Inform users about downtime during migration phases

Your Use Case 🤔

Your company has been using Jira Data Center, but after careful consideration, you have decided to migrate to Jira Cloud. This means that all projects and issues will be moved to the cloud version, and some projects will be archived during the process. The most important part: There will be a temporary downtime.

To ensure a smooth migration, you need to inform your employees about the upcoming changes, the timeline for the migration, and especially the time when Jira won’t be available. Instead of sending an email or posting a message in a channel that might be overlooked, it's best to create an announcement in your Jira instance. This way, all Jira users will receive a notification and can read about the migration and downtime details and instructions on how to behave then.

Solution 💡

With our Announcer module in the Data Protection and Security Toolkit for Jira, you can easily create a company-wide announcement to communicate the migration and corresponding downtime. You can add links to further information or instructions, or even ask your Jira users to provide feedback to the admin if something is not working.

How to communicate a company-wide downtime

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.

Open

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.

Open

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: “Downtime During Migration”. 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 window, you now have all the possibilities to add your exact migration and downtime information. Simply tell your company all hey need to know right now to continue their efficient working.

For example, tell them:

1. Reason for downtime

2. Duration of downtime

3. Impact on services

4. Possible workarounds

5. Contact person for questions

Inside the dialog body you can change the font size, format, add emojis or even images (if you want to be funny), change the background color and much more. You can also add links, for example, to further information about the downtime or workarounds. Clicking preview will show you how the announcement will finally look like.

You can also choose whether you would like 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, you 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.