Alerts Configuration Overview

You use alerts to move information along. For example, a sales team can use alerts to track the progress of a potential customer, to note when it is time to add new contacts or schedule a calendar date to place a follow-up telephone call.

Use alerts to remind you when your opportunities advance from one stage to the next.

Alerts and Workflows

Alerts and Workflows are similar in the way move information along. However, you can configure workflows to a greater degree to meet your company's business rules. For example, you can configure workflows to notify you when an event occurs, and also to perform a specified action such as updating information in a field.

Alert Options

Use Alerts Configuration to specify:

• When alerts are sent
• How the alerts are sent (email message or dashboard message)
• Under what conditions the alerts are sent
• The contents of the email message (subject and message body) when alerts are sent via email messages

The options available vary and depend upon the alert type.

Polling Interval

To activate activity alerts, you must set the alert polling interval to a level other than zero. Deltek recommends a value of 60.

Alerts and Emails

Before you specify that you want to send alerts via email messages, ascertain that the GovWin Capture Management URL is set up correctly. All alert email messages contain information that you can use to track down alert problems. This information includes the database name, database server, and application server.

Types of Alerts

There are two types of alerts.

Alert type	Description
Alerts triggered by a reaction to information defined on your process server. (Most alerts are triggered by the process server.)	The process server: "Wakes up" based on a polling interval configuration setting. Evaluates specific job tables in the database. Reviews the alert configuration to determine whether action is needed. Creates the alert, if action is required.
Alerts triggered by a change in information in your database.	Database alerts: Do not depend on schedules defined on the process server. Are triggered dynamically, based on a change in data. Activate a special code when changed data is saved. GovWin Capture Management compares changed data with the alert configuration criteria to determine whether or not it requires action, and creates an alert when it does.

Alerts and Process Servers

For each alert, process server information displays, including: status (such as running, waiting, or complete), the time the run started and ended, the time of the next run, and the frequency of the run. For most alerts, run frequency is connected to their functionality.

Alert history is retained. After each run of an alert, the job is retained and the new job is re-inserted back into the queue. This allows you to view error messages or to confirm that the jobs run correctly. The alerts' queue clears on an hourly basis and retains only the most recent 20 jobs (for successful runs) and 40 jobs (for errors).