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Administrator Guide - 2.4
- Karina Zoin
Video:Â Admin Features
The following video provides a helpful high-level overview of the Administration features available within this add-on. See the Administrator Guide documentation below for additional details.
Administration Overview page
To access the Administration Overview page, click the Cog menu 
and choose Add-ons. Expand the entry for the Announcer add-on and then click Get Started.
The Administration Overview page shows all active and inactive announcements. To activate or disable an announcement, edit the announcement and then change its Status as needed.
From this page, you can:
- Click Preview (
) to preview an existing notification. - Click Reset (
) to reset the all counts for an existing active 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 Annoucement editor window will appear.
Basic edit options:
Advanced edit options:
Confluence:
JIRA:
Supply the following details:
Basic edit options
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | This is the title of the notification in the U/I and it is 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 | This 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.
|
| Contents | Use the dropdown to select the desired format (HTML, Markdown, Plain Text) and then supply the body of the announcement. |
Full Page is not available for announcements created by Space (Confluence) or Project (JIRA and Bitbucket Server) Administrators.Advanced edit options
Click Show advanced options... to display additional options:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Filter for specific space(s) | (Confluence only) If you want to target a specific space, select this checkbox and then select the space that should be used. To select multiple spaces, hold down Shift and then click each space. |
| Filter for specific project(s) | (JIRA only) If you want to target a specific project, select this checkbox and then select the project that should be used. To select multiple projects, hold down Shift and then click each project. |
| Filter for specific groups(s) | If you want to target a specific group, select this checkbox and then select the group that should be used. |
| 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. The global administrator can override this in the global configuration. |
| 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.
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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.Â
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 number of these types of announcements are used for Spaces/Projects that are not visited often.
This same type of penalty may be encountered if many time-restricted 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 ()Â 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.
Global Announcer Configuration
To access the Global Announcer Configuration 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 Delegation for Space/Project Admins | This option allows Space Administrators and Project Administrators to create their own announcements. | false |
| Bypass Full Page Announcements | 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 |
| Dialog height | This allows you to change the default dialog height of Dialog announcements. | Â |
| Delay Time | For announcements with the delayed button activation feature enabled, this setting allows you to customize how long the button will be disabled for. | 5 seconds |
Git Push Behavior BITBUCKET ONLY | This allows you to enable or disable the blocking of git push:s if there are outstanding announcements for the user. |
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 behavior can be disabled by the global administrator( see above).
StatusPage.io integration
In order for the integration to work, you have to configure the StatusPage.io API Token.
Configuration
If you're a user of StatusPage.io you can have your StatusPage updates automatically become announcements in the Announcer Series. To do this, simply go to the StatusPage.io Integration page in the administration area. From here you can configure the integration by clicking on the  in the upper right corner. This will bring up the Integration screen.
Integration configuration
| Configuration item | Description |
|---|---|
| Base Url | For most users this will always be https://api.statuspage.io/v1/pages/ |
| StatusPage.io API Token | This is available to you through the StatusPage.io web interface. Simply:
|
| Polling Frequency | How often should Announcer poll for updates on StatusPage.io. This can have server performance impact depending on your configuration. |
| Status Page Link Prefix | This text is prepended to the StatusPage link, allowing the end users when viewing the announcement to click through to StatusPage.io to get more information. |
Announcement mapping
For all of settings in the Announcement Configuration, please refer to the general Announcement configuration options.
| Configuration | Description |
|---|---|
| Status Page | Select the status page that you want pull status updates from |
| Status(s) | Whenever an incident matches a status on the selected page with these values they'll automatically be ingested into Announcer as a new announcement or the previously processed Incident will be updated. |
| Announcement duration | Once an incident has been resolved/closed in StatusPage.io, how long should it remain active in Announcer. |
Whenever an announcement is ingested, it will be displayed in the general Announcement list with the StatusPage.io icon. Please note that this announcements are not editable and are there for your reference only. In addition to this, the announcements are also added to the Active StatusPage.io Announcement page (available in the administration navigation bar). This page will display all StatusPage incidents with history currently active.
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.
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 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.
Need more help? Contact our support team.