are not accessible to other users.

o  Replies to own messages: Messages that are a reply to one of your own messages.

o  Messages mentioning own user name: Messages that explicitly mention your user name with a preceding @.

o  Other messages: all messages except the personal messages.

Your own messages are listed in the periodic e-mail report if you have checked this option explicitly in the ‘Active Event Services’ subsection. Apart from that, your own messages are only listed when they received a new reply or are a reply to a message which in turn received a new reply. Note that the notification services always list com­plete threads, i.e. a message along with all its replies.

The default notification options are valid for all objects in your workspaces unless you change the notification options on the object level.

You may change the default options at any time, e.g. to deactivate an entire event service or to disable read events from being transmitted via the periodic e-mail report. While changes in the de­fault options with respect to event types do not affect individually set notification options, de­acti­va­tion of an event service is valid also for individual notification options. Thus the default notification op­tions provide a central location to enable or disable an entire event service. If you do not want to overrule individual settings, just disable all event types for a given service to disable the service for the general case, but still allow its use for certain objects with individual notification options that use this event service.

Please note that some services may be disabled for your BSCW server. Consequently, these services are not offered for default configuration.