Would it possible to add a filter to announcements similar to how the add a note works on a ticket. This would be so we could look to do internal agent only private announcements if required, eg a database deployment has been completed successfully. But then also post notifications in regards to known issues which the end users could then see in the portal if need be.

I agree, we really need a way to have internal announcements for the tech staff, and public announcements for our end users. 

Could I get an update on this please, any chance this is on the horizon as it would be very beneficial to us

Craig,

We are starting to work on enhancements to announcements, including control over announcement visbility to Agents only (specific groups/all), requestors only (specific groups/all) or both. Additionally, you will also be able to schedule announcements. Development on this has started, we'll continue to update you here.

Thanks,

Freshservice product team

Great news thanks :)

I am really looking forward to announcements per group/department. We are also really hoping that email notification to those groups/departments will also happen.

Will this include the ability to filter Announcements on a group or company basis for MSP mode? This would be very helpful, so we could show announcements tailored to particular customers.

The ability to use a canned response (that can include an image) for routine announcements would be helpful.  

 

Thank you! These are some awesome edits and will definitely help with communication. It would be even better if we could automatically email all members of a group when an announcement is added if we choose to. Right now looks like we have to enter every email address to send email notification which would be painful. Hopefully an option to email the groups specified can be considered. Everything else is exactly what we need.

Hi Venkat,

I'm so excited for the possibilities that the new Announcements bring! Here are a couple of related things we noticed: our Service Desk is trying to set up groups for each application we manage, so that we can target audiences appropriately. We noticed that any requester marked "can see all tickets from this department" is actually able to see all tickets from every department to which they belong.

So for example, our Customer Service Manager is a member of "Customer Service" as well as "Accounting Software". This means that she can see all tickets from anybody in Customer Service (good thing) as well as all tickets from any member of the Accounting Software team (not necessarily a good thing).

Another issue is that we have a header up on our user portal that shows the latest announcement with a subject, date, and "view all" link. Whenever an announcement is no longer relevant, we go to the portal customization section and comment out (<!--) the announcement container. Then whenever we want to display the announcements header, we remove the comment tags.

I played around with the announcement expiration time, but it doesn't exactly do what we would like - it just removes the announcement itself, rather than helping us get rid of the announcement header. Are there any plans to revamp the code for creating an announcement banner such that we could easily hide/display it whenever an announcement is active? In other words - we don't want to delete historical announcements. We want to retire the announcement after a certain time (not delete the announcement), then automatically have the banner go away once the message is retired; then when we create an announcement, we want the banner to come back up again.

These aren't huge issues, but I figured I would pass along the feedback. Again, thank you for working on announcements - it will allow us to keep relevant users in the loop so much more easily!

Regarding the header Dave mentioned - it's really nice being able to present an announcement in a banner on our freshservice portal. This helps to get important information out front for anyone who goes to the portal (if they didn't see or read an email) thus minimizing duplicate tickets and improving access to communication. It would be nice if there was a control in the announcement to display the announcement in the banner on the home page so we don't have to keep editing the html. 

We created a custom banner as Dave mentioned to allow us to display the "Active" announcement as we see fit (Major incident, Maintenance, Important System information, Etc..). We only display part of the announcement in the header and the user clicks the banner to read the entire announcement. I have attached our custom code in hopes that you can better understand what we are doing and in case others are interested in adding the same functionality to their portal. Hopefully you can add a control on announcements to automate the ability to display announcements on the freshservice portal.

This may also be helpful... Attached is a screenshot of what the custom banner looks like with a sample announcement.