Every system administrator, at some point, needs to make few key announcements to the entire user base including upcoming system maintenance notifications. Today most system admins make use of emails or company announcement systems to send such notifications but there are very high chances that users do not pay attention to such notifications.
It is better to show notification to the users in the system where they work most of their day. AgilePoint NX portal is one such system. For those of you who are already familiar with AgilePoint NX OnDemand portal, it does have an announcement mechanism used by product team to push new release announcements as well as make users aware of any upcoming system maintenance. There was a wish list feature from some of the clients to enable same announcement mechanism in AgilePoint NX Portal for their system admins to use for custom announcements.
With AgilePoint NX 7.0 SU2, we did provide a way for system admin to configure this by adding values to the portal config file but that means system admin needed to have access to the VM.
With AgilePoint NX v9.0, we are opening this feature for system admins to push custom announcements and system maintenance messages to users who log on to AgilePoint portal via an easy to use web based interface which does not need any VM access.
For those of you who prefer enabling such notifications through a controlled process flow, we have provided dedicated process activities for these features as well under the AgilePoint NX activity group
- Create Announcement
- Update Announcement
- Delete Announcement
- Publish Announcement
- Set System Maintenance
Please note that this feature is only enabled in AgilePoint NX OnPremises or Private Cloud at this moment. For OnDemand customers who are using a shared environment, announcements are managed by AgilePoint IT team.
Here is a short video on how this feature can be configured and used.