"Watch This Folder" and other meaningful Alert Options

February 23rd, 2017 ProActivity News

Have you ever wished you had an assistant that would send you an email reminder to do that task you forgot about or perhaps you never even knew about? We are here to tell you that it is possible with Dakota Software!

Alerts in Dakota Scout & Tracer enable you to set up automatic email notifications and reminders for select events or action items. For example, you can set up an email reminder to be sent one week before an action’s due date. Or you can automatically be notified when a data field in Dakota has been modified and is ready for you to follow up with.

Taking advantage of this feature is easy! You can open the Set Alerts window in Scout or Tracer by doing any of the following:

To set an alert for all items listed in the data table, click Table Options > New Alert on the table toolbar.
To set an alert for a single item, access the detail view and click Options > New Alert.
To set alerts by your organization hierarchy folder structure, right-click on a folder and choose Watch This Folder (Hint: setting an alert at the highest folder will also watch all sub-folders below that folder)

Below are some suggested best practices your organization can be taking advantage of today.

Responsible Person: Watch This Folder can be used to create automatic notifications & reminders that are sent to the responsible person for each task in Tracer. To create this watch, select the “Responsible Person” box in Alert Options and specify your notification & reminder criteria that should go to each responsible person. Some common criteria for this watch include, “WATCH - Send email when items are added” and a reminder X amount of days prior to the Date Due where Status is not set to Complete or Verified.

Escalation: An escalation alert in Tracer can be created using Watch This Folder that can send an email notification to an employee’s supervisor or anyone else that should be notified of overdue tasks. This alert can be created by adding recipients emails in the “To” field and setting a reminder X amount of days AFTER the Date Due where Status is not set to Complete or Verified.

New Incident: Watch This Folder can be used to notify anyone as soon as a new incident is added to Scout by adding recipients emails in the “To” field and checking the “WATCH - Send email when items are added” box. Advanced alert conditions can be used to further define notification parameters such as Report Type = Injury/Illness.

We hope all Dakota users take advantage of this feature to help deliver crucial information and provide guidance for your day to day activities. Please contact the Dakota support team with any questions or requests for assistance.