Message Centre

The message centre creates messages and distributes them. It defines when a message is created and what its text says, who receives it and by which route. All messages of the project are kept in one list in the dialog of the message centre – a separate block per message is not needed.

One block is created per project. Services of the controller, for example the monitoring of the partner controllers, also report through the message centre.

Delivery follows the priority of the message. There are four priorities – information, warning, alarm and critical – and one separate assignment to the recipients per priority. This allows, for example, information to go only by e-mail to the building technician while an alarm additionally goes as a push message to the standby service.

Five routes are available: e-mail, notification to the uni-PRO APP, NTFY, Pushover and IFTTT. The centre uses the same services as the individual sending blocks; those blocks are unchanged and can still be used on their own.

Setup:

• Open the editing dialog from the parameter Messages, recipients and assignment. It stays open so that addresses can be dragged into it from the address window.
• On the Messages tab, drag the trigger addresses from the address window into the list. Name, trigger, priority, delay and acknowledgement are set per message in the list; below it are subject, text, repeat block and escalation levels. This area appears as soon as a row is selected (see below).
• On the Recipients tab, create one row per person: name, mail address, APP devices, NTFY topic, Pushover key, weekdays, quiet hours and groups.
• On the Assignment tab, tick which recipient receives which priority by which route. The assignment is built as a tree: the four priorities are at the top with the recipients underneath. A tick on a priority itself sets the route for all recipients at once, a grey tick means that only some of the recipients receive it. If nothing is stored for a route with a recipient, the column is shown in grey; it can still be ticked, but delivery only happens once the entry has been added.
• The row of the priority the message was triggered with always applies. A tick at warning therefore does not automatically apply to alarm as well. If a recipient is to receive everything from a certain level upwards, they are ticked at each of those levels.
• The Preview tab shows, without a connection to the controller, who would be reached at a chosen time and weekday and why somebody is held back.

Quiet hours: Quiet hours from/to can be entered per recipient. A period across midnight (for example 22:00 to 06:00) is handled correctly. If both times are equal there are no quiet hours. A message with priority Critical breaks through the quiet hours if the parameter Critical breaks through quiet hours is set.

Repeat block: A time in minutes within which the same message is sent only once. It is the parameter Repeat block of this block and applies to all messages in the project unless a message has its own entry.

"The same message" means: the same row of the message list at the same escalation level. Two different messages therefore never block each other, and an escalation continues even if its first level would currently be blocked. The time of the last delivery is stored permanently and survives a restart of the controller.

Sequence of a message: When the trigger address fires, the message waits for the configured delay and is then sent according to the assignment of its priority (level 1). If Acknowledgement required is ticked, the escalation levels follow one after the other, each after its waiting time, until the message is acknowledged through the input QI. Without acknowledgement the message is sent once and is then finished. A message that is still running is not restarted by triggering it again. The state of the running messages survives a restart of the controller; a message that was still in its delay at the restart is dropped. In the first seconds after the start no message is triggered, so that the initial values of the addresses do not create a message.

Recipient groups: Every recipient belongs to one or more of eight groups. The groups are used by the escalation levels of the messages: level 1 goes to the normal assignment, every further level to the group entered there.

The eight groups come preset with the roles that are common in a larger installation: building services, standby duty, service contractor, site management, property management, security service, control room and company management. The order follows the usual path of an escalation, from the first level to the one called last. This is only a suggestion: the button Rename groups... on the Recipients tab allows the names to be changed freely. The name then appears wherever groups are selected – including the escalation levels of the messages. A name left empty means that the group is shown under its number.

Note on the uni-PRO APP: Unlike the other routes the recipient is not held in the project but results from the devices that have registered with this controller. The column APP devices selects which of them are meant; if the selection stays at All, the notification goes to every registered device. Devices that register later are automatically included with the setting All, but not with a fixed selection.

A device is addressed by the user logged on in the APP. If no login is set up there, the ID of the device at the push service is used instead; the selection shows it in a column of its own. That ID is not permanent though: Google and Apple issue a new one as soon as the APP is reinstalled or its storage is cleared. After that the message no longer reaches this device and it has to be selected again. Where reliability matters, a login in the APP is the better choice.