Announcements

The sections below build up the concept, then link the tasks:

Planned maintenance and platform changes affect everyone who works in Self-Service. When users don’t hear about them, they open support tickets for an outage that was announced elsewhere. An announcement puts the message in Self-Service itself, where users see it when they log in and while they work.

An announcement has a title, a message, a severity and a time window. The severity (Critical, Warning or Information) sets its colour and icon, so users can tell an outage from a routine notice at a glance.

There are two kinds of announcement, and they differ in who publishes them and who sees them:

Each kind holds one announcement at a time. While a tenant announcement is scheduled or active, that tenant can’t publish a second one; the admin edits the existing announcement instead. The same rule applies to the platform announcement. A user can therefore see at most two announcements at once: their tenant’s and the platform’s.

Self-Service shows an active announcement in two places, chosen so it’s visible without getting in the way of work:

Detail pages, the tenant settings page and Insights don’t show announcements, because there people are in the middle of a task.

Closing the card hides that announcement until the browser tab is closed. If an admin edits the announcement afterwards, it counts as a new message and the card shows again, so a correction doesn’t go unnoticed.

When two announcements are active, the banner and the card show one at a time, with arrows to move between them. The more severe one comes first, so a Critical announcement is never hidden behind an Information one. When both have the same severity, the one that started most recently comes first, whichever kind it is.

An announcement has a start and an expiration. Before its start it’s scheduled: admins see it on the card or tab where they manage it, but users don’t. Between start and expiration it’s active and users see it. After its expiration it’s gone; users no longer see it and the admin can publish a new one.

An admin enters the start and expiration in a time zone of their choice, and Self-Service stores both as fixed moments in time. An announcement entered to start at 02:00 in Europe/Amsterdam therefore starts at the same moment everywhere: at 20:00 the evening before in New York. Leaving the start at its default publishes the announcement straight away.

Self-Service checks for new and expired announcements every minute, so an announcement appears and disappears on its own, without users reloading the page.

These pages cover the tasks and the details: