Notices
A notice is a short announcement people must confirm they have read. "On 12 August line 3 closes for maintenance." "Following last week's incident, the guard on press 2 stays down until further notice."
It is a kind of controlled document, so it reuses the same reader, the same read-and-understood record, and the same coverage report as any policy. What makes it a notice is that it has one version, it is never revised, and it stops applying on a date you choose.
Publishing a notice is limited to Quality Administrators and the Corporate Administrator. A notice goes live immediately, and going live immediately is a quality-role act everywhere else in Better Comply.
When to publish a notice instead of a document
| Publish a notice | Create a controlled document |
|---|---|
| It matters now and stops mattering on a known date | It applies until somebody revises it |
| One version is all it will ever have | It will be revised, approved and re-issued |
| You need proof people read it | You need proof people read it |
| It should never become training material | It may be cited as a training source |
If you find yourself wanting to edit a notice, it should probably have been a controlled document.
Publishing one
- Open Controlled Documents.
- Open the New document menu and choose Publish a notice.
- Write the title and the message. The title is what people see in their list, so make it the thing you want them to know.
- Set Active until. After that moment the notice leaves everyone's pending list on its own.
- Choose who has to read it under Who has to read it. Leaving every field empty reaches the whole organisation.
- Press Publish, then confirm.
Everyone in the audience is notified straight away, in the app and by email, and the notice appears in their To read and confirm list.
Who can read it, and who has to
These are two different questions and a notice answers them differently.
Everybody can read it. A notice is always published organisation-wide, so anybody who follows a link to it can open it. This is deliberate: an audience picked across departments would otherwise produce a notice that appears in somebody's list and refuses to open.
Only the audience has to confirm it. The people you targeted are the ones asked to read and confirm, the ones reminded, and the ones counted in the coverage report.
What happens when it expires
Nothing moves and nothing is deleted.
- The notice leaves the pending list of anybody who had not confirmed it.
- The reader shows a quiet note saying it has expired, and the confirm button disappears.
- Every acknowledgement already recorded stays exactly as it was, permanently.
- Reports stop counting it, so a coverage figure is never stranded below 100% by an announcement about last month.
This is why a notice needs an end date. Without one it would sit in somebody's list forever.
Correcting a notice
A notice cannot be edited after publishing. To correct one, publish a new notice with the right content and let the first one expire.
If the original is wrong enough to be harmful, open it and use Mark obsolete. It leaves everyone's list immediately, and the record of who read it survives.
The reason for the rule is that an acknowledgement names a specific version. If the text could change afterwards, every confirmation already recorded would attest to something nobody actually read.
What a notice cannot do
- It cannot be revised, submitted for review, or approved.
- It cannot be cited as a source when authoring training material.
- It is not indexed, so the training assistant will never quote it.
- It cannot be uploaded as a file. A notice is written in the app.