Interact Intranet: Alerts

Interact Intranet uses a system of alerts to notify users of certain activities.
Some activities additionally trigger emails (covered in my previous post: Interact Intranet: System emails).

The purpose of this post is my own documentation on what I've learned about the alert system on version 5.1.5.

Manage Alerts

From time to time someone might trigger an alert that administrators would like to remove.
We've removed system emails several times and the process is very straight forward.

Within Site Admin: Control Panel: Manage Alerts you can find and delete alerts.

Be aware that alerts in this area are a combination of future and past alerts.  Meaning some have been sent and others are in the queue to send at a later date.  It would be helpful if there were an indicator for this!  I haven't been able to determine the sort order but they don't appear to display chronologically nor alphabetically.

Advanced Alert Management

Alerts (future and past) are stored in the ALERT table of the Interact database.
Key fields in the table include:

• DateAdded - date the alert was created
• DateFor - when the alert is due to be sent
• Date Actioned - when the Alert has been read by a user (aka actioned)
• ActionedBy - which user the alert has been actioned by

Alert SubType IDs

Alert subtype ID's are used to help organize alerts by activity in the database.
After over 10k alerts being sent by our system (1 month of production use) these are the IDs that have triggered alerts for us and their titles:

• 1 New Blog Post
• 2 Keyword Suggestion
• 2 You have received a comment on one of your blog postings
• 3 Is This Up To Date?
• 7 Document Version Approved
• 8 Comment Reported
• 8 Post Notification
• 8 Thread Notification
• 8 Thread/Post Content Reported
• 9 <Title of document pending approval>
• 10 Document Review Reminder
• 12 Document Expiry Warning
• 13 Document Watch
• 14 Document Comment Received
• 17 An update has been scheduled
• 18 Interest Suggestion
• 19 Feed Notification
• 20 <Username> has invite you to join <team name>
• 22 Share Notification
• 23 A comment has been made about your image.
• 200 You have been tagged

A number of alerts have null as their SubTypeID.  Those include:

• {TEAMNAME} Notification.
• Accepted Interest Suggestion
• <Username> has requested to join <team name>.
• Approval Request Deleted
• Comment Request Deleted
• <team Name> Membership (upon being granted access to a team)
• Rejected Interest Suggestion
• Team Creation
• Team Request

Note

AFAIK alerts (and emails) are triggered by actions of others and can't be self-triggered.
This needs more testing on my end to validate this behavior.

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Interact Intranet: Customizing your login page

Modifying your Interact login page is easy to do, although probably not upgrade proof.  If you are going to make any customizations, be smart and make a backup of your customizations (in addition to the originals)!


The source files for the login page are stored at \Interact\WEB\Interact\Login.  From there you can modify the default.aspx and default.aspx.vb files per your design.  The CSS is quite complex so if you aren't strong at manipulating floats properties in DIVs then you might just want to start from scratch (or delete everything between the BODY tags).

With some graphic help from our creative department I was able to whip this up in about an hour.

Good luck!

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Try the New Microsoft Windows 8

Windows 8 is the latest platform in the Windows operating system series from the house of Microsoft. Microsoft announced the development of Windows 8 before its release itself. According to Microsoft’s announcement, Windows 8 was expected to be too different from the previous versions. When they released the pre-release or evaluation version, everyone was shocked because it was far more than everyone expected. There were a lot of changes that even made Windows 8 stand apart from its siblings. Windows 8 didn’t hit the market as expected by Microsoft because the traditional and power PC users are against upgrading from the old Windows platforms to Windows 8. Their reason for not upgrading is that, Windows 8 doesn’t have any traditional Windows 8 qualities and furthermore they didn’t want to cross over such a huge learning curve. There are a lot Windows 8 support and forums filled with the discontent articles from end users.
But Windows 8 is not as bad as most of the users think. It’s true that Windows 8 has totally new User Interface. But that doesn’t mean that the classic Windows User Interface has been dropped by Microsoft. Microsoft included the Traditional User Interface as an option in Windows 8. Above all, the features and utilities, performance and appearance are very good in Windows 8. If you want to try out Windows 8, get your hands on an evaluation copy or trial copy today!

