When I was typing the title of this article, my fat fingers made a Freudian slip that is pretty appropriate for this solution accelerator. The original title was "Notification WorkSlow Solution Accelerator". Once you finally get the thing installed, it is extremely frustrating trying to set up things like separate day/evening notification schedules for operators. More on this later; for now let me start with setup:

Setting Up the SA

The setup documentation for this particular SA is poor at best. There are a number of assumptions made by the authors that just don't match up with the average consultant installing the product. Here are all the components I had to add outside of the instructions to make it work:

• First the SA requires that you have IIS running on the database server where the SA will be installed. (How many Enterprise customers do most of you have that will allow IIS to run on their database servers?)
• Second, you need to install SQL Notification Services. (I know... I suppose I should have known that, but hey I don't play in the SQL world often)
• Third, you need to install SQLXML. (This is necessary because you *MUST* install the Engine components when installing the SQL Notification Services. If you select the Engine components and don't have SQLXML installed, you get a pop up telling you to install it and try again.)

The SA documentation doesn't point out that you need any of these installed. If you don'y install them however (and you run the SA installation) there is absolutely nothing in the log files that would lead you to determine why the SA doesn't install...

Using the SA

Once you finally get it installed, you use a web interface to set up users and subscriptions. The url is http://<servername>/NotificationWorkFlow.Web/HomePage.aspx

Two things you will notice immediately.

• When you add users, they actually go into a local table on the SQL server. There is no AD integration meaning that you will need to enter each subscriber's information manually with no ability to use AD Groups (or groups of any kind for that matter). For a very small shop (5 to 10 Operators) this might be acceptable. For an Enterprise Solution it is extremely poor.
• Most Enterprise Orgs that I have dealt with usually have email notification during working hours and cell/pager notifications after hours. The SA can accomplish this, but you must create a daytime subscriber ID and and evening subscriber ID for everyone that will need both types of notifications.

Once you have added the users, there is no way to cut and paste schedules between users. Since most people on a single shift will have the same hours, this could be a huge time saver but it is not possible with the SA.

The Subscriber devices tab is interesting. It does allow you to specify multiple devicesand you can specify which device (email, pager, etc) can be used for each subscription, but without the ability to set up devices per schedule, you are limited to adding multiple subscribers per user.

The one thing that is nice about the SA is that it gives you the ability to be paged for alerts on a particular Management Pack, Computer Group, or Individual Computer as well as giving you the choice of notifications by severity threshold.

Overall Score

If I rate this Solution Accelerator on a scale of 1 to 5, I would give it a 1.5 for overall functionality. It falls very short in the Enterprise space. i can't imagine that a single Enterprise customer would actually use the SA in production. It could possibly work for a very small organization.

My suggestion: Unless your customer is up for a dev engagement to make the tool useable, steer them away from this SA...

-mac