Administration Overview page

To access the Administration Overview page:

Select the Cog menu > Add-ons.
Expand the entry for the Announcer app.
Click Get Started.

This page shows all active and inactive announcements. To activate or deactivate an announcement, edit the announcement and then change its Status as needed.

From this page, you can click:

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

Create or edit an announcement

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

Basic edit options:

Advanced edit options:

Confluence:

JIRA:

Enter the following details:

Basic edit options

Name	Description
Title	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	An internal description of the announcement and is not displayed to the end user.
Status	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 - Displays the notification as a banner on every page until the end user dismisses it. Full Page - Displays the notification as a "full page" acknowledgment (see list of of URLS below that are not affected). Dialog - Displays the notification as a dialog. Flag - Displays the notification as a popup that appears in the top righthand corner of the screen until the 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 enter the body of the announcement.

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 and Bitbucket 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. For Jira: Only the projects that the current user has 'Browse' permission for are shown.
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 a warning 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.
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.
Show announcement upon every login	Select this checkbox to display the announcement to the user upon every login.

Click:

Preview to preview the announcement in a new tab.
Save to save the changes made to the announcement.
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 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 () to display an Acceptance Report 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 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 ^Jakarta Commons-HttpClient.+ (this allows the Application Links to pass through).

For additional information on regular expressions, you may want to visit RegExLib.com or the Regular Expression Test Page.

blank

Dialog height This allows you to change the default dialog height of Dialog announcements.

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 app will intercept all page requests with the exception of the following 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.

Slack deep link support

Starting in version 2.7, announcements can be configured to open the Slack desktop client with the help of Slack deep linking.

Below are the three examples showing how to configure it:

To open the Slack desktop client
```
<a href="slack://open">Open Slack</a>
```

To open the Slack desktop client for a specific team

<a href="slack://open?team={TEAM_ID}">Open Slack</a>

To open the Slack desktop client for a specific team and channel
```
<a href="slack://channel?team={Team_ID}&id={CHANNEL_ID}">Chat with us on Marketing channel</a>
```
Click on this link to learn how to find Slack team and channel ids.

Announcer Series

Admin Guide - 2.7