Test Notifications in lower environments

[emarwood]

We need to add a way to better test notifications prior to them going live in production.  Many customers have struggled with either the logic in the rule conditions or not included a condition to narrow the recipients to a specific user or group of users.  This has resulted in test messages being sent in mass and in some cases resulted in a bad taste for SBM from executive management.

We need an option that fits with the SBM change management best practices when you copy your database back to your lower environments from production but does not require you to alter all of your notifications in order to test.

Currently the options to test email notifications in environments other than production is only possible if you set the action on each notification to use the console plugin, or to do a database update on the TS_NOTIFICATIONS table and set the TS_SENDTYPE to zero.  Neither of these options are helpful if you test your notifications and then want to promote them in a snapshot to production.

A design option would be to add a email server type for the Notification Server to write to a log file vs. email server connection info.  Perhaps this could write to the log the recipients, template and conditions that satisfied the notification rules that triggered the notification to execute.

[David_J_Easter]

This has been put under consideration for the 2HCY18 release.

[David_J_Easter]

Delivered in SBM 11.5