Setting up and Using ImageNow Workflow Alarms

Hello, and welcome to another video by RPI Consultants. My name is Alex Lindsey, and today we’re gonna demonstrate how to set up workflow cue alarms within perceptive content workflow. Alarms are a great way to keep track of your documents and to notify you when anything has particularly gone wrong with a script or, things have been routed or, have been sitting in ques for a long time.

So today we’re gonna set up one alarm in an Accounts Payable workflow as an example. So from the Management Console you saw that we navigated to the workflow, opened a particular workflow. Now, let’s pick a cue that we’re gonna set up an alarm. For this, we’re gonna use AP Approval Error. So if anything goes wrong in the approval process, whether it’s tried to assign tasks, or it can’t read the data, or the data just doesn’t make sense versus a hierarchy that you guys may have, this is where the documents are going to go, should they error.

So let’s set up an alarm for this cue. We’re gonna double click it. Let’s also make sure that we have users in the cue … Assigned to the cue. That’ll make sense down the line here. And then from here we’re gonna start clicking quite a bit. The first thing we’re gonna do is add an alarm, so click add. It’s gonna be a new alarm, so let’s select new. We’re gonna name it, Approval Error. You’ll do this a number of times so, get used to it.

The timeout period here is set to five minutes. I wouldn’t modify this or change this in any way, it’s just basically an email timeout piece here. Really no need to change it, and we really never do. Make sure that it’s active, and then we select the alarm rule. Since we don’t have one yet, we’re gonna create one, so you select Edit Rules. We’re also gonna create a new one. This will start to look a lot like routing rules set up within Perceptive Content workflow as well.

So we’re gonna create our rule here. Name it Approval Error. And really important here is to make sure that we select this drop down the rule type of Routing Rule to Alarm Rule. And from here again, this is very similar to setting up Routing Rules. We’re gonna click new, and it will automatically default to a statement here, Cue item count is greater than or equal to one. You can add other values as well if you wanna be more specific here in your alarm, like draws and things like that. But for our purposes, if somethings in this cue, something has to be fixed.

We’re gonna name our statement again. To keep it consistent we’ll call it Approval Error. And then we’re gonna add in our alarm type. So, we basically have four different types here. Flash icon, which will basically flash the user icon to basically say, hey there’s something in this cue that has to be fixed. Message center. If you’re familiar with that, it’s the scroll bar, kind of like a ticker that you see in New York Times Square. From the toolbar itself. That’s sometimes used.

Play sounds if something goes into the cue, and the alarm is triggered, it’ll play a sound for you. And, more often than not, what most people use is to send an email. So we’re gonna click that. Again, we’re gonna name this alarm, Approval Error. For more generic things, you could just call it General Error if you have a lot of different exception cues and saying the same thing. The from can be anyone really. Something that makes sense and maybe catches the eye to the person receiving the email.

So image, I now add admin for instance, at Acme Corp. The two … So you can select specific users. The users have to be users of an image now and they have to have a email address assigned to their profile. For our purposes, we’re basically just gonna say email all users in the cue. So those two users we saw assigned to the cue, that’s who we’re gonna send it to. You also have an option for carbon copy and blind carbon copy.

And then, here’s where we’re gonna configure what the actual message looks like, and what the end-users going to be seeing. If your cue name is descriptive enough … So, AP Approval Error, that’s fairly descriptive and should call attention to what needs to be done. You can just select the cue name here. These are dynamic values that can be populated and put within the email body to give greater detail on what the alarm says.

So we’ll just click cue name here, and it’ll automatically put it. You could front-end that with the word urgent as well, if you really need attention to it, and in the body. So this is what the person will see when they open the email up. There are currently … And this is where we can get more dynamic here. Total count of items. So it’ll tell you how many documents are actually in that cue. In the … Cue name again. Cue. Please investigate and resolve.

The other nice thing about this, with these functions here is you can actually add an alarm link here that’ll take them directly to the cue that they’re receiving this message about. We’ll then sent the interval to one day, this is how frequently the email will be sent out. So if you don’t wanna go in every hour, which I don’t recommend ’cause that may be extremely annoying. But, in some of these cases, it could make sense.

We’ll hit okay. We’ll hit okay. We’ll make sure this is set to active. We’ll hit okay again. Okay. Here’s where we’re gonna set the alarm rule, Approval Error. Make sure it’s still active here. Hit okay. Hit add, and we now have an alarm set up on your cue. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to myself, alindsey@RPIC.com. And I hope you enjoyed the video. Thank you.