Jo Ann Musgrave, Director of Financial Information Systems for the Art Institute of Chicago, spoke at RECONNECT 18 about creating and configuring alerts within your company to help track important information.

Key Takeaways

Some key takeaways from this article include:

• If you can create a query, you can create an alert.
• Alerts can help communicate information between different locations and departments.

Footprint

To give a little background about the PeopleSoft environments in play at the Art Institute of Chicago, they are on 9.2 across the board for Financials, HR and Campus Solutions. Financials is on PI 26 with PeopleTools 8.54.23. HR is on PI 17 with PeopleTools 8.54.23; Campus Solutions is on PI 8 with PeopleTools 8.55.20.

How Alerts Are Utilized

Alerts play a significant role in both the school and the museum’s financials because the Accounting Department at the Art Institute is decentralized. They have separate accounting for the museum, school and Central Administration; so it is important to relay information between the three areas. That’s where alerts come in!

Creating Alerts

Alerts are created when a query is combined with functionality in the Events and Notifications framework. They are based on data within one or more PeopleSoft tables. So, if you can create a query, you can create an alert!

The steps to creating an alert are as follows:

1. Create a query to identify who will receive the alert message.
2. Create a User List Definition using the query created above.
3. Create an email format via Message Catalog.
4. Create a query that produces results to generate the alert.
5. Determine component and menu names.
6. Determine a portal object name.
7. Create a Notification Registry if one does not already exist.
8. Create an Alert Definition.