Desktop Assistant notifications

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Desktop Assistant notifications

    Desktop Assistant notifications allow organizations to instantly communicate critical updates to end users across devices, enhancing awareness during major incidents and proactive device engagement. These notifications are sent as system push notifications on Windows and macOS and can also be accessed via the Desktop Assistant notification panel.

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    Key Features

    • Real-time critical updates: Major Incident Management sends notifications about critical incidents to relevant users based on location and application usage, ensuring targeted communication.
    • Recipient lists: Notifications can be sent to all users in affected locations or selectively to users with recent application usage in those locations. Usage aggregation can be configured daily, weekly, or monthly to refine targeting.
    • Proactive Engagement: Alerts users about device-specific events such as upcoming maintenance, helping them prepare ahead of time.
    • API integration: Administrators can use APIs with customizable parameters to send notifications for any update or activity through Desktop Assistant.
    • Notification lifecycle management: The Time-to-Live (TTL) setting controls how long notifications remain active (up to 7 days), after which outdated notifications are discarded.
    • Notification control: Notifications can be enabled or disabled as needed to manage user experience.

    Key Outcomes

    • Ensures timely and relevant communication of critical information to users, minimizing disruption and enhancing incident response.
    • Supports targeted messaging by filtering recipients based on location and application usage, reducing unnecessary notifications.
    • Improves user preparedness for device maintenance and other events through proactive alerts.
    • Provides administrators with flexibility to customize and automate notifications using APIs.
    • Delivers notifications promptly, typically within two minutes of generation, enhancing the effectiveness of communication.

    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

    Note:
    The administrators can now use Desktop Assistant as a channel to send notifications for any update or activity. This can be done by configuring the API (Application Programming Interfaces) with required parameters. For more information, see API parameters to customize Desktop Assistant notifications

    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.

    Notifications are sent as system push notifications on Windows and macOS devices. You can also access notifications through the Desktop Assistant notification panel.

    To learn more about viewing notifications in your Desktop Assistant, see View notifications.

    Desktop Assistant supports notifications from the following applications in these ways:

    • Major Incident Management sends real-time updates about critical incidents to all configured recipients, with each notification delivered once per logged-in device. Major Incident Management provides updates to two recipient lists out of the box:
      • All users in affected location(s): Major Incident Management sends the updates all the configured recipients in the affected locations. For example, a Major Incident Management notification informs all employees in affected locations of a sudden network outage, ensuring they’re aware of the issue.
      • All users based on the application usage in the affected location(s): Major Incident Management sends the updates only to the configured recipients based the application usage in the affected locations. The recipient list consists of only users whose aggregated application usage is greater than zero during the selected aggregation period and aggregation frequency. The aggregation period and aggregation frequency can be any of the following:
        • Daily: 1-7 days
        • Weekly: 1-4 weeks
        • Monthly: 1-12 months

        For example, if the aggregation frequency is set to daily and the aggregation period is 7, a message is sent to users in the affected location(s) whose aggregation application usage is greater than 0 over the last 7 days. Similarly, if the aggregation frequency is set to weekly and the aggregation period is 4, the message is sent to users in the affected location(s) whose aggregated application usage is greater than 0 over the last 4 weeks.

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

        This ensures that only relevant users receive useful updates, avoiding unnecessary notifications.

        To customize this out of box recipient list, All users based on the application usage in the affected location(s), see Update the recipient list for Major Incident Management updates based on application usage .

        To create a notification for a particular incident using this recipient list, see Compose communications for incidents and major incidents.

    • Proactive Engagement alerts users about updates specific to affected devices. A notification from Proactive Engagement alerts users about events like upcoming maintenance on their devices to help them prepare in advance.
    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. Older notifications exceeding the TTL are discarded.
    Note:
    The Time-to-Live (TTL) value can be set to a maximum of seven days.

    You can also disable notifications by following the steps in Enable or disable notifications.

    Note:
    Notifications should appear on the end user’s devices within two minutes after generation.