Distribution Lists

A Distribution List is a list of email addresses and/or account users that can serve as the recipient of an email notification. There can be overlap between the desired recipients of notifications for different System or Service Events; for example, a user may want to inform every administrator of a facility when a Service Event titled "Possible Break-In" is triggered, as well as for a "Critical Machine Failure" event. The user could create an email notification for each of these Event Types and manually list out every administrator, but this is time-consuming and creates more room for mistakes. Instead, the user could create a single Distribution List called "Admin", add all administrators to this list, and set the recipient of each notification to the Distribution List. The use of a Distribution List also simplifies the process of changing which people are notified in response to events. If a new administrator is hired, rather than add that person to each email notification manually, a user can simply add the new administrator to the "Admin" list, and he or she would immediately begin receiving all relevant notifications.

Sub-Lists

Distribution Lists can also include other Distribution Lists as Recipients, called Sub-Lists. After all, if a user wishes to create a Distribution List containing users of type A and type B, and lists already exist of each type individually, it is much easier to add the latter as sub-lists than to manually add every user of type A or B to the new list. This would also allow a change in the Distribution List of type A to automatically be reflected in the parent list, in the event that, for example, a type A user quits. Any Distribution List can be added as a sub-list to any other list, unless doing so would create a loop in which a Distribution List is its own sub-list, either directly or indirectly. For instance, if list A includes list B as a sub-list, and list B contains list C, then list C would be unable to add list A as a sub-list.

Adding Notifications

Typically, recipients are added to a Distribution List by an admin user with the permissions necessary to access the Distribution List page. The "Add Contact", "Add User" and "Include Sub-List" buttons allow an admin user to add as a recipient a raw email address, account user, or other Distribution List, respectively. However, an admin user can also check the "Open Subscription" flag of a Distribution List, allowing any non-admin user with the necessary permissions to subscribe himself or herself to a list. Self-subscription is covered in more detail on the next page, Subscriptions.