Video: User Features

The following video provides a helpful high-level overview of the User features available within this add-on. See the User Guide documentation below for additional details.

Administration Overview page

If a Site Administrator has configured the Announcer add-on so that Space Administrators and Project Administrators can create announcements, then you can access the Administration Overview page by doing the following:

In Confluence, from the Space Tools menu found at the bottom of the sidebar, choose Add-ons.
In JIRA, from the project administration screen, choose Project Announcements.

Confluence:

JIRA:

On the Administration Overview page, you can view the active notifications for users logging in. The announcements on this page are broken into Active and Inactive announcements. To move an announcement from Inactive to Active, simply edit the announcement and enable it.

From this page, you can:

Click Preview () to preview an existing notification.
Click Reset () to reset the all counts for an existing notification.
Click Edit () to edit an existing notification.
Click Delete () to delete an existing notification.
Click Report () to see an acceptance report for an existing notification.
Click Add another notification to add a new announcement.

Creating or editing an announcement

When you create or edit an announcement, the Announcement editor window will appear.

Basic edit options:

Advanced edit options:

Supply the following details:

Basic edit options

Name	Description
Title	This is both the title of the notification in the U/I and presented to the end user in the title bar of the browser window.
Description	This is an internal description of the announcement and is not displayed to the end user.
Status	This indicates whether the announcement is active (enabled) or inactive (disabled).
Show for Anonymous	Indicates whether this item should be displayed to anonymous users.
Notification Type	Banner - this will make the notification be displayed as a banner on every page until the end user dismisses it. Full Page - this will make the notification be displayed as a "full page" acknowledgment (see list of of URLS below that are not affected). Dialog - this will make the notification be displayed as a dialog. Flag - this will make the notification be displayed as a popup that appears in the top righthand corner of the screen until the end user dismisses it. Full Page is not available for announcements created by Space (Confluence) or Project (JIRA and Bitbucket Server) Administrators.
Contents	Use the dropdown to select the desired format (HTML, Markdown, Plain Text) and then supply the body of the announcement.

Advanced edit options

Click Show advanced options... to display additional options:

Name	Description
Filter for specific groups(s)	If you want to target a project, select this checkbox and then select the group of users that should be used. This option is only available for Dialog and Banner notification types.
Notification icon	Choose this if you'd like an warning, error or information icon displayed next to the announcement title.
Enable time restrictions on announcement	Select this checkbox if you want the announcement to appear only within a specific date range. Once this checkbox is selected, additional controls will appear so that you can click the start date, hold down Shift and then click the end date.
Button Text	If you want to override the text of the button, specify it here. If this field is left blank, the default text is used.
Enable the button after 5 seconds	Select this checkbox and the Dismiss button will become active after 5 seconds, ensuring the user has the opportunity to read the announcement before dismissing it. This value can be altered by the global administrator.
Should the accept button be shown	This applies to Banner and Flag announcement types only and indicates whether the Accept button should appear. This is selected by default.

Click Preview to preview the announcement in a new tab, Save to save the announcement or Cancel to discard your changes.

JIRA handles the targeted projects differently than Bitbucket handles Bitbucket projects and Confluence handles a space. A project is considered active in JIRA if it's the last project the user visited.

When editing Target groups, the person editing the announcement will see only those groups to which they directly belong.

About Anonymous Users

While we try to avoid showing the same item repeatedly, we're using the web browser session and thus an Anonymous user might see the same item repeatedly. However upon login, the notifications are applied to the logged-in user and thus they won't see the item again.

Minimizing Performance Impact

We try to avoid any type of performance impact with Announcer and while the following scenario is highly unlikely, due to the personalized nature of Filtered Spaces/Projects, there may be a performance penalty when a large amount of these types of announcements are used for Spaces/Projects that are not visited often.

This same type of penalty may be encountered if a large amount of time window-based announcements are utilized, which causes the token cache to be continuously flushed.

If you encounter these performance penalties, we recommend converting to global fixed announcements.

Reports

For any given report , select the report icon () and an Acceptance Report will be displayed that shows who has accepted the announcement and who has not. Dwell time (i.e. how long an announcement was displayed before the user dismissed it) is displayed as a summary across all users and on a per user basis.

At any time, a user can select Acknowledged notifications from the User menu to see the notifications they have acknowledged/accepted.

This is the notification list that the user will see once that option is selected:

Bitbucket-specific functionality

If you're using Atlassian Bitbucket, a list of a user's outstanding announcements is shown whenever a user does a git pull/push (and there are changes to be applied). This functionality can be disabled by the administrator.

URLs that are not affected

The Announcer add-on will intercept all page requests with the exception of the below paths:

URL	Product	Description
/rest/*	All	REST URLs are not blocked
/plugins/servlet/upm	All	The Universal Plugin Manager (UPM) is not blocked

Need to circumvent the Cookie check?

The Interstitial announcements are cookie-based and every once in a while you might want to make requests that don't get intercepted. You can use either of the following means to do this:

Set the User-Agent in the Global Configuration (see above).
Set the User-Agent on your request.

Make sure to add in a "X-WITTIFIED-NO-CHECK" header, such as:

curl -H "X-WITTIFIED-NO-CHECK: ignore" http://my-confluence-site.example.com

Confluence and JIRA Data Center

Any enabling/disabling/new Interstitial announcements might take up to one minute to be active across all nodes.

Announcer Series

User Guide - 2.4