How can I try Windows 8?
If you are using a trial version, you can use it freely for one month. After the trial period you can buy Windows 8 and enter the serial to activate Windows 8. After the trial period, many features are disabled in case the license key is not entered. Evaluation copy doesn’t allow you to license or register. You can use it for 30 days, after which many features get disabled. If you like it, you can purchase a genuine version and install it. In any case, no harms are caused by trying out the evaluation copy or trial copy. But before you do so, please make a backup of your data so that you don’t lose your data if anything goes wrong.
Installation of Windows 8 is very simple. It consists of some easy steps and installation process takes place in graphical Interface. If you want help on installation, check out the Windows 8 support websites that provide help on Windows 8 installation.

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Interact Intranet release version 5.2 with enhanced analytics and more

This morning (US time) Interact Intranet hosted a webinar covering the release of version 5.2 of their intranet software.  The webinar was recorded and is available here.  Below are some comments and screenshots of the features.

Comments Interface

Anyone that has the ability edit a document can now delete comments.
Profile pictures display alongside comments.

Change Author

In bulk - reassign a document to someone else.

Influence Score

Displays profile score and influence score on user profile
Measures how each user causes others to take action on the Intranet

Analytics

Statistics

Warnings

Real Time Benchmarking

If you don't opt in you don't see the scores for other companies.
All benchmarked against entire Interact user population

Email Report

Daily emails.  Content and frequency cannot be customized.

Document Quality

Score out of 10
Based on things like: keywords, title, images, review date, links, summary, content, etc
Updates on creation and edit of a document.

3rd Party Analytics Integration

Using this interface you can apply a 3rd party analytics tool.

How do I get 5.2

You need to request it from support area via the Interact Extranet area.  Raise a new ticket
5.2 is available immediately.

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How to Enable Large Drive Support in Windows XP?

Windows XP was released in a time when there were a lot of limitations in the hardware. Even though there were limitations in hardware, Windows XP platform was designed to perform well, and the features built in it were very higher considering the hardware limitations. The basic version of Windows XP supported hard drives up to 137 GB only. This was a lot more than enough at that time. But hardware advancements are so fast and this necessitates an upgrade for Windows XP limitations in hard drive size.
Microsoft understood the problems with the limitations in Hard disk size and soon uplifted the curtain by releasing the Service Pack 1 update for Windows XP. Windows Online Support reduced the stress on Windows XP users by providing support for the Service Pack 1 update. Microsoft included the higher hard drive support in the security update that came in the Windows XP service pack 1. This was also included in the later updates like Service pack 2 and service pack 3. The predecessors of Windows XP didn’t have any problem like this as Microsoft removed the Hard disk limitations.
If you want to remove the Hard disk limitations the only way is to install Service pack 1 or higher. To remove the hard disk limitation of 137 GB I will help you install Service pack 1 update in your Windows XP. Following are some instruction for installing Service pack 1 in Windows XP.
Instructions
 Power ON your PC. Log into Windows XP using the administrator account and wait for desktop to load.
 After the desktop is loaded, open your Internet Explorer and navigate to Microsoft Webpage. (Internet connection is necessary)
 In the Microsoft website search for Windows Service Pack 1 and download it.
 Now click on Download prompt or double click on the installation package for installing update.
 Now give permissions for the prompts during the installation wizard. Accept EULA (End Users License Agreement) and click on the install button in the window.
 The installation process will complete in some time depending on your system configuration. After the installation is complete you will need to restart your system to complete the update process.
After restarting system check you system properties to check the OS version. You can see that it is Service pack 1. Now you will have no limitations on Hard disk space by Windows XP. If any problem occurs during or due to Service pack 1 update, you can get from Microsoft professionals via Windows online support.

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