Building a user-oriented notification system at CERN

Abstract

CERN, as many large organizations, heavily relies on a variety of communication means for different use-cases and teams. The large amount of notifications received every day leads to adverse consequences. For the users receiving them, it is challenging to control and keep track of where, how and when some information was received. At the same time for those sending and maintaining the tools that deliver notifications, it is difficult to choose which targets to adopt (email, messaging system and platforms, electronic devices, etc.). The CERN Notifications system aims at consolidating communication by providing a central place where notifications are created, maintained and distributed. CERN Notifications allows not only optimising the flow for the multiple people and teams which are responsible for sending, but also empowers the target users by respecting their preferences: how, where and when they receive their notifications. This paper describes the design and architecture of the CERN Notifications system and its components, how it was designed with a flexible and highly modular architecture which allows adding further device targets with little effort. Furthermore, it presents implementation details and the decisions behind those. And last but not least it describes the features that empower users to choose how to consume information sent to them.