Broadcasts

A broadcast is any proactive notification sent once to an audience: production updates, service disruptions and their all-clears, sandbox and product updates, planned maintenance, outage alerts to an FI's people, general notices. Before, each of these was one case per recipient FI — or, for outages, a text sent by hand.

Who sees it, and how it reaches them

Everyone whose entity is in the audience sees it here; unread ones are counted in the rail. Beyond that, each person's contact preferences decide: a regular broadcast goes by their everyday channel (email, SMS, both, or in-app only); an emergency one by their emergency channel — SMS for most. Preferences are set per person on Users, or by each person from the rail.

Someone who should always hear from an entity but never works in the tool — an FI's on-call engineer, its IT manager — is a contact on the Users page: notified like anyone at the entity, with their own channels, and never able to sign in. Extra recipients are the one-offs: typed into the broadcast itself, one email or mobile per line, and belonging to that broadcast only.

Writing one

+ New broadcast, or Broadcast about this case… from a case's Actions. Three tabs:

Message — category, urgency, the case it's about (optional; locked when opened from a case), who it's sent as, subject, body (Markdown, for email and in-app), and the SMS text: plain, short, defaulting to the body's first paragraph. The line beneath it counts characters and segments; a character outside the basic SMS set (an em dash, curly quotes) halves the segment size.
Recipients — the audience (all entities, or selected; an entity includes everything beneath it), extra recipients — enough on their own for a notice to people who are users of no entity — and the resolved list of who gets what and why. Untick anyone who shouldn't get this one.
Recipients recomputes as you work: add or remove an entity, switch the audience, add an extra recipient or untick a person, and the list and the count on the tab follow at once.
Preview — the email and the SMS exactly as they will go out, including the carrier-required prefix and footer. Send now is here (it reads Send later once Schedule for later is ticked); nothing sends before you've seen it.

Save draft keeps it. Sending can't be recalled — a correction is a new broadcast.

Schedule for later (in the dialog, above the subject) holds the broadcast until the time you pick — the button reads Send later once it's ticked, Send now otherwise — in your own time zone, up to 90 days ahead. Sending is done by a job that runs every five minutes, so the broadcast leaves within five minutes after its time, never before. A scheduled broadcast sits under Scheduled on this page with Cancel send, which returns it to Drafts with its time kept; edit it there and send or schedule it again. A junior operator's broadcast is scheduled by the operator or admin who reviews it. The person who scheduled it is recorded as its sender.

Who may send

An operator can broadcast about a case to that case's owner and involved entities (plus extras) — the outage path. Any wider audience, or a broadcast not about a case, needs an admin. A junior operator's broadcast waits for review, like their responses.

Delivery and replies

Each recipient's delivery is tracked — emailed, texted, delivered, failed — and shown under the broadcast. Replies come back into the tool. A reply from someone at the case's entities (or an extra recipient on that broadcast) lands on the case the broadcast is about; anyone else's reply, or a reply to a broadcast that isn't about a case, opens a new case owned by OPN, linked to the broadcast and related to the original case. An SMS reply on a case can be answered from the case by SMS.

Exporting

Export writes the sent list as CSV, XLSX or JSON, in the time zone you choose, for all or some rows.