Communicate Software Outage in your company

Your Use Case 🤔

Imagine that an app in your Jira instance has suffered a total outage overnight. Maybe even the time tracking app? Now, you need to inform the entire company about this software outage as soon as possible. How do you proceed? A newsletter? The mailbox is unfortunately not looked at often enough. That's why you better add the important announcement directly in your Jira instance! That way, every employee will definitely see it.

Solution 💡

With our Announcer module in the Data Protection and Security Toolkit for Jira, you can easily create a company-wide announcement to track and manage the communication and resolution of the software outage. With a transparent announcement about the cause and expected duration of the outage, as well as possible solutions, you prevent panic among your employees and signal strong crisis management.

How to communicate a company-wide outage

Step 1: View Announcer Dashboard

From your Jira Dashboard, navigate to the Manage Apps tab and to the Data Protection and Security Toolkit section. Find the Announcer button, click on it, and you will see the Announcer dashboard. It is the main page where administrators can view and manage all announcements.

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Step 2: Create the announcement

You can create an announcement from a template (Privacy Policy or Cookie Policy) or, which is more appropriate in your case, simply create your own Jira announcement from scratch. Click on Create to do so.

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Step 3: Configure the announcement

Now, you’ll see the blank configuration page of your Jira announcement, including the preview of it.

This page consists of 4 configuration options: General, Styling, Scope and Review, which we will now modify one by one.

Step 3.1: Change general information

Pick a clear name for your template and a description. Here, for example, we can use: “Outage of Time Tracking App”. The template name is the internal name that will only be displayed for admins. The Dialog title will be displayed to the user group you define.

In the dialog box, you now have all the options to add your exact outage description and information on the damage minimization and solution finding. You can also suggest workarounds for the meantime. Simply tell your company what they need to know right now to get through this time of software outage.

Inside the dialog body you can change the font size, format, add emojis or even images (when you want to be funny), change the background color and much more. You can also add links, for example, to further instructions on what to look out for now. Clicking preview will show you how the announcement will finally look like.

You can also choose whether you want to perform your customizations in the text editor or directly in HTML.

By clicking on Next, you will be navigated to the Styling options.

Step 3.2: Change styling

In the styling configurations of your Jira announcement for your development project, you can decide where the announcement should be placed and how large.

In our case, because we want to show a notification to every user of our Jira instance and to all user groups, we should choose any display option you like except "Block login form" or "Pin to footer and blog login form". With these two options, you can display the Jira announcement even to users that aren’t already logged in. We don’t need that here. You can add up to two buttons and change the texts for Accept and Decline to your liking.

Because this is a pure announcement, and there is no reason not to accept it, the only thing that would probably be appropriate here is an “Accept” button. Be aware: If you select only one button in the button count, it means accepting this announcement is required.

By clicking on Next, you will be navigated to the Scope options.

Step 3.3: Change the scope of your announcement

Now, you can define the scope of your Jira announcement and define in which projects the announcement should be displayed to which user groups.

1. Skip Select projects since you want to display it everywhere in Jira

2. Can view > Logged-in users

3. Skip Select groups since you want to display it to all groups

4. Select the display framing time > always

By clicking on Next, you will be navigated to the Review.

Step 3.4: Review

In the last step of your Jira announcement configuration, you can review your work and have also the preview next to the configuration. If you set the status of the announcement to Enabled, it will be activated right after you hit Save. If you click Disabled, you need to enable it later.

Click on Save and you’re done!

Analyze the announcement

Now, your announcement will be displayed like this to your whole company:

In the statistics, you can view how many Jira users have viewed and accepted or declined your announcement.