AppArmor has an additional interface that can be used to send notifications, called the “Advanced Notification” Sending” interface. This interface is meant to allow advanced users of the system to send a notification in a single-page interface, instead of the standard “Wizard” approach.
If you’d like to consider using this interface, please reach out to AppArmor Support, and they can assist you with the migration from the Wizard
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Sending a Notification
The numbered screenshot below provides the suggested order in which the elements of the Advanced Notification interface are completed.
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Event and Template
Sending Profiles
Message Content
Deactivation
Preview
Send Button
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The options in this section set the content for the mass notification.
New or Existing Event
Choose whether you want to send an Update Notification to an existing Event, or if you want to create a new Event. Updating an existing event will populate the entire Advanced Sending interface with the settings that were chosen when the previous Notification in the event was sent, and will link the notification you’re sending to the existing event.
This dropdown field automatically defaults to updating the most recently updated active event.
Event Type
Choose Actual, Exercise, or Test from the Dropdown List. This will affect the Sending Profiles you have access to when Sending.
Understanding Event Types
Generally our clients configure Sending Profiles to make it intuitive for senders, and in compliance with the CAP protocol. Here’s the general configuration we recommend, and the explanation from the CAP Standard documentation:
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Type
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Standard Use Case
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CAP Standard Definition
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Actual
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Used in scenarios where you want to target a large number of recipients, which generally fall into 2 categories:
An occurring safety related incident about which you want to notify your community.
A full-scale system test, in which you want to ensure that your system is functioning as expected at scale.
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“Actionable by all targeted recipients”
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Exercise
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Used for training purposes. The ideal configuration is that you’d set up Exercise Sending Profiles as a direct mirror of your Actual Profiles, but without having them point to a large number of subscribers.
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“Actionable only by designated exercise participants”
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Test
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Used for testing the functionality of the system.
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“Technical testing only, all recipients disregard”
Category
You can optionally filter the “Template” field by Category. The available categories are based on the CAP Standard, and are as follows:
“Geo” - Geophysical (inc. landslide)
“Met” - Meteorological (inc. flood)
“Safety” - General emergency and public safety
“Security” - Law enforcement, military, homeland and local/private security
“Rescue” - Rescue and recovery
“Fire” - Fire suppression and rescue
“Health” - Medical and public health
“Env” - Pollution and other environmental
“Transport” - Public and private transportation
“Infra” - Utility, telecommunication, other non-transport infrastructure
“CBRNE” – Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear or High-Yield Explosive threat or attack
“Other” - Other events
Once you've selected a category, the options for available Templates will appear.
Template
Choose from the Templates available in the Dashboard. If you’ve selected an option from the “Category” field, only Templates in those categories will display.
Variable Fields
After you select a Template, the system will display the variable fields that must be completed in order to complete the notification content before sending. There are 3 types of variable fields you may encounter:
Free Text Field
You must type in a value to fill this variable type.
Standard Dropdown
Select an appropriate value from the dropdown list. Administrators will have attempted to include all possible values in the list, but if you need to add a value that’s not available in the dropdown, you can click the “+” button instead:
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If you click the “+” button, a dialog will appear allowing you to add a new option to the dropdown list, which will be available in future sends.
Location Dropdown
AppArmor has a special kind of Dropdown list called a “location” field. Administrators will have set up location options that you can select from the dropdown list. Unlike a Standard Dropdown, a Location Dropdown allows you to select multiple options, which reflects the reality that safety situations often affect multiple locations at once. When sending a Notification, you can search for and select multiple locations from the dropdown list.
Parent/Child Relationships
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Your Administrator may have created one or more sets of Parent/Child relationships in a Location Dropdown. Parent/Child relationships are represented by the existence of one or more dashes in front of a location name. Each additional dash signifies an additional layer of depth.
The system will assess the input, and will attempt to "roll back to the parent" if the message is too long to be fully reflected in any character-limited Alerting Mechanisms reflected in the selected Sending Profiles.
