Announcements

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Configuring the announcements for the Self-Service Portal, Service Catalog, and Service Desk Home pages.

Overview

Announcements contain information about planned maintenance work, current system failures, or other news that are relevant for your end users. All the announcements are managed on the Announcements page in the Matrix42 Service Catalog and Service Desk, and shown on the Service Catalog, Service Desk, and Self Service Portal Homepages as per Audience settings.

SSP Announcements1.png

Announcements displaying example in Self Service Portal

Announcements Service Catalog.png

Announcements displaying example in Service Catalog

The number of dots at the bottom of the Announcements area on the Service Catalog Homepages corresponds to the number of Announcements available to the specified Audience. Use arrows on both sides of the Announcements area to move between the announcements.

Managing Announcements

Announcements can be created from the Announcements page in the Service Catalog or Service Desk:

Service Catalog Announcements.png

General

The General dialog page of the Announcements dialog allows you to define the following data:

Announcement General.png

Subject: Subject line to be displayed at the top of the announcement.
Message: Message of the announcement to be displayed below the subject.
Settings: Visibility settings for the announcement.
- Visibility: Define the time when, if ever, the announcement is visible to the specified Audience by selecting a Visibility option for the announcement. Choose from:
  - Always (default)
  - Time Period
  - Retired
  - Never
- Visible From: Define the starting point for the Time Period visibility option. The control is disabled for all the other visibility options.
- Visible Until: Define the point, the date and time, when the announcement gets hidden for the Time Period visibility option. The control is disabled for all the other visibility option.

Audience

All new announcements are unrestricted, or visible to everyone by default. You, however, can restrict the visibility of announcements via the functionality located on the Audience dialog page of the Announcement dialog. On the Audience dialog page, you can explicitly define the Organizational Units, Locations, Roles, and Users that are authorized to see the announcement.

Select the This announcement is restricted checkbox if you want to restrict the announcement:

To hide the announcement from everyone, select the checkbox but do not add any Organizational Units, Roles, and Users to the grids below.
To allow only select Organizational Units, Roles, and Units to view the announcement and hide it from the rest of users, select the checkbox and add the Organizational Units, Roles, and/or Users that should be able to view the announcement to the grids below.

Announcement Audience.png

Organizational Units: Only users from the selected organizational units will see the announcement in the Service Catalog and Self Service Portal.
Users: The specified users will see the announcement irrespective of their organizational unit.
Roles: Users that belong to the specified roles will see the announcement irrespective of their organizational unit.

Click Save & Close to apply the changes. The created Announcement will be added to the list of Announcements as follows:

Announcement preview.png

Activities

The Activities dialog page allows you to manage incidents, problems, changes, and tasks that are related to this announcement.

Announcements Activities.png

To add a Change, Incident, Problem, or Task to the grid, click the + add action on the top left corner of the grid.
To remove objects from the grid, select them and click the Remove action located above the grid.
To sort the grid by any of the columns, A to Z order, click the column name. Click it again to revert the sorting order.
Click the Columns icon located above the grid on the right to display the Columns panel and be able to add columns to or remove them from the gird by selecting / deselecting checkboxes next to their names.

Use Ticket ID to differentiate between Changes, Incidents, Problems, and Tasks: CHN = Change, TCK = Ticket or Incident, PRB = Problem, TSK = Task.

Actions

In the actions pane of the Announcement Preview, you can access actions available for announcements:
Announcements actions.png

Edit: Open the announcement for editing.
Copy Announcement: Copy this announcement and create a new announcement from it. All information will be copied except for related activities.
Delete: Delete the announcement.
History: View the history of announcement related transactions.
Export: Export the announcement to an .xml file.
Print: click the Show more actions icon to see all actions and the additional Print option for printing all the information from this item's preview page.