webeyeCMS has long allowed you to specify which of your users receive Push Notifications (PNS) and SMS alerts, as well as providing a simple solution for blocking a site where you need to silence it temporarily.

The webeyeCMS hierarchy allows you to control who has access to which sites by simply creating a user in a group above all of the sites that you want them to have access to, and below all of the others. However, sometimes you may need to invite a user from a different hierarchy to a specific site, or to remove a certain site's alarms from some user's alarm queues. Until now that has not been possible.

With the release of Webeye Monitor v2.9 (release notes) we have introduced a new, more powerful Subscription system.

To use this system, view the site that you want to set up subscriptions for, and click on the Subscriptions option in the left-hand menu. You will be taken to a screen that looks something like this:

Let's walk through what options are available here:

Summary and Search

Here we can see the location of the site in your hierarchy, the number of current subscriptions and a search box. You can search for any user that already exists in webeye who is level or above this site in the hierarchy. For example, we search for demo and the following result is displayed:

You can see here that there are two users that may match the username that was searched for, but we couldn't find an exact match in your hierarchy. They may exist elsewhere in webeyeCMS, however, so you can choose to invite the user from the link under the search box. If you want to add any of the users from the search results, simply click on the desired option (detailed below) to subscribe the user to this site.

Subscription Options

Let's take a look at these five users:

Subscribed

Every user in this list is marked as Subscribed. If you remove this option then the user will be removed from the site's subscriptions. When you search for a user, enabling this checkbox will add the subscription.

Alarms

If you want this site to show in the user's alarm list when there is a valid, open alarm, you must have this option selected. Removing this option will also remove app and SMS notifications option.

App notifications

As long as you are logged in to a webeyeCMS (or compatible) app, enabling this option will tell webeyeCMS that it should send a push notification to your mobile device. When you select this option the alarms option will also be enabled if it isn't already.

SMS notifications

Similar to App notifications, when an alarm is received webeyeCMS can send you a text-message to let you know. This can be useful as a backup in case push notifications aren't delivered, but we don't recommend that you rely on this method of notifications due to SMS itself not being reliable.

Blocked

When you block a site, you will no longer receive any notifications for the site (ie no push or SMS notifications) but the site will still appear in your alarm list. You can block and unblock from within the webeyeCMS (and compatible) apps and it will simply toggle your chosen notification options on and off. Unblocking will restore the previous notification options.

Alarm Type

webeyeCMS currently supports two types of alarms:

Standard Alarm Message (SAM)

SAM alarms are traditional alarms that are intended for professional users. When webeyeCMS receives an appropriate event from your alarm system, an alarm is raised and all subsequent events are collected into the one alarm. Notifications will be sent to enabled users every 10 minutes until someone closes the alarm, and the alarm must be closed with a reason.

Webeye Message (WEM)

WEM alarms are intended for residential uses where regular notifications are sent and alarms do not need to be closed. WEM alarms can be marked as read or unread, similar to an email. We recommend WEM alarms for IN HOME app users.

Permission

If your user is within the site hierarchy, you are automatically made an Owner of the site. This enables the usual permissions for your user account that can be configured by your organisation administrators.

However, if you have been invited from outside of the site's hierarchy, you will have overriding permissions in the form of being a Guest or an Administrator.

Administrator

Administrator users can view, handle and close SAM alarms, LiveLink and take snapshots, and can also invite other users. They can also manage their own subscription but only if the user has the subscription management permission themselves.

Guest

Guest users can view alarms only.

Bulk Actions

When you select options from the right-hand column, the bulk actions become available:

You can apply the same options to every selected user by choosing the desired option and then clicking the Apply button.