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User Guide - 2.1
- Karina Zoin
Version 2.3 of Announcer offers an improved user interface. We recommend you upgrade at your first convenience.
This guide refers to functionality in the 2.1 release of the Announcer app which is currently available for Jira and Confluence.
The Announcer for Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence app is available to install through the Atlassian Marketplace & Atlassian Universal Plugin Manager (UPM).
If you're upgrading from a version prior to 1.5
If you're upgrading from a version from prior to 1.5, please note that all of your announcements will become disabled when you upgrade. Simply visit the Administration Overview page and click Enable all (or select the announcements to enable).
To add a new announcement, click the Cog menu 
and choose Apps. In the left sidebar, click Announcer.
 On This Page
Administration Overview page
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 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 announcement to add a new announcement.
Creating or editing an announcement
When you create or edit an announcement, the Notification editor window will appear.
Standard edit options:
Advanced edit options:
Supply the following details:
Standard 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. |
| Contents | This is the body of the announcement. Please use HTML tags to format the contents. |
| Anonymous Access | 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.
|
| Active/Inactive | Working on a notification and not quite ready for it to be live? Simply hit this checkbox. |
Full Page is not available for announcements created by space (Confluence) or Project (Advanced items
Click Advanced and you can edit the following options:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| 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. |
| Delayed Button activation | Select this checkbox and the Dismiss button will become active after 5 seconds. |
| Filtered Projects/Spaces | If you want to target a project, select this checkbox and then select the project or space that should be used.
|
| Target groups | If you want to target a project, select this checkbox and then select the group of users that should be used.
|
| Format Type | Don't want to enter in HTML code? Use Markdown or just plain text and the system will take care of formatting it properly. |
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 announcer editor will only see 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.Â
Reports
For any given report , select the report icon ()Â and an Acceptance Report will be displayed that shows who has accepted the notification and who has not. Dwell time is displayed as a summary for the entire notification and on a per user basis.
My Acknowledged notifications
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:
Global Configuration
To access the Global Configuration options page, click Edit Settings (
) which appears in the top right corner of the Administration Overview page.
The options that can be configured are:
| Option | Description | Default value |
|---|---|---|
| Enable Space/Project Configuration | This option allows space or project administrators to create their own announcements. | false |
| Full Page Ignore User-Agent | Input a regular expression which, when applied, will 'skip' the verification of interstitial announcements. To maintain normal behavior, leave this field blank. When this field is blank, the regular expression used is | blank |
Project/Space Administrators
New in 2.0, space and project administrators can now edit and create announcements for their given space. These announcements are visible to the global administrator as a regular announcement (with the targeting information).
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)
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
2.1 is almost Confluence and Jira Data Center ready, however because we try to avoid performance issues, any enabling/disabling/new Interstitial announcements might take up to one minute to be active across all nodes.
Need more help? Contact our support team.