Change Notifications to Users

We would like to create an app that can.

  1. Alert users to a change in process documentation.
  2. Display the written summary of the change.
  3. Require acknowledgement that they’ve read and understood the change.

This would require that we could gain access to several key pieces of information within Tulip.

  • User’s last access date to the documentation (app).
  • Contents of change notes from the publication of the change.
  • Date of the change publication.

And may require that we have the ability have two types of comments when submitting an app for approval.

  • Internal release notes (comments seen by the approvers).
  • User release notes (those which are actually shown to the user, and visible to approvers).

How difficult would this be and do would you need additional detail from me about what we’re trying to do?

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Hey Aaron, thanks for the details! So when you say “last access date to the app”, what are the possible scenarios you are thinking of? If they have not seen multiple versions of the app, would you want to roll up all user release notes into one long list?

Or would they just see the release notes from the latest published version?

Basically yes.

What we want to be able to do is compare the last time they accessed the app, to the current time and alert them to any and all versions changes that might have occurred between.

So by way of an example: the user was in a week ago and just returned from their vacation. Upon arrival they’d be notified that there were two changes made in that period and shown the dates of the change and the associated change notes that were entered by the change agent.

Okay. And do you think text notes are sufficient? Or would it be better to have pictures/images to show what changed?

Yeah, I think text is fine. That’s what we’re planning. I suppose if there was a “gold” level for this, the whole picture/multimedia thing could be an option. I think communicating the change notes are really the critical part though.

Okay, makes sense. We do not have this on the near-term roadmap, but I will certainly update this thread when we start work.

In the meantime, have you considered using a Table for this functionality? You could create a new table record for every new version of an app. And then, you could add the version publish date to the table.

Then, you could embed that info on the first step of the app. And when an operator logs in, it could check the last time they logged into the app and then only show the table records that have been created since that date.

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