Several mass notifications systems, such as AMG Alerts, have tools to allow recipients to add or at least manage their own profiles in order that the system is independent from other systems within the customer’s organization. The primary reason for this, surprising to many, is not technical but instead, the benefit of short implementation time. Many trying to implement an employee notification system or a school alert system want the solution NOW.
Often, as time goes by, people as us to do integration with their current system. While we do not want this to become a technical article any more than it is (or will be) , we generally recommend “batch” updates for the sake of practicality. And with the added reason of security, neither our customers nor us seriously consider any type of real-time interactions between our two information databases. The batch concept works.
And since we are automating here and have, usually, no human babysitter, we also recommend to our customers incremental updates. This means that we get the ADDs and deal with those and we get the DELETES and deal with those. Such a process is far less dangerous because the unchanged records, which represent 95+% of the database, can sit there safely without being subject to being wiped out when, say, whole data sets are replaced but the source that our customer provides contains no records due to an automation hiccup.
There are other good reasons for this design and we always work closely with our customers to design an efficient overall process and then work automation based on that.