CRMA Academy

Notifications and Annotations

Set threshold notifications on a CRM Analytics widget, understand why they belong to the end user's filter context rather than the designer's, work within the 10-notification limit, and use Annotate to post a widget to Chatter with @mentions.

Notifications and Annotations

Sharing is a pull feature — someone has to open the dashboard. Notifications are a push feature: the platform watches a number for you and emails you when it crosses a line you drew. For a busy business user, that difference is everything.

Setting a notification

Notifications live at the widget level. Open the widget's action menu and choose Set Notification.

  1. 1

    Filter the dashboard to what you care about

    This step is not optional and not cosmetic — the notification captures the current filter context. Get the widget showing your slice of the data first.

  2. 2

    Open Set Notification on the widget

    Available on widgets backed by a measure — number tiles and charts are the usual candidates.

  3. 3

    Define the condition

    Pick the measure and a threshold: greater than, less than, equal to a value. 'Open pipeline below 2M', 'cases over 50'.

  4. 4

    Choose a schedule

    How often the platform evaluates the condition — hourly, daily, weekly, at a time you pick. The check runs on that cadence; the email only arrives if the condition is true.

  5. 5

    Decide on repeat behaviour

    Tick 'notify me only the first time the conditions are met' if you want a single alert per breach rather than one every evaluation.

That last checkbox is the difference between a useful alert and an inbox you start ignoring. If a metric sits below target for three weeks, do you want twenty-one emails or one? For most threshold alerts, the answer is one.

Why the user sets this, not the designer

This is the part that trips people up, and it's the single most important idea in the lesson.

A notification inherits the filter state of the dashboard at the moment it was created. It doesn't just watch "the widget" — it watches the query that widget was running for you, with your selections applied.

Which means:

Same widget, different alerts

A West-region manager filters to West and sets a notification. An East-region manager does the same on East. Identical widget, two genuinely different alerts — each watching their own numbers.

The designer can't do it for them

A notification you create belongs to you and watches your filters. It is a personal subscription to a condition, not a dashboard property you configure once for everyone.

So the designer's job here is communication, not configuration. When you hand over a dashboard, show the audience where Set Notification lives and make the point explicitly: filter to your world first, then set the alert.

Each user is limited to 10 notifications. That's a per-user cap across CRM Analytics, not per dashboard. It's generous for the intended use — a handful of metrics you genuinely need to be told about — but it does mean users should spend them deliberately rather than setting one on every tile they like the look of.

Notifications also fire on mobile. If your audience uses the CRM Analytics mobile app, an alert arrives as a push notification on their phone, which for a field-based team is often the only analytics touchpoint that reliably lands.

Annotations

The second half of this lesson is Annotate, and it solves a different problem: not "tell me when a number moves" but "let's talk about this number".

Annotate is on the same widget action menu. It opens a comment thread attached to that specific widget, and posts it to Chatter — with two options that make it far more useful than a plain comment box:

  • Include a screenshot of the widget as it currently looks, so the conversation has a picture of what you were seeing.
  • @mention colleagues, which pulls them into the thread and notifies them the normal Salesforce way.

Two very different audiences use this, and both are worth mentioning when you train users:

Business discussion

'@Priya why did Central drop 30% in week 4?' — the question lives on the widget itself, with the visual attached, instead of in a lost email thread.

Design review

During UAT, stakeholders annotate the widgets they want changed. You get feedback pinned to the exact widget rather than a document saying 'the chart in the middle looks wrong'.

That second use is one of the most practical tricks in this section. Running dashboard sign-off through annotations gives you an unambiguous, threaded, screenshot-backed list of change requests — and it happens inside the tool instead of alongside it.

Notifications and annotations keep people engaged with the dashboard. But sooner or later somebody wants the numbers out of it — into a spreadsheet. That's the next lesson: downloading data.

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