In order to take advantage of this feature, you should only select the most granular location values (ie, lowest level children) that you'd like to target. Avoid selecting children in addition to selecting their parent, as this could cause the system to roll back multiple times, displaying redundant values.
2. Sending Profiles
Select the Sending Profiles to which you want to send an alert. Every institution has different criteria for when to use each Sending Profile, and this should be elaborated on by administrators as part of training.
3. Message Content
If there is information that needs to be sent in the notification that is not part of the Template or variables, you can manually edit the content of the information by changing the fields manually.
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Note: modifying the message content manually should not usually be required, if the Templates have been well built. If you notice that this needs to be done frequently, consider modifying Templates to minimize how frequently this needs to be done. |
Special Field - Headline
This field is the “Short Version” of the message. The Headline field is unique, in that there are a number of elements that respond to the selections you’ve made elsewhere on the page. For example:
The Headline field displays a character counter. The character limit for the Headline field is decided based on the Sending Profiles you’ve selected - it is set to the character limit for the Alerting Mechanism with the shortest character limit that is present in a Sending Profile that you’ve selected. For this reason, do not be concerned if the character limit is different for different notifications that you send.
If your system is configured with Location Variables that have parent/child relationships, the headline will “roll back to the Parent” as required in order to keep the content of the field in accordance with the character limit.
If your system is multilingual, the character counter will be dynamically shared between the languages. For example, if one language has longer values for the selected options, characters will be taken from the language with the shorter variable values and allotted to the language with longer variable values.
4. Deactivation Settings
You can optionally set your notification to Auto-deactivate after a specified period of time, or else set to manual deactivation.
5. Preview
You can use the Preview modal to see what content will display on the different Alerting Mechanisms after you send the notification.
6. Send
Click the Send button to send your notification!
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Prerequisites
In order to use the Advanced Notification interface, your AppArmor system must be configured by our team for “Event-Based Sending”, and also have the Advanced Sending interface enabled. These changes need to be made by the AppArmor support team because the Advanced Sending interface is more complicated and it is important that your team is trained to use it properly.
The Advanced Notification interface also requires a switch from the normal “Message-Based Sending” mode that AppArmor uses as a default, to the more complicated “Event-Based Sending”. These two sending modes are quite different:
Message-Based Sending: Each notification is standalone, and can be deactivated individually.
Event-Based Sending: Each notification is tied to an active “event”. Each event can have multiple notifications. When deactivation occurs, the system deactivates the entire event including all associated messages.
The Standard Notification and Advanced Notification Interfaces can both be enabled, offering two sending options to your team. Or your system can be configured to exclusively use the Standard Notification Interface, or exclusively use the Advanced Notification interface.
Contact the AppArmor support team for assistance in configuring your system to use the Advanced Notification inteface.
Sending a Notification
The Advanced Notification interface is designed in a two-column format. The interface is designed to be followed by columns first, top to bottom. This ensures that the sequence of steps are completed in the proper order as some information from earlier steps is required for later steps.
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When accessing the Advanced Notification interface, the sytem can be in one of two states:
There are no active events, so the “New or Existing Event” dropdown list says “[New Event]”
There are one or more active events, so the “New or Existing Event” dropdown list will be pre-populated with the event most recently sent a notification.
It is important to train your users to identify which event they are sending a notification for.
New Event
When a new event is selected, the initial message will become the title of the event. You will notice that if no events are active, the “[NEW EVENT]” option is selected by default.
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When sending a notification for a new event, you will also have the option to choose the Event Type (Actual, Test, or Exercise). The selection of the event type controls the list of Sending Profiles available for this notification.
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Existing Event
If one or more existing events are active, the system will try to configure itself to help the user quickly send a notification and select the most recent active event from the list. In this case, an event will already be selected.
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If an existing event is active, the user can create a notification for a new event by selecting “[NEW EVENT]” from the list. Please note, that if you choose an existing event, the “Event Type” field will be inaccessible because it was already configured by the initial message for the event. It is not possible to change the event type for an active event.
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Choosing the Template
After the Event is selected, the user needs to select the template of the message to send. There is a “Category” dropdown list that allows the user to filter the list of templates by Common Alerting Protocol (CAP 1.2) category. This helps locate a template quickly.
