The PA System tool provides system administrators with the ability to deliver customizable system-wide or targeted alerts to users in their Sakai instance. These alerts may take the form of dismissible, rich-text popup alerts or simple text banners, color-coded by alert priority. All alerts are centrally managed through the PA System tool within the Sakai Administration Workspace and can also be controlled via a set of RESTful APIs.

Popup alerts are modal windows that users see upon logging into the system. These popups may be temporarily or permanently dismissed by the user. The content of these alerts allow for rich HTML content/formatting.

Banner alerts, similar to notification banners in mobile operating systems, appear at the top of the user interface and are designed for delivering simple and concise information to users. These alerts can be pushed to all users or a targeted subset of users. Furthermore, banner alerts can be delivered on all servers of a Sakai instance or to only selected servers. There are three different types of banners in the PA System, color-coded by alert priority:

• Blue (Low priority) - can be dismissed by the user
• Yellow (Medium priority) - can be hidden (minimized) by the user
• Red (High priority) - can be neither dismissed nor hidden by the user