Exercise 4.4: Creating organization announcements

In this exercise you will learn how to create and enable an organization announcement.

Overview

If you have an announcement for all users in your company, you can use an announcement to display a message on the dashboard for all of your users.

The announcement displays on users' dashboards.

You can display up to three announcements to users at any time. You can create and save up to eight announcements for future posting.
Note: Organization announcements are different from system announcements, which are sent by Support to broadcast messages about SmartCloud for Social Business, for example notifications of upcoming maintenance.

Objectives

After completing this exercise, you should be able to:

Glossary

Term Definition
Organization announcement Broadcast message created and distributed by a SmartCloud for Social Business administrator to users containing information you want to make them aware of. Announcements are displayed on My Dashboard for all the users in your company.
Parent topic: Lesson 4: Customizing SmartCloud for Social Business for your organization
Previous topic: Exercise 4.3: Adding a custom field to user profiles
Next topic: Exercise 4.5: Subscribing users to system announcements

Procedure

Step
Action
1
Log in and navigate to the Administration panel. For detailed steps, see the procedure document: Accessing the Administration Panel.
2
From the navigation pane, click Announcements.
Click Announcements.
3
Click Add an Announcement.
Click Add Announcement.
4
Fill in the content for the Title, Message Text, URL Address, and URL Description fields.
Tip: The URL Address and URL Description fields are optional. If you do not have a URL to include with the announcement, leave the fields blank. They will not display on the announcement when it is posted for users.
Fill in the title, message text, URL address, and URL description fields.
5
Choose whether you want to set an expiration date for the announcement.

Select No expiration to have the announcement display on users' dashboards until you manually remove it.

Select This will expire on a selected date and set the date and time for expiration to have the announcement automatically disabled and removed from users' dashboards when the announcement expires.

Select No expiration, or select This will expire on a selected date and set a date and time for expiration.

Tip: When you click in the date field, a calendar will be exposed.
Click in the date field to expose a calendar.
6
Choose whether you want the announcement to display immediately on users' dashboards, or if you want to display the announcement at a later date.

Click Save and Enable to save the announcement and post it immediately to your users' dashboards.

Click the Save and Enable button.

To display the announcement at a later date:
  1. Click Save.
    Click the Save button.
  2. When you are ready to post the announcement, click on the arrow next to the announcement. and choose Enable.
    Click the arrow next to the announcement, and then click Enable.
7
Verify that the announcement displays on your dashboard.
The announcement displays on users' dashboards.
8
If you later need to edit the announcement, go to the Announcements page, click on the arrow next to the announcement you would like to edit, and select Edit Announcement.
Click the arrow next to the announcement, and then click Edit Announcement.
9
Make the necessary changes, and then choose to either Save or Save and Enable the announcement.
Remember: If you choose to only save the announcement, you will need to go back to the Announcements page and enable the announcement for it to display on your users' dashboards.
Click Save and Enable or Save.
10
If you would like to delete the announcement, go to the Announcements page, click on the arrow next to the announcement you would like to delete, and select Delete.
Click Delete.

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