Set up Notifications

Messages from your SIS

Some notification messages originate in your information system. In Banner these are called “Holds,” in Colleague they are called “Person Restrictions,” and in PowerCampus they are called “Stop Lists.” (These are the non-push notifications that originate from the SIS.)

If your information system is currently set up to generate these messages, Ellucian Mobile will begin to display them to your mobile users after you have set up this module. Please see your SIS documentation for information about generating these messages. Colleague institutions can include links from Notifications messages to other external pages, such as WebAdvisor forms, if the Install Colleague Web API has been set up to enable the links.

These messages will appear within the Notifications module, which means that users need to sign in to Ellucian Mobile and open the Notifications module to see them. These messages remain on the device until the expiration date in the SIS passes or an administrative person removes the originating item in the SIS.

Messages from external applications

Other applications that you use at your institution may be able to be modified to send messages to the Ellucian Mobile Notifications module. Those products can be updated to call our RESTful service API. See the Notifications API information in the Ellucian XE Registry documentation for details about calling the RESTful Service API. (These are the push notifications that are generated from the Notifications API.)

If the application flags a message as a push notification, Ellucian Mobile can deliver it as a push notification to the end user's mobile device. Users are typically alerted when the message arrives, and the message appears in the device's native notification list without the user needing to have Ellucian Mobile open. For institutions that are published through Ellucian GO, the push notifications are sent from the Cloud Configuration system to the Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) system and Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) for delivery. Institutions that have published custom versions of the Ellucian Mobile app must configure their Mobile Integration Server web services app to handle communication with FCM and APNs, as described in the Platform Edition Developer's Guide.

Users must consent to receiving push notifications from Ellucian Mobile. All notifications, whether they are pushed or not, are available within the Notifications module in Ellucian Mobile.

These messages can be flagged as "sticky," which means that they appear and remain at the top of the list within the Ellucian Mobile Notifications module and cannot be deleted by users. Instead, sticky notifications have an expiration date and are automatically deleted from the device when the expiration date has passed. See the documentation for your other products for information about how to send notifications from those products.

Messages from your Cloud Configuration Service

You can send notifications through the Notifications API directly from within the cloud without writing code that calls the API. Access the Cloud Configuration tool to set up and send notifications. You can send notification messages to either all users or to specific users. The users must have been assigned logins to the Mobile application, and must have logged into the app at least one time to receive push notifications. The following are examples of when you might want to do this.

• You want to send a brief, important, but non-urgent notification to all mobile application users. For example, "Water main break on north campus. Portions of parking lot B are shut down."
• You want to send a message notification to a set of users. You can do this by using a list of SIS IDs that you provide from your SIS system list, or by using a list of mobile login IDs. For example, you want to let a group of mobile application users know that their registration time tickets have arrived.