Being able to inform users immediately about changes to your site's content is not only a neat feature, but can in some cases, be mission critical. I am not talking about a planned and nicely edited marketing newsletter, I am talking about automated responses that are immediately triggered by events, like a new page being published or edited. This can not only come handy in a workgroup-like environment or an intranet, but also on public websites.
For registered users only
But let's start with the bad news: Unlike the blog subscriptions (see chapter "blog subscription" of the Kentico blog article) out of the box, the notification engine only works for registered users. Thus you must add the membership module to your site. And it also means that users will have to register on your site to use this feature. For an intranet or social networking site this is not a big deal. However, it’s a huge roadblock that makes the feature less attractive for smaller sites that otherwise would have no need for user registrations 1.
For each user, the subscriptions can be viewed (and deleted) in the notification tab in the backend.
Possible scenarios
You may ask what the possible uses of this module are. Well, consider any situation that you would like to know about immediately as it happens: From the release of the latest quarterly or annual report of the company you’ve invested in, updates about road construction work in your neighbourhood to the changing schedule of your bus line. Or maybe a price change of a desired online product, a sudden change in the schedule of the conference you plan to attend, and so on.
Immediate notification for each of these scenarios is possible because the notification module can be configured to send messages out to subscribers when pages are added, edited or deleted from your site. And as programmers, we can certainly dig deeper and program custom events.
Despite all the examples I mentioned above, the module was indeed designed for intranet or membership applications. Here as well, there are endless scenarios for the use of this module, be it for a large team of web collaborators that need to be kept informed about any changes going on their web site or sections of the site like a wiki. Or for users of an online community or user group that don't want to miss a single update.
Notification Gateways
The module ships with the built-in e-mail gateway that will cover the needs of most users. The possibility to easily add-in a custom gateway might come handy if you wish to use SMS transmission instead.
Last minute update: Petr Vozak from the Kentico team has just announced that he will release an SMS and an ICQ gateway for the notification engine. They will be soon available in the Kentico Marketplace.
No direct unsubscribe link
The only thing I was missing is an unsubscribe link that you could place directly in the e-mail. Even considering that this module for designed for a membership model, such a link would come in handy. For the now the only possibility for unsubscribing users is by manually deletion in your account section.
A site administrator might also have found it helpful to view a list with all subscribers per event. However, even if this feature does not come out of the box, you can easily create such a list using the built-in report module, a portion of this CMS that I yet will have to discover...
[1] Although, with a few code changes it is possible to enable notifications for unregistered users, you will need to program your own unsubscribe web part. I talked to the Kentico support about this issue and there is a chance that public access to the notification module will be supported in some near future versions.