Notification Strategy › Notification Manager Policies › Ways to Implement Your Strategy › Expanding Upon Your Strategy

Expanding Upon Your Strategy

CA Automation Point expands upon the strategy described above by offering you extra flexibility through the following features:

• Clone a contact. You can reduce the amount of data entry that you must perform when populating your database by cloning a contact. For example, suppose you want to notify a person named John, and John has a similar schedule and methods of notification as another person Tom, who is already in the database. When defining John as a person to notify, you can clone Tom's definition, and just make minor revisions to this definition to make it specific to John.
• Mark a contact as unavailable. You can use this feature like an out-of-office notice, telling Notification Manager to skip this contact even if there are active notification entries in that contact's schedule. This way, you can avoid delays that result from trying to notify a contact that is not available. It is much easier than requiring users to delete all their schedule entries when they go on vacation, and then recreate them when they return.
• Use of method types. All the Notification Manager methods are categorized into specific types of methods. When sending a notification, you can request that Notification Manager use only one or some of the possible method types for notification. For example, suppose John Smith has two active schedules, one assigned to use the Email 1 method and the other assigned to use the Alphanumeric Pager 1 method. If you have an urgent problem that requires John Smith's immediate attention, you can use the Pager method type on the notification request to force Notification Manager to use only those methods assigned to this method type. Because Alphanumeric Page 1 is a Pager method type, John Smith is notified using the Alphanumeric Pager 1 method instead of the Email 1 method.