Desktop Assistant notifications

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Desktop Assistant notifications

    Desktop Assistant notifications allow your organization to instantly communicate important updates to end users across Windows and macOS devices, regardless of their current activity. This feature is designed to support critical communications such as Major Incident Management and Proactive Engagement by delivering timely information that raises user awareness without requiring direct action.

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    The system supports up to 400,000 notifications daily and can send notifications at a rate of up to 10,000 per minute, ensuring scalability for large user bases.

    Key Features

    • Accessing Notifications: Users receive notifications as system push messages or can view them in the Desktop Assistant notifications list. Notifications typically appear within two minutes of being generated.
    • Supported Applications:
      • Major Incident Management: Sends real-time updates about critical incidents to:
        • All users in affected locations, ensuring broad awareness during events like network outages.
        • Impacted application users in affected locations, targeting users based on recent application usage over configurable aggregation periods (daily, weekly, monthly) to ensure relevance.
      • Proactive Engagement: Notifies users about device health issues and required actions, such as restarts or remediation steps, enhancing device maintenance and user self-help.
    • Notification Delivery: Each notification is delivered once per logged-in device, avoiding redundancy.
    • Configuration: DEX administrators can configure notification behavior via API parameters and control notification time-to-live (TTL) with a maximum duration of seven days. Notifications exceeding TTL are discarded automatically. Administrators can also enable or disable notifications as needed.

    Key Outcomes

    • Ensures critical updates reach end users promptly across devices, improving incident awareness and response.
    • Targets notifications effectively to relevant users based on location and application usage, reducing noise and enhancing communication efficiency.
    • Supports proactive device management by alerting users to take necessary actions to maintain device health.
    • Provides administrators with flexible configuration options to tailor notification delivery and lifespan according to organizational needs.

    Desktop Assistant notifications enable your organization to communicate important updates to end users instantly, regardless of their device activity. This feature enables delivering critical information, supporting Major Incident Management and Proactive Engagement.

    Desktop Assistant notifications provide a reliable way to inform end users of critical updates with minimal effort. These notifications provide updates for awareness but aren’t directly actionable.

    Desktop Assistant supports an optimum number of 400,000 notifications per day, with a maximum rate of 10,000 notifications per minute.

    Accessing notifications

    Access Desktop Assistant notifications as system push notifications on Windows and macOS devices, or from the Desktop Assistant notifications list. For more information, see View Desktop Assistant notifications.

    Notifications should appear on end users’ devices within two minutes of generation.

    Supported applications

    Desktop Assistant supports notifications from Major Incident Management and Proactive Engagement.

    • Major Incident Management: Major Incident Management sends real-time updates about critical incidents to recipients in the following base system recipient lists.
      • All users in affected locations: Updates are sent to all configured recipients in affected locations. For example, a Major Incident Management notification informs all employees in an affected location of a sudden network outage, ensuring they’re aware of the issue.
      • Impacted application users in affected locations: Updates are sent only to impacted recipients in affected locations. To make sure only relevant users receive updates, the recipient list includes users with application usage above zero during a specified aggregation period and frequency. The aggregation period and frequency can be configured to one of the following options:
        • Daily: 1–7 days
        • Weekly: 1–4 weeks
        • Monthly: 1–12 months

        By default, the aggregation frequency is set to Daily, and the aggregation period is 7 days.

        For example, if the aggregation frequency is set to daily and the aggregation period is seven days, notifications are sent to users in affected locations who have application usage above 0 over the last seven days. Similarly, if the frequency is set to weekly and the aggregation period is four weeks, notifications are sent to users in affected locations who have application usage above 0 over the last four weeks.

        Each notification is delivered once to every logged-in device.

        You can customize the Impacted application users in affected location(s) recipient list or create a notification for an incident using this list. For more information, see Customize recipient list for Major Incident Management updates and Compose communications for incidents and major incidents.

    • Proactive Engagement: Proactive Engagement uses Desktop Assistant to notify users about the following device-related events:
      • Actions that users must take to maintain device health.
      • Issues detected on devices
      • Steps to remediate issues by following the self-help instructions or using the linked resources.

      For example, end users receive alerts to restart their devices if they haven’t done so in the recommended duration.

    Configuring notifications

    As a DEX administrator, you can configure and manage Desktop Assistant notifications.

    You can configure API parameters to enable Desktop Assistant to send notifications for any update or activity. For more information, see API parameters to configure Desktop Assistant notifications.

    You can define how long the system attempts to deliver notifications by configuring the time-to-live (TTL) value using the sn_dex_desktop.sn_desktop_assistant.notification_time_to_live property. The TTL can be set to a maximum of seven days. Older notifications exceeding the TTL are automatically discarded.

    You can also enable and disable Desktop Assistant notifications. For more information, see Enable or disable Desktop Assistant notifications.