Idea: Notifications for Announcements

[Luke]

We have recently shipped the Announcements feature: Feature Preview: Announcements

Currently you need to view your components to see their incoming Announcements. We are exploring ways of introducing notifications, either via Email, in-product notifications, or Slack, to ensure that you don't miss an important announcement when you are outside of Compass. 

Would you find this useful, and what would be your preferred mechanism for receiving these notifications? 

[David Harper]

Hi, I think I have two main use-cases:

1. I'm responsible for a product that depends on something else. When that something else posted an announcement I want to be proactively informed about it because it might break "my thing". This could be in-product, email or chat. It needs to have a visual importance of "High Priority"
2. I am interested in the stream of changes going on to all products. I want somewhere when I can dip-in and see all the announcements. This could be a page in-product, a chat channel in Team/Google Chat/Slack or an opt-in digest email sent daily/weekly. These would have a standard visual importance. Almost like an RSS feed of announcements for those of us old enough to remember them.

@Andy Burgess makes me think of a good point by mentioning Jira in that it could also be handy to turn an announcement in to a Jira issue for my team.

• Team {API} makes announcement of a breaking change in two weeks
• I click on the "Create Issue" button on the announcement
• I make a Jira issue in my project that is linked to the announcement for me to adjust our code
• This in turn could notify the original team that another team has work to do because of their change.

[Andy Burgess]

Yes, I was hoping that announcements would have a notification feature, it would be very useful.
A selection of notification channels options would be good - email, Jira, OpsGenie woudl be useful for me.

[Mac White]

Could the announcement be broadcast to the channels defined in the dependencies graph? Meaning if component A is dependent on component B, then an announcement for B is sent to any configured chat channels in component A.

[Erion Peci]

Hi @Luke I would definitely like to the idea posted by @David Harper to be able to track the announcement with the work unit which has dependency .

But I also I want to bring out that one team manages multiple service which makes it difficult to monitor all the applications announcements . So my proposal would be to have a mechanism  to roll up all the announcement by team and possibly show this as part of the Notifications in the Jira itself , which would allow each user to use emails or whatever is their preference . 

Secondly have a way to integrate the announcement to a alert in Opsgenie this way the team will acknowledge and assign the working item to the alert. 

Thanks

Erion

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

Developer side question: Is there a way to get a badge into the left navigation tab title of a regular Compass component page, similar to the cool unacknowledged announcements badge, or is this an internal capability that's not yet usable from Forge modules?

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

@David Harper has already covered most aspects, I'd just like to rephrase it slightly and then add one more option:

1. As a user, I'd expect some kind of announcement overview in-product so that I can view all pending announcements at a glance - this could be a global page or maybe an additional column in the various component list/table views (would still require checking all component types though).
2. As a developer, I'd expect an API/SPI for announcements so that I can a) notify whatever external channels my team prefers and b) have in-product quick actions like 'Create issue' - this could be built-in RSS/webhook capabilities for platform independent extensibility and/or dedicated Forge modules (which would enable the former for those who need it).

With respect to the need for 1, I've been contemplating to handle announcements as 'just another metric' so that 'Unacknowledged announcements' would surface as a scorecard in the components view, but maybe that's stretching the abstraction/semantics a bit?