Release notes your audience can subscribe to - 🥳. Brand new in Automated release notes

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Background

When we decided to tackle the Release notes generation & distribution problem, we had made up our mind to go the long haul. Here is the entire problem statement we were trying to solve for - 

With minimum efforts 🏋 from Software development teams, generate beautiful release notes with required data points 📊 & communicate them to the relevant audience in different formats via multiple channels 🐦 for superior engagement 💟.

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As of today,  Automated release notes app for Jira doesn’t offer perfect solutions for all of the pain points highlighted above. However, it continues to address almost all of them to a varied extent.

But how?

• Minimum efforts - The way ARN is structured, once you design the templates automation takes over. Just to give you some context here - in CY 2021 ARN’s automated actions were used by our cloud customers (across the free & paid apps) a whopping ~200000 times. 
• Beautiful - With the help of our early adopters, we have transformed ARN’s template builder from a command line-like limited tool to its today’s avatar of a fully functional WYSWYG editor. However, this is one area where we continue to research more as the variety of designing/visual needs of our customers continues to grow exponentially.
• Required data points - ARN exploits the power of JQL very smartly. It introduces its own variables & allows you to build powerful, reusable templates for release notes documents & other types of reports. Additionally, it lets you use any of the default & custom fields in your template. 
• Different formats - The number of formats ARN templates can be created in keeps on growing. As of this writing, there are email, pdf, Confluence, HTML, JSON, POST & event JSM customer portal announcements. However, the one that excites me the most is Release pages & Widgets. These two formats are only supported on the cloud version of ARN.
• Superior engagement - This is an area that we still haven’t wrapped our heads around. In today’s ARN, there isn’t much functionality that directly focuses on measuring/enhancing the audience engagement on your release notes/reports. And we are changing that with our Jan 2022 update. Read on to know more.

Release notes one can subscribe to 

Release pages are standalone webpages where all the release notes content or changelog, as you may call it, resides. These release pages are populated with data from ARN’s rule actions and have a couple of variations in terms of their design & content. 

For example, here are screenshots of ARN’s release pages for Cloud & DC. 

Accessible at - amoeboids.release.page/arn-cloud

Accessible at - amoeboids.release.page/arn-dc

In January 2022 release, we have introduced the ability to allow ‘Subscriptions’ on these release pages. So this is how the end to end flow would look like -

Step 1 - Someone from your target audience navigates to the release page & puts up their email address for the subscription.

Step 2 - ARN will send out a confirmation email & will keep the subscription pending until the end-user confirms the subscription from that email.

Step 3 - Once the user clicks on this confirm button, they will see the confirmation on their web browser.

Step 4 - Now based on ARN’s rules, whenever new release notes content is added to that release page, the subscriber will receive an update email. 

The update email that end-users receive is configurable similar to a usual email template in ARN. To improve the experience though, ARN app adds the ‘Unsubscribe’ link to all of these update emails. 

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Now the release page can become your hub for engaged customer communications. Your end users can simply subscribe to receive any updates that you are rolling out. And your team can sit back & rest assured that ARN will push the release notes content to the release page, send out the update to email subscribers - all without needing any manual intervention.