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.
Jeff,
Yes, this is currently being worked on. We are looking to have the announcements improvements ready for customers in a couple weeks. Stay tuned here.
Thanks,
Freshservice Product Team
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 new Announcements improvements are now live.
- Schedule an announcement to be visible to your users whenever you choose.
Have a scheduled outage this weekend ? Create your announcement earlier and schedule it to be posted on the helpdesk at the right time. You can also leave announcements running for as long as you want and auto-archive them afterwards.
- Control whom the announcement is visible to.
Choose the specific groups/departments/companies (MSP mode) that are impacted by the announcement and let only them know.
- Notify users over email.
Want to pro-actively notify your users rather than wait for them to see your announcement on the helpdesk portal ? Easy. Just choose to send a created announcement by email . At the time when your announcement is posted on the helpdesk, it will also be sent over email.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on the new announcements. We'll be making a few more small tweaks in the coming days, but wanted to get this out to you for your feedback, so do let us know here.
Thanks,
Freshservice Product Team
Jeff, Thanks for your feedback.
Actually, the email does work exactly like you describe it. When the 'Also Send this announcement by email' is checked, it does sent the announcement as an email, at the scheduled date/time to the chosen recipients (everyone or agents only or specific groups). The 'Add Email Recipients' is really for additional recipients like external vendors etc that you may want to notify.
We'll make a couple tweaks to reflect this clearly in the UI.
Thanks,
Freshservice Product Team
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.
Craig Marriott
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.
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