posted by Matt McAdams on February 9, 2009 11:44 PM

One advantage of using an online database is the visibility it provides into one’s data. Custom views, statistics, and powerful search features make it easy to see what’s happening with customers, orders, inventory, and nearly everything else.

Sometimes, though, that’s not enough. If a customer logs a critical bug, I want to know about it right away, not the next time I log into TrackVia and look. If our sales group has a time-sensitive opportunity that requires senior management involvement, our CEO wants to know about it immediately, not the next time TrackVia emails him a pipeline report. In fact, come to think of it, I want to know about all bugs, and our CEO wants to know about all sales opportunities, as they happen. We have a high need to know.

Now we can know. Last week TrackVia launched a new alerts feature. Alerts allow TrackVia users to be notified by email whenever their data changes in ways they’re interested in. This could be an added record, a deleted record, or any change to a specific record. It could also be a change to one or more records that meets very specific criteria.

The specificity of those criteria make alerts great for workflow applications, that is, using TrackVia to manage a business process. For example, an alert can notify a claims processor that an investigator in her region has approved a claim and it’s now ready for payment.

If you have a high need to know, and you’re not getting it from your current database, you might try a better database.