Have you ever needed to let all your MantisHub users know about something? Perhaps a new process or procedure? Remind your reporters to make sure they include that vital information when they create issues. Running a customer survey? New release? Flag to the team to check out the Changelog. Let everyone know (or maybe just your project team ; ) ) about Friday drinks. I’m sure you can think of a heap more.
MantisHub have just rolled out the new announcements plugin that allows you to create banners to be visible to your users within the MantisHub app. So you don’t need to use yet another medium to shout out to them. Some of our lovely customers have been asking for this. We totally get the advantages and are excited to deliver!
All administrators have access to install and configure the Announcements plugin. Just head to the plugins page in your MantisHub and check out our KB article for more step-by-step details. Within the configuration, Admins can define who is allowed to create banners according to access level. By default this is MANAGER level and above. You’ll probably want to keep the default. You don’t want just anyone sending out messages, but as with many MantisHub features, you have the flexibility to define it according to what suits your workflow.
Within the Announcement you can define the what, who, when and where for your banner.
What: Give it a title and message content. It can run across multiple lines and if you want, make use of Markdown to add formatting including emphasis and in-line links
Where: You can create a banner to be viewed across all projects or just for a single project and only users with access to that project will see the banner. Location will define where on the screen your message appears.
Who: Determine who sees your banner by defining the access level. Here you are setting the minimum access level for which the banner is viewable. For example, set it to ‘developer‘ and developers, manager and administrators will receive the banner. A users global access level will be applied for all project banners. For specific project banners, the system will use specific project access level if defined, otherwise it will use global access level. If a user does not have access to a private project, they will not see any banners defined for the project.
When: Set the time to live field to allow your banner to automatically disappear after your set time. A setting of 0 means your banner will remain up until you manually deactivate it, or the user dismisses it (if you’ve given them that option). The dismiss option is checked by default so once they’ve read or actioned it, your users can close the banner.
I’m sure you can see the benefit of this great new feature in MantisHub. I’m really excited about it. I’m planning to send out a joke of the week, maybe leave them hanging and create a separate banner for the punch line after a few days. I’ll let you know how it goes ;D. Go ahead and try it out. I’d love to hear how you’ve put it to use! Just tweet @mantishub with your ideas.
Til next time…
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