As I understand currently, notifications for blackpearl are created in two ways:

1. By manually creating a notification event in a task.
• Pros: you have access to process level data to send in the notification
• Cons: If all tasks require a notification, the process definition bloats on order of 2X.  Also, it seems to be a nightmare of a maintenance headache.
2. Automatically by the blackpearl engine when a task (which has a user pre-assigned) becomes active.
• Pros: you don't have to create 1 task per notification / easier maintenance
• Cons: you have no access to process level data within your notification. 

If I am correct in this understanding, then I am interested in researching ways to centralize notifications (ie SQL Notification Services even though that's going away in SQL 2008).  Has anyone come up with a good way to handle this in either 2003 or Blackpearl?