Creatio uses the Notification center to alert users to key reminders: scheduled activities, feed messages, approvals, and more. Did you know that you can push custom alerts to the Notification center for any necessary information or reminders? This encourages users to be logged in and monitoring Creatio throughout the day, in comparison to using email notifications. (Note: You can also create mobile push notifications for users who are not in front of a computer all day.)

You will create Creatio in-app notifications via processes, so they can easily be added as part of an existing process, or you can create a new stand-alone process just for the alert. For the alert, you’ll need to pass in the Contact Id for the user that you want to send the alert to, and the Id of the record that you want the alert to link to – so you will typically have one or more Read Data elements to gather that information for the process prior to actually creating the notification. For my example, I’m reading data from a newly created Lead to use later in the process.

For the notification itself, use am Add Data element to create one record in the Notification object. At a minimum, you’ll need to set values for the following:

• To: the Contact Id for the user that you want to set the alert to. If the alert always goes to a specific person, you can simply search and select that contact from the lookup. Otherwise, you’ll want to pass in a Contact Id value – for example, perhaps the Owner of the Lead or Opportunity. Again, you’ll typically use a Read Data element to get that value. There’s also the ‘Current User Context’ variable option, which will send the notification to whichever user is triggering the process that creates the notification.

• Time: When you want the notification to appear. For immediate notification when this process step is reached, use the menu to select the ‘Current Date and Time’ option. Alternatively, you can use formulas to delay the notification – for example, the formula ‘[#System variable.Current Time and Date#].AddHours(1)’ would delay the notification by 1 hour.

• Title: This will be become the hyperlink text in the notification, so this is where you can specify the message that you want to send to the user. If you want to pass in any text values to the message, you can do that via formulas as well. For example, the formula shown below will include the name of the lead within the message.

• Object: The object that you want to link the notification to, such as Lead, Opportunity, or Account. Use the Lookup Value selection option to get a list of all objects so that you can easily select the desired one. 
• Parent entity ID: The Id of the record within the select Object that you want to link to. Again, this will typically be set by passing in a parameter from another element in your process, such as a Start element or a Read Data element.

Here’s an example of my fully configured Add Data element:

And here’s my full example process:

The created notification looks like this in the Notification center: