Welcome to the jungle "beans".
I too am new to this, going on close to 3 weeks with trying to understand how it all is supposed to work correctly, and it does, more or less. However, I still have not been able to get notifications to work so far from my new system either and am still searching for a solution, since it was one of the major features that attracted me to Vera in the first place.
Reading the widely scattered information is key in beginning to gain a modicum of understanding. The lack of logically organized documentation is definitely one of major fallbacks of working with this stuff... Everything appears to be quite fluid.
Links I could give you galore, but really you need to discover them for yourself, based on what you are facing; and believe me, there are links to be found a plenty! This forum is invaluable I have found, some of the folks here really know this stuff, but like everything else with MCV, you have to search for the nuggets.
Good luck! I'll be looking out for your continuing posts.