Announcement banners: now able to be scheduled!

[#1]

Enjoying the new Announcement Banner feature in Confluence Cloud, but looking for a way to plan your announcements ahead of time? Good news! You can now set start and end times for your banners!

I’m John, a Product Manager focused on improving the experience of admins within Confluence Cloud, and I’m excited to share that you can now schedule, copy, and archive your announcement banners:

Why did we build this?

While the Announcement Banner feature already provided a powerful channel for Confluence Premium and Enterprise admins to easily share important information to their teams, admins were limited to manually publishing and removing their banners. This created the inconvenience of forcing admins to publish and make changes to their banners in real time.

Admins were also unable to access their historical banners. This not only created an inefficiency for admins looking to copy a previous banner and quickly re-publish information, but also prevented our admins from being able to review historical details around the who, when, or what of their team’s previous banners.

Setting up your announcement banners

Note: only product and org admins can create announcement banners

1. Select the settings or gear icon on the upper right corner of your page. 

2. From the left navigation bar, find the Announcement banner tab. 

3. Select either the Create Announcement button or the edit icon next to an existing banner in the table to begin creating or editing your banner

How does scheduling banners work?

After selecting to create or edit a banner, setting specific Start and End dates and times will automatically control when a particular banner is active and visible, but neither is required.

If no Start and End dates and times are set, banners are designed to start as soon as they’re published, and to run indefinitely or until archived.

Only one banner can be active at a time, but scheduling additional banners can be a useful strategy for setting up a queue of banners to run in succession.

Viewing activity about banners in the audit log

In addition to viewing metadata about historical banners within the feature's tab, we've also added new events to our audit log to provide additional context:

The audit log can be found by selecting the settings or gear icon on the upper right corner of your page, and then scrolling down to find the Audit Log tab. 

When can you start scheduling your banners?

Banner scheduling and other management capabilities have now been rolled out to all Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise instances!

ℹ️ For Free and Standard customers: If you’d like to try this out, you can start a free trial in your admin portal under “manage plans.”

Let us know what you think and how you’re planning to use the new scheduling capabilities in the comments below!

[Tim Eddelbüttel]

The Announcement Banner is considered as a Premium / Enterprise feature? The scheduler itself is a nice addition.

Personally I think it would be better for Atlassian when not the whole feature is hidden behind a higher plan. Considering have some "basic" functionalities also available in Free / Standard and just highlight what you can get if you upgrade to Premium / Enterprise.

Sometimes it feels like the recent move of BMW to put seat heating into a monthly subscription :D

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Cool addition!

Any plans on releasing announcement banner scheduling for JSW/JSM?

[mybucket2018]

Would also be good if we can restrict the announcement banner to certain groups next .

[Summer_Hogan]

Cool new feature!