Ways to use a universal messaging system in Jira/Confluence

[Andreas Springer _Actonic_]

Hi, all.

Here's a question to start off your week:

Let's assume you had a system to show whatever message you want to your Jira or Confluence users. The message can be (formatted) text, images, videos, whatever. You can show it to all users, specific groups, etc. and you can have interactive elements (buttons) like yes/no, accept/decline, whatever you want.

What would you use this for? What would you want such a system to be able to do?

I'm eager to hear what you can come up with. :)

Thanks!

Best,
Andreas

[Darryl Lee · Accepted solution]

Hi @Andreas Springer _Actonic_ -

So it might be nice to have something like Announcement Banners back in Cloud, so that we could tell people if there's going to be an outage for maintenance or something. Oh wait, with Cloud there's never any (ahem) scheduled outages.

Well, it would also be good for non-Confluence/Jira messages like, "Office will be closing early for margaritas this afternoon" or something. :-}

And if people had to acknowledge the message, that'd be nice too.

Oh would you look at that - it's already available for Jira. 

Well, another thing that would be interesting is if you can have it "pop up" with a notification in people's screens for when you have an urgent message like, "Please save your work because we have to upgrade the backend database." (Again though, not treally a cloud issue.)

Hum.

[Andreas Springer _Actonic_]

Thanks for your input. Love the margaritas part. :D

[Dave Mathijs · Accepted solution]

Hi @Andreas Springer _Actonic_ , great question!

I would use it for tailored announcements or field help instructions.

[Andreas Springer _Actonic_]

Nice! What exactly do you mean by field help instructions? Can you give some examples?

[Dave Mathijs]

In Cloud, the description of a custom field isn't shown anymore when hovering over the system/custom field. Field help instructions can be used like the Request form Description in JSM to display what is expected from the user on how to choose a certain value for a field.

Example for Story Points options (in pop-up window when hovering over the field):

Value	Description
0	No effort is required, or there is some efford required, but there is no business value delivered, so no points are accumulated for doing the work. An example is a desired behavioral change deriving from the scrum retrospective
1	Extra small. Developers feel they understand morst requirements and consider it relatively easy, probably the smallest item in the sprint and mostly like completed in one day.
2	Small. A little bit of thought, effort, or problem-solving is required, but the developers have done this a lots, so they have confidence in the requirements. Or, it sounds extra small, but they want to hedge their bet just a bit.
...	...

[Andreas Springer _Actonic_]

Good point, thanks! :)