The user can also go directly to the “Template” dropdown list and choose the template.
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Once a template has been selected, the user will be prompted to enter any variable values for the selected template. The variable values will appear below the template selection, all variable values are required fields.
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This completes the selection of the Event, Template, and variable values. The user can now move on to verify the message content.
Please note that the “Event and Template” panel becomes disabled when the user modifies any of the Message Content. This is because changes to the variables or template would overwrite any manual changes to the Message Contents. The user will see the panel grayed out, with a red “Edit” button:
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If the user presses the “Edit” button, a popup confirmation dialog will display an appropriate warning to users in this scenario.
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Generally speaking, once you have begun manually modifying the message content, it’s best not to backtrack.
Message Content
The Message Content panel provides the user an opportunity to modify the message as necessary. This is useful if small changes are required to the message that were not appropriate from the template.
The fields displayed are from the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP 1.2) specifications.
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Please note that in multilingual systems, the interface will display fields for each language.
Sending Profiles
Now that the message has been composed, we need to choose the recipients of the message. The Sending Profiles panel displays a list of the sending profiles available based on your event type. Also, if you are updating an existing event, then the sending profiles previously used will be pre-selected.
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Filtering by User Fields
After your sending profiles have been selected, you can also choose to target a specific subset of users by using the “Filter” button. This will display the user list along with the filtering interface.
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Place a checkmark next to the users you would like to target, then press “Save Users Selection”.
Filtering by Map
If your selected Sending Profiles contain geographic data about the recipients, then you’ll have the option to target recipients by drawing on a map. This is useful when targeting messages to recipients in a specific geographic location.
When you click the “Map” button, you’ll see a map centered on the users within the sending profile. If the number of users is large, you’ll see a “heat map” identifying where the density of users is the highest.
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You can use the “Draw Circle” or “Draw Polygon” to identify the recipients for the notification.
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When your circle or polygon is complete, the map will center itself on the selection, and update the “Map Users” count listed in the top left corner. Press “Save Users Selection” to save the users, and return to the Advanced Sending Interface.
Recipient Summary
Once you have completed selecting your Sending Profiles, and filtering by using the user fields or map, then a summary of the recipients who will receive your message is displayed.
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If you chose to filter the users, you’ll notice a label that says “Filtered: XX Users” in the top right. You can also hover your mouse over each of the mechanisms to view details of the recipients by mechanism.
Scheduling
Optionally, you can choose to schedule when your message is sent, and when it is deactivated. This is done through the scheduling panel. Your system may be configured with an “Auto-Deactivate” time which is set by default. (Contact AppArmor Support to have an Auto-Deactivate time configured for your system.)
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To change the scheduling, click the “Edit Schedule” button. You will see an interface that allows you to choose the sending and deactivation times. Options for preset times (e.g.: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, etc) are available for quick access. You can also choose “Custom Date and Time” to supply a precise time.
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Please verify the selected time zone when setting a specific date and time.
Notification Preview
Before sending, you can preview how your notification will look on the various endpoint mechanisms. Click the Notification Preview button for a popup preview interface.
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On the left side of the popup preview, you will notice a listing of the endpoint mechanisms. Hover the items to display a preview of each in the preview area.
When you’ve finished previewing the message, click the “Close Preview” button.
The Send Button
The label on the send button is purposely designed to provide a final confirmation. The button label consists of the word “Send” followed by the event type (e.g. Actual, Test, Exercise) and either “Alert” (if this is the first message in a new event) or “Update” (if this is a subsequent message in an existing event). Also, the color of the send button will vary by event type. Pay close attention to the send button, as it tries to provide additional reassurance information about your notification.
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When you press the send button, you will see an on-screen popup confirmation as a last final check. This popup will also confirm which event your are sending to, and the event type.
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If all details are correct, press “OK” to send the notification.
Success Screen
After your notification has been sent, you will see a “Notification Sent Successfully” screen, which include a button to access the tracking page where you can monitor progress and view tracking events.
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Your message is now sent.