The primary function of webeyeCMS is to bring alarms to your attention as fast as possible, 100% of the time. However, there are some cases where a user may not wish to see some alarms immediately, or may want to silence the alarm for a period of time and have it reappear at the top of the list after this countdown. For these users, we have developed the new Notification Alarm List and the Alarm Delay and Deferred Alarms feature.
Both Alarm Delay and Deferred Alarms are only available on the Notification Alarm List. This is a new alarm list that works in a similar way to to the push notifications (PNS) that we use with the webeyeCMS smartphone apps for iOS and Android.
When using the Notification Alarm List you can opt to add a delay to your alarms, meaning that they won't appear immediately.
This can be especially useful if you are a supervisor, for example:
In a situation where a mobile guard receives the alarms first and your monitoring station only wants to know about alarms that are still open after 5 minutes, you could apply a five-minute delay to your monitoring station users, leaving the guard at zero. If an alarm appears in your list then it is 5 minutes old already.
Likewise, the monitoring station supervisor may want to see alarms that are still open after 15 minutes. Simply set this user's default delay to 15 minutes and they will only be presented with alarms that are at least 15 minutes old.
This feature will help ensure that your users are only seeing the alarms that they need to, allowing them to focus on the task at hand, rather than filtering through unnecessary data.
Note that although this delay will present alarms to users after a period of time, it does NOT take the alarm out of the original user's alarm list.
The default delay period for your user can be adjusted by editing your profile and entering the desired delay in the Default alarm delay (H:M:S) field.
You can then override this value for any given site that you receive alarms for by editing your Subscriptions page. All sites that you are subscribed to will appear here and you can view the applied delay for each in this one page. Default delays are shown in greyed out fields and you can override them by checking the box to the right of the times and entering your desired value.
In some cases you may want to take an alarm out of the alarm queue temporarily, while still receiving events from the systems on site. This may be because you are on your way to site, or there is someone on site who is supposed to be there and you don't need to keep bothering users with alarms, but you still need to record what is happening on site.
For this purpose we have introduced Deferred Alarms.
When you defer an alarm you are prompted to record how long you wish to defer the alarm for, and to leave a note explaining your decision. After you defer the alarm a message will be displayed at the top of the page indicating how long it is deferred for.
Once deferred, the alarm will disappear from all notification alarm lists and no more notifications will be sent to webeyeCMS smartphone users. You can bring the alarm back into your list by enabling the Deferred filter at the top of the Notification Alarm List.
The deferral can be removed by entering the alarm and clicking on the Cancel Deferral button. Again, you need to add a comment explaining why you have removed the deferral.
Both deferrals and deferral cancellations are audited and can be viewed within the alarm.
You can enable the Notification Alarm List for your user by editing your profile and selecting Notifications as your Default alarm list type.
A major development that is enabled with the use of the Notification Alarm List is that we can now implement PADARC in the browser.
PADARC (short for Progressive Alarm Delivery and Alarm Receipt Confirmation) is our patented technology which will keep notifying users about an alarm until it is handled. Push notifications will continue to be sent to smart devices with the webeyeCMS app installed for 2 hours, SMS can be sent, and now we can keep pushing these alarms back to the top of the queue until they are properly handled.
You can easily tell that an alarm is a PADARC repeat notification by looking in the Repeat column to the left of the alarm in the Notification Alarm List. An icon is displayed with a counter which indicates the number of times that an alarm has been repeated, up to a maximum of 12 (2 hours). Every 10 minutes the alarm will come back to the top of the list until it is either handled or deferred.
You can read more about the site subscriptions and notifications that were added in webeyeCMS v2.9 here.