Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Interact Intranet: Alerts

Interact Intranet uses a system of alerts to notify users of certain activities.
Some activities additionally trigger emails (covered in my previous post: Interact Intranet: System emails).

The purpose of this post is my own documentation on what I've learned about the alert system on version 5.1.5.

Manage Alerts

From time to time someone might trigger an alert that administrators would like to remove.
We've removed system emails several times and the process is very straight forward.

Within Site Admin: Control Panel: Manage Alerts you can find and delete alerts.

Be aware that alerts in this area are a combination of future and past alerts.  Meaning some have been sent and others are in the queue to send at a later date.  It would be helpful if there were an indicator for this!  I haven't been able to determine the sort order but they don't appear to display chronologically nor alphabetically.

Advanced Alert Management

Alerts (future and past) are stored in the ALERT table of the Interact database.
Key fields in the table include:

  • DateAdded - date the alert was created
  • DateFor - when the alert is due to be sent
  • Date Actioned - when the Alert has been read by a user (aka actioned)
  • ActionedBy - which user the alert has been actioned by

Alert SubType IDs

Alert subtype ID's are used to help organize alerts by activity in the database.
After over 10k alerts being sent by our system (1 month of production use) these are the IDs that have triggered alerts for us and their titles:
  • 1 New Blog Post
  • 2 Keyword Suggestion
  • 2 You have received a comment on one of your blog postings
  • 3 Is This Up To Date?
  • 7 Document Version Approved
  • 8 Comment Reported
  • 8 Post Notification
  • 8 Thread Notification
  • 8 Thread/Post Content Reported
  • 9 <Title of document pending approval>
  • 10 Document Review Reminder
  • 12 Document Expiry Warning
  • 13 Document Watch
  • 14 Document Comment Received
  • 17 An update has been scheduled
  • 18 Interest Suggestion
  • 19 Feed Notification
  • 20 <Username> has invite you to join <team name>
  • 22 Share Notification
  • 23 A comment has been made about your image.
  • 200 You have been tagged
A number of alerts have null as their SubTypeID.  Those include:
  • {TEAMNAME} Notification.
  • Accepted Interest Suggestion
  • <Username> has requested to join <team name>.
  • Approval Request Deleted
  • Comment Request Deleted
  • <team Name> Membership (upon being granted access to a team)
  • Rejected Interest Suggestion
  • Team Creation
  • Team Request

Note

AFAIK alerts (and emails) are triggered by actions of others and can't be self-triggered.
This needs more testing on my end to validate this behavior.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Interact Intranet: Customizing your login page

Modifying your Interact login page is easy to do, although probably not upgrade proof.  If you are going to make any customizations, be smart and make a backup of your customizations (in addition to the originals)!


The source files for the login page are stored at \Interact\WEB\Interact\Login.  From there you can modify the default.aspx and default.aspx.vb files per your design.  The CSS is quite complex so if you aren't strong at manipulating floats properties in DIVs then you might just want to start from scratch (or delete everything between the BODY tags).

With some graphic help from our creative department I was able to whip this up in about an hour.
Good luck!

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Interact Intranet release version 5.2 with enhanced analytics and more

This morning (US time) Interact Intranet hosted a webinar covering the release of version 5.2 of their intranet software.  The webinar was recorded and is available here.  Below are some comments and screenshots of the features.

Comments Interface

Anyone that has the ability edit a document can now delete comments.
Profile pictures display alongside comments.


Change Author

In bulk - reassign a document to someone else.



Influence Score

Displays profile score and influence score on user profile
Measures how each user causes others to take action on the Intranet








Analytics

Statistics











Warnings











Real Time Benchmarking

If you don't opt in you don't see the scores for other companies.
All benchmarked against entire Interact user population


Email Report

Daily emails.  Content and frequency cannot be customized.


Document Quality

Score out of 10
Based on things like: keywords, title, images, review date, links, summary, content, etc
Updates on creation and edit of a document.












3rd Party Analytics Integration

Using this interface you can apply a 3rd party analytics tool.



How do I get 5.2

You need to request it from support area via the Interact Extranet area.  Raise a new ticket
5.2 is available immediately.