You may find it necessary on occasion to hard-code a phone number, pager ID, or other information into a REXX program so that you can notify a particular person that a critical event has occurred. If you rely on this kind of hard-coded information, you can find yourself doing extra work in the long run. For example, suppose that a person leaves your company, and that person's telephone number is hard-coded in your program as the person to notify. You would have to change the program so that another person's telephone number could be used instead.
Notification Manager helps you avoid using hard-coded information in your programs altogether. It enables you to create a policy in which the telephone number of the person to be notified does not have to be hard-coded. It also enables you to expand upon that policy so that other people could be notified if the first person was unavailable. With Notification Manager, you can specify different ways of notifying different people in different locations and obtain responses from those people. The Notification Website lets you obtain the information characterizing the people you need to notify.
If you do not require ongoing, real-time queries to an external corporate data source in order to obtain information to notify someone, you can avoid the time and effort required to write the ADDRESS VOX programming described in the previous chapter on notifications. Instead, you can populate a database with the notification information, individual schedules, and escalation options collectively known as policies, and let Notification Manager do the rest.
Notification Manager offers the following advantages:
|
Copyright © 2014 CA Technologies.
All rights reserved.
|
|