A notification can be sent to multiple recipients for the purposes of announcements, notices and water outages. The user can select this option from the “Notifications” menu. This is a full-screen form rather than a modal. The form will maintain its state, including if the user navigates away to search for and add recipients.
Elements of the Send Group Notification form are as follows;
- Method Preference 1- The first preference for sending the notification as a select control. Will default to “Push Notification”. Note that, unlike an individual notification, the recipient list may include customers that may not have this preference available, particularly those that may have been tagged as a result of directly entering / pasting into the recipient list.
- Method Preference 2 - The second preference for sending the notification as a select control. This field is mandatory.
- Method Preference 3 - The third preference for sending the notification as a select control. Is mandatory.
- Message Type - Select list to classify the type of message. In some contexts, this is used as the notification title (from the perspective of the staff user). This message type may default to a value based on the context of the form. The list of message types can be updated through the system configuration. The following messages types are be available:
- Water Service Disruption
- Public Notice
- Water Notices Issued
- Custom Notification
- Delay Delivery?- A checkbox which, when selected will cause the message to be sent at a specific time in the future.
- Timeout? - When this checkbox is selected, the message will timeout on the selected specified date and time.
- Send to All Users? - When this checkbox is selected, the notification will be sent to all users.
- Message Details - The details of the message that will be sent
- Message Length - Shows the number of characters in the message
Add Recipients to a Group Notification
Positioned to the right of the form the recipient control is used to add / bind recipients to this notification, labelled 'Add Recipients'.
From here there are a number of ways the user can add recipients to the Group Notification.
From a User Search - this will direct the user to the Customer User Search as described in Customer Management. Once the user is presented with the search results they are able to select multiple users or All from the search results.
It should be noted that the effect of this control is “additive” to the recipient list. The operator is selecting users to add to that existing list. In some situations, multiple searches may be undertaken for one group notification.Once the operator selects the recipients and activates the “Select These Customers” button, those that have been tagged will be loaded into the recipient list control. Note that any duplicates will be filtered out.
From a list of Account Numbers - Selecting this option will display a modal as per the example in 40. This will allow the user to type or paste in a series of account numbers. The form should accept data that has been pasted in from a spreadsheet, converting the cell data to commas or another delimiter. Note that comas, semicolons, tabs or carriage returns will be used as delimiters.
From List of Email Addresses - As per 'from a list of account numbers' but for email addresses. In this case, addresses are validated using a regular expression only. They are not matched to existing customers – presumed that user has extracted these from another valid system.
From List of Mobile Numbers - As per the above sections, but for mobile numbers. In this case, addresses are validated using a regular expression only. They are not matched to existing customers – presumed that user has extracted these from another valid system.
Table list of Recipients:
The table list displays all of the users that have already been tagged against the notification. For a brand new notification, this table would be empty. The contents of the table should scroll internally where required. The following items are displayed in this list:
Recipient - A suitable icon and the recipients’ names. For recipients added by mobile number only, the guest icon is shown, followed by the mobile number. For recipients added by email address only, the guest icon is shown, followed by the email address entered.
Likely Method - Shows the likely method that will be used for the notification. If SMS is chosen as the preferred method and all users tagged have a mobile number stated, then this column should list only mobile numbers. However if some do not have mobile, based on the preferences stated, one of the other methods will be shown by their icon. The method is shown with the appropriate text next to it as previously defined in previous sections. However, if the tagged user has no contact details available (which is unlikely), a different icon is shown as an error with the text “No contact details available”. 
This recipient will not receive the notification prepared in any form.
Remove - A button that will allow the user to individually remove one of the recipients that have been tagged. This action does not require confirmation and should function without the need to reload the page or even the control.
Recipient Controls
Once Recipients of the Group Notification have been selected they are displayed in the Panel Labelled 'Recipients' with the number of recipients in brackets. Users can select to clear all by selecting the 
button. Alternatively they are able to remove individual recipients by selecting the remove icon 
Confirm Send Group Notification:
Once the user has Selected the check box verifying that "the recipient above is correct and that issuing this notification is acceptable under the terms of use and GWCC policy." the Send Notifications button becomes enabled. When the Send Notifications button is actually selected, a second and final confirmation modal will appear, asking the user to confirm.
The contents of that confirmation control state:
• The time and date when the notification will be sent
• The total number of unique recipients
• The total number of push notifications expected to be sent
• The total number of emails expected to be sent
• The total number of SMSes expected to be sent
When a notification is sent, it will be processed by the system’s notification service.
