Business Rule: Only notify certain queue members
This week I was posed an interesting scenario from a customer. They have certain users who need access to every queue. But, they don’t want those users to be notified when a case is dispatched to that queue.
For example, lets say that the Maintenance queue has 4 members: Fred, Annie, Gary, and Steve.
Fred and Annie are regular users.
But Gary and Steve are part of the Network Operations Center (NOC). The NOC has access to every queue, as they need to be able to peek inside each queue to see what’s there, read the case titles, etc.
But, since the NOC belongs to every queue, they get a lot of business rule notifications – one for every case that gets dispatched to a queue. But they don’t need to get all of those notifications.
So how do we keep those NOC users as members of the queue, but exclude them from all of those notifications?
There are a couple of ways to solve this problem.
Option #1: Custom Recipient Alias
One way to solve this is to create a new custom recipient alias property. Recall that a recipient alias is used at rule execution time to determine who should get notified.
Normally we would notify the baseline Queue Members recipient alias.
Instead, we can create a new Non-NOC Queue Members alias. We’ll use an inline where clause to exclude the NOC workgroup members.
So our path looks like: case_currq2queue:queue2user:user2employee(work_group != ‘NOC’):employee2user:login_name
Notice the inline where clause that excludes the NOC workgroup members: work_group != ‘NOC’
Note: If you want a refresher on business rule properties, including inline where clauses, check out the Advanced Business Rules (Part 1) training at: http://rulemanager.wikispaces.com/Training+and+Presentations
Here’s what the full rule property looks like in Dovetail Admin:
Then when we create the rule, we can pick that recipient alias as who should be notified:
Pretty easy.
Option #2: Queue Supervisors
The other way to implement this is to use Queue Supervisors.
When setting up the queue membership, rather than defining the NOC users as members of the queue, we’ll make then queue supervisors.
Queue supervisors still have access to the queue.
Here’s the queue membership form in the Clarify Client:
Notice in the Business Rule Action editor, we have Current Queue Members and Current Queue Supvsr:
So we can choose to notify the Current Queue Members, but NOT notify the Current Queue Supervisors.
Pretty easy as well.
Which option should I use?
Well, it depends. Depends on which one more closely maps to your needs. Depends on whether you’re already using Queue Supervisors or not. Depends on whether you to distinguish employees via queue membership or via workgroup. Depends on which will be less maintenance and administration in your environment.
Not sure? Need some additional guidance? Feel free to drop me a line – I’m happy to help.
