Recently I have been scratching my head trying to customized notification in PDM.

It really would be better if there's a capability to 

1. have automated while customized/personalized notification comment and a condition that helps to route the notification to specified receiver.

2. same goes to delayed-in-state notification.

Reason it's important to have personalized message instead of group message is that, nobody acts on group message and nobody knows what to do on the message. (even if we have given a lot of training ) And automated because it's rather repetitive every time, and sometimes human simply forgets to notify.

So far the best method I have found is to use dispatch to send mail, as within the same interface, I can sort of create a conditional notification routes based on data card variable.

Below is the setup. Different colors means different users.

The pre-condition is that, on the data card, I create "designated approver/checker" for user to fill in, and if it's left empty, the workflow condition won't allow it to go thru. (After the file is released, this variable will be cleared thru transition action.) 

So based on this designated approver, I can use it to condition the notification routes. And the dispatch will start after the state change.

I can also write personalized message using HTML tags(I just copy it from the notification templates in install dir).

The shortcomings is it cannot include variables or path like the usual notification we get. So the user have to know to use the search function inside the vault. So I kind of simply things for them...Each approver will only see the search favorite that will return files that's supposed to be approved by them. And of course in the search result column, I still include "designated approver" just to double verify...

So far this only applies to transition notification.

As for complete notification system, I guess we have to create add-in or something else.

Cheers.