Overview#
A traveler SOS fires at 3 AM. The primary duty officer has their phone on silent. The notification system retries, escalates to the backup officer, and sends an SMS as a fallback channel. Three minutes after the SOS, someone is aware and responding. Without a structured escalation workflow, the outcome depends on whether someone happened to check their phone.
The DoC Notification domain manages that escalation logic, multi-channel delivery, routing based on severity, and automatic escalation for unacknowledged critical alerts, as a systematic process rather than a phone chain.
Key Features#
- Multi-channel notification delivery (push, email, SMS).
- Notification routing based on alert severity and type.
- Delivery tracking and confirmation.
- User notification preference management.
- Notification escalation workflows.
- Organisation-scoped notification configuration.
- Notification history and audit trail.
- Template-based notification content management.
Use Cases#
Duty of care programme managers configure multi-channel notification routing for different alert severities, ensuring that life-threatening SOS alerts reach responders through every available channel simultaneously.
Operations teams manage notification preferences for duty of care team members, defining which individuals receive which alert types and through which channels, with preferences respected across all notification triggers.
Security supervisors configure escalation workflows for unacknowledged critical alerts, with automatic escalation to backup officers ensuring that no SOS activation goes unresponded to due to an unavailable primary contact.
Post-incident reviewers access notification delivery history for specific incidents, confirming that required notifications were sent, when they were delivered, and when they were acknowledged.
Integration#
Integrates with general notification systems, DoC alert management, and DoC incident management for comprehensive duty of care communication.
Open Standards#
- OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) 1.2: Alert payloads conform to CAP 1.2 urgency, severity, and certainty vocabularies, and the service generates well-formed CAP XML documents for submission to FEMA IPAWS.
- W3C XML Digital Signatures (XML-DSig): CAP XML documents are signed with an enveloped RSA-SHA256 signature using PKCS#12 certificates before transmission, satisfying FEMA IPAWS signing requirements.
- OAuth 2.0 (RFC 6749) and JSON Web Tokens (RFC 7519): Firebase Cloud Messaging HTTP v1 access tokens are obtained via the JWT service-account assertion grant (RS256), implementing the OAuth 2.0 token exchange flow.
- Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) HTTP v1 API / Apple Push Notification service (APNs): Mobile push notifications are delivered through FCM for Android and APNs for iOS, using the FCM HTTP v1 API as the primary transport with legacy FCM and direct APNs as fallbacks.
- SMTP with STARTTLS (RFC 5321 / RFC 3207): Generic SMTP email delivery with optional STARTTLS transport-layer upgrade is supported alongside hosted email API providers for multi-channel alert delivery.
- WebSocket (RFC 6455): Real-time in-browser notifications are pushed over persistent WebSocket connections to web dashboard operators as a fourth delivery channel alongside email, SMS, and push.
- ISO 8601: All notification lifecycle timestamps (sent, delivered, acknowledged, created, escalated) are stored and serialised as ISO 8601 datetime strings, ensuring interoperability with audit and reporting systems.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-05 Last Updated: 2026-04-14