Calling all admins 📣 this announcement (banner) is for you!

[#1]

Looking for better methods of communication? You can now get important messages to your team that won’t get lost in emails or chat threads!

I’m Sunny, a Product Manager focused on building Premium features for Confluence Cloud and I’m excited to share that the announcement banner is now available. The announcement banner is a powerful tool that lets Confluence Premium and Enterprise admins easily share information to help teams stay informed and up-to-date with critical information.

Why did we build this?

Historically, Confluence Cloud Admins lacked a way to communicate broadly with their teams, and users were often unsure where to find the most important announcements. Confluence blogs are a great way to share important details and long-form announcements, but it was tough to ensure that teams were made aware of these critical updates without sending alerts to other tools like email and chat.

With announcement banners now available as a native feature of Confluence Cloud, it’s easy to create and manage these critical announcements in the place where teams are actually working, so the most important messages can cut through the noise, and the risk of missed messages is reduced. You can easily share things like:

🔒 Security and compliance updates

📑 Updated company policies

⚙️ Organization change management

and more!

How do Admin Announcements work?

Banners are visible on all pages within Confluence for your selected audience. You can configure the visibility of an announcement banner, so only certain users can see it. These groups are: 

• Public: Anyone in Confluence, including guests and users from other organizations. This includes users from anonymous access and JSM access.

• Private: Only licensed users within your organization. In other words, anyone who can log in to Confluence and view content in your organization. 

Setting up your announcement banner

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. Under Display Settings, create your message and select a color for your banner. 

4. Select whether or not you’d like end users to have the ability to dismiss the message

5. Select Private or Public for banner visibility. 

When can you start using Admin Announcements?

Admin Announcements is rolling out to Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise instances over the next few weeks, so if you don’t see it now, you should have it soon.

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 this new feature in the comments below!

[G subramanyam]

Pretty cool and needed feature.

[michelle_bachmann]

In Jira, the announcement banner has been available for some time.  (I know this BECAUSE I use it.)  It would have added value to have this feature at the same subscription level as it exists in Jira, which is the standard level.  I am disappointed that it was added to only premium and enterprise Confluence subscription levels.   

[Dave Mathijs]

Fancy, but why only for Premium and Enterprise plans? This is not an advanced feature.

[ITS-Middleware ITS-Middleware]

Echoing Michelle above. Insanity this was a free feature on Confluence Server on prem, it's in Jira Cloud for standard plans. But, it's premium for Confluence. We thought we were finally getting what we needed, but just are not. 

[Haddon Fisher]

I don't mean to rain on any parades - this feature was requested initially over a decade ago, so I'm obviously happy something we all wanted for so long actually got done. 

But....uh...."Premium feature" is a funny way of spelling "table stakes features people expect to exist".

[Matt Hine]

Wow, we wait over 10 years for something is available on the standard plan on jira, to find its not available on the standard plan for confluence. As people have said above, this is surely a standard feature that should be included on all packages!!

[Andy Gladstone]

Used this for the first time today to announce our monthly lunches in all locations!

[Matt Reiner [K15t]]

Just made a little video summing this all up: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uD92eRIjcp4
Of course, we had to add a few best practices in there. Can't help ourselves.

[Eusebio Ajenjo Gutiérrez]

This a very useful tool for admins, but any customer is going to pay premium for it. It doesn´t have a business value. Admins features should be for any kind, I think

[Erki Tammik]

@Sunny Sun 

Global banners are good for bigger changes, but you are forgetting that teams working in different projects could benefit from this feature too.

I often find myself helping other teams with Jira projects, and it would be very nice to select affected projects and add a banner with a link to information so the whole team could know what has changed. Changes could be made in workflows, fields, Epics or anything else. It would be nice to announce these changes per affected project.

Why don’t you also make it possible to add a banner per project and space?

[StephanieC]

Will this be available in Data Canter? 

[P_D_ Foerster]

Well, good that you made this feature available in Cloud after all. However, I must agree with my fellow community users that this must be included in all paid plans, including standard.
The Confluence admin doesn't care what subscription plan the company has if something needs to be announced.

The functionality is available in Jira server / DC for a long time and also on Confluence server / DC you could make announcements in a similar way with custom HTML.

[Zoriana Bogutska_Adaptavist_]

@P_D_ Foerster if your team is up to 10 members, you can look to apps from Atlassian Marketplace that offer alternatives of announcement banners for free. One such is Content Formatting Macros for Confluence. For cloud users, it includes the interactive banner macro that allows to set announcements on a page level. 

[Vikdal_ Hans Marius]

Please consider to make this available to alle Confluence Cloud plans. This i not a feature that should require a premium or Enterprise level license. This is a tool that all admins should be able to utilize to administer their instance. 

[Kerli Loopman]

I appreciate the hyperlink feature, a missed aspect in Jira announcement banners. Hopefully, this enhancement extends to both products. I concur with comments advocating for universal availability on all Confluence Cloud plans, as it's not an add-on worth paying extra for, given the existing premium plan features.