We have encountered an unavoidable configuration issue in our rollout of SMS notifications through the MessageBee platform. Currently, patrons who enable SMS notifications can manually disable individual notifications. For example, they can opt to receive holds pickup notifications via SMS but courtesy notices via email.
If a patron has done this, their email notifications will be processed by MessageBee instead of our current SirsiDynix service. This applies only to notifications available in SMS but manually disabled. Notices not available via SMS are not affected.
This means that patrons will start seeing MessageBee email notifications earlier than expected. SWAN has taken steps to ensure that those notifications are well-worded and reflective of your library's branding, but we apologize that a select number of patrons will receive notifications on templates you have not yet had an opportunity to undergo training and evaluate.
We currently send daily e-mail reports on notifications to aliased emails that many of you receive. Unique will also send Daily Digest reports to the same recipients. These will include data on both SMS notifications and the email notifications that go out due to the problem outlined in this Known Issue.
You will need to rely on these Daily Digest reports in resolving patron questions about notifications sent through MessageBee. MessageBee emails are not tracked through our Patron Email Status lookup tool.
Finally, we have had to set a temporary patron notification policy of TEXT in User Category 10 for patrons who have SMS notification options selected in their profile. This may look unusual, but it is simply a mechanism to force our notification reports to run properly. We will remove this temporary policy when we finish our rollout of email notices in June.
