Newsroom

The newsroom is a place where iTop displays News sent to the current user. Those News may come from various News providers.

• From the beginning iTop Hub is a News provider, which sends News to iTop administrators only.
• Some Extensions providers such as Molkobain also has his News provider, sending News to iTop administrators only when one of his extension is deployed on that iTop.
• Since iTop 3.2.0, iTop itself is now a News provider, which can send News to any back-office users, using the trigger-action mechanism.

From a user perspective, a News is just an other mean to get informed about events occurring in iTop. For some users spending their working day on iTop back-office, News can replace emails if they prefer.

News are accessible from the bell, displayed at the bottom of the left menu bar.

• A red bullet on the bell is displayed when there are unread News.
• Mouse moving over the bell, displays a tooltip with the number of “unread” News in the newsroom (or “99” if there are more than 99 unread messages).
• Clicking on this icon displays a popup menu with the messages. Each message - made of an icon and a short description - is actually a link to more information.
• Clicking on one of the messages opens the message's link in a new tab/window and marks the message as read, which removes it from the newsroom menu.

No unread News	Four unread News	One unread News	Resulting page when clicking on the News

• A click on the bell, allow to select View all messages which open a user dedicated page

On that page one can:

• Delete past News
• Flag as unread a News which we want to keep is that state because we still need to reply or act on it.
• Flag a News as read
• Open a News in a new browser tab

Flag as unread	Open a News in new browser tab

• In addition, by changing the “Select mode”, the user can make all those actions in bulk

When a user receives News and/or emails due to a particular type of event in iTop (a trigger in iTop terminology), he can now decide to unsubscribe to such notification, assuming the administrator has allowed such action.

• A particular trigger can be configured to send Email and News to the same set of people.
• Each recipient, can once they have received at least one notification, decide to unsubscribe from a particular channel, says for eg. no more emails, and keep the News.
• If allowed by the trigger setting, they might even unsubscribe completely, by removing all channels.

There are 2 paths to open this Notification center page, either with the top right icon available in “My News” page or from the User preferences page, follow the link

To end-up on the user dedicated page, where they can manage their notification subscriptions:

• On channel removal and subscribing a feedback is provided:

• On channel removal, when this is not allowed by the trigger, a generic message get displayed, not so easy to relate to the true reason

• The person who configured the trigger and action can limit the possibility for users to unsubscribe:
  • For OnMention triggers, we usually want to deny users to unsubscribe from all channels, they will have to keep at least one, so we are sure that they are notified.
  • On some action such as iCalendar Invitation, Unauthenticated Form,… users are not allowed to unsubscribe at all.
• Users can unsubscribe only to notification action for which they have already received at least one notification event.
• Users can only unsubscribed to action which are sent directly to their Contact Person linked to their User, such as Email and News, so not to a Rocket, Teams,… and other notification channels of this nature.

A user in charge of configuring the iTop Notifications, can create new actions Notification by Newsroom, which are pretty much like an Notification by email :

See the Notifications page for more details

When an object, during its creation or modification has generated notifications, they are visible in a dedicated tab of the object details (as before).
Those notifications are grouped by type of notifications and the labels are aligned to be more comprehensive.

• There is a background task which delete read news older than a configuration parameter in days.

what about News never read for eg, because the Person/User is gone / inactive / deleted ???

The whole newsroom mechanism can be disabled - for all users - by an Administrator setting the configuration parameter newsroom_enabled to false in the iTop configuration file.

User Configuration

: those old settings aren't working as expected in 3.2.0-beta and might be changed or removed

• The number of messages to display in the drop down menu can be configured (for each user) in the “Preferences” page.
• Each source of news (currently there is only one source of news: iTop Hub) can be enabled or disabled (for each user) in the same “Preferences” page.