Sending internal communications

How to use the news feed beacon to transmit internal communications to all or some Dynamic Workload Console users.

Before you begin

You must have TWSWEBUIAdministrator role or writing rights on the system where Dynamic Workload Console, is installed.

About this task

You can use the news notification beacon to send specific communications to internal Dynamic Workload Console users, simply by storing these communications on the Dynamic Workload Console server. For example, administrators can use this feature to broadcast maintenance notices or company related announcements.

Note:

If no customized feed is specified, the default feed is used, which retrieves the latest product information from official support sites. To disable any notification, comment the entire section. To disable only external notifications about product information updates, assign an empty string as value to the FeedURL property of JSONP feed like:

  <property name="FeedURL" type="JSONP" value="" />

To add customized feeds, specify a list of sections named NewsFeed in the TdwcGlobalSettings.xml file by performing the following procedure:

Procedure

Edit the TdwcGlobalSettings.xml file by adding the properties specifying the name and format of the file in the NewsFeed section. Example:
```
<property name="NewsFeed" type="RSS" 
value="http://www.DWC_hostname:portnumber.com/news_rss.xml"/>
```
For more details, see the Customizing your global settings.

Optionally, specify a polling interval for the feed reading and an image associated to the notification. Example:

<property name="PollInterval" value="600" />
<property name="PollInitialDelay" value="1" />
<property name="NewsFeedCategory" value="my company info" 
icon="http://www.my.company.com/info.png" />
<property name="NewsFeedCategory" value="my company alert" 
icon="http://www.my.company.com/alert.png" />

Note: To specify multiple feeds, you must specify multiple NewsFeed properties.

Optionally, specify a list of feeds that must be taken into consideration by the notification feature. The browser detects new items from all the specified feeds and merge them sorting them by date in a single list.
Write the communication in ATOM 1.0 or RSS 2.0 format and store this file in the an HTTP server complying with the same origin policy. For browser security reasons, this policy permits to access information only on server using the same protocol, hostname and port number as the one to which you are connected.
Optionally, if you want to store your customized feed on an external server, you must configure an HTTP reverse proxy server mapping the external server address.

Results

The notification beacon function reads all the feeds specified in the NewsFeed section, detects new information and aggregates all in a single file ordering it by date. Then, it transmits notifications and internal communications to the recipients based on the roles specified in the TdwcGlobalSettings.xml file.