Disable Notification Preferences in System Settings

[Tyler Michals]

Hello,

We recently upgraded our DEV environment to Jakarta and discovered the notification preferences in the system settings pop-up window. We would like to completely disable this feature for all users. Notifications are crucial to the success of our business, so they should never be turned off. Does anyone have suggestions on how to accomplish this?

I tried creating a UI Script to hide all the content in the frame. Below is my script

var nTab = parent.document.getElementById("tabpanel_notifications");

nTab.style.display = "none";

This script works the first time you go to system settings, but if you go a second time, all the content is there again?

Can anyone help me with my script or suggest an alternative solution?

Thank you,

Tyler

[kristenankeny]

If you update the email notifications to have "mandatory" checked, they won't be able to turn off the notifications.

[Tyler Michals]

Thank you for the suggestion Kristen. Just to confirm, there is a true/false field labeled "Mandatory" on the notifications table. When this field is checked, the notification will be sent out no matter what?

If so,

Is there a way to quickly locate our frequently used notifications and bulk update them all to mandatory?

Is there any fallout to bulk updating ALL notifications to mandatory?

Is this the only solution you know of?

[kristenankeny]

Yes, the "Mandatory" check box on the notifications table is the one you'll want to use. We have only used this on our crucial emails (like approvals) because we recognize that each person functions differently - some like the emails, other hate them. I think if the email is critical, I would make it mandatory. But if it's more "informational", then I would allow users to turn it off if needed.

With regard to identifying the commonly sent emails, I would use the syslog_email table to see what is typically sent. You'll probably need to export and parse the data to get to the sys_ids, then cross reference with your notifications table to identify which emails they refer to and make your decision as to which to update. You could write a fix script that updates the notifications table where the sys_id is in the list of email notifications you want to set to mandatory, then use a while loop to update each notification.

This is the only solution I know of, but that's not to say that it's the only solution in existence. One thing I've seen in ServiceNow is multiple ways to achieve certain things. i don't know if this is one of those scenarios.

[DrewW]

Also note that there is a notification field on the user table and when set to none the user will receive no notifications what so ever.   So you need to prevent users from updating this field also.   I added a BR to the user table that anytime the notification field changes I check to see if the user doing it is an admin and if not then I just set the value back.