Notifications: the alerts bell in the top bar

Things with a date attached are the things that get forgotten: a licence about to expire, a task assigned to you, an internal message waiting for a reply. The notifications bell gathers them in one place you can see from every screen.

Steps

1. Look at the bell icon in the top bar — image 1. The red number above it is the count of unread notifications.
2. Click it to drop the list open — image 2 — showing the latest ten notifications, each with an icon for its kind, its text, and how long ago it arrived.
3. Click any notification to go straight to the screen it concerns — the licence, the task or the message — and it is marked as read.
4. The Mark all as read button at the top of the list empties the counter in one go.

Notes

• The bell shows notifications that have not been read yet; once you open one it leaves the list and does not come back.
• Task, session and appeal-deadline alerts disappear automatically once their date has passed, so warnings about things already over do not pile up.
• Notifications are personal: each user sees what was sent to them, not what was sent to colleagues.
• Next to the bell there is a megaphone icon for "what's new" in the system itself, and a question mark icon for the guide — each of those is a different thing from notifications.