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First click on "Add a new Topic" and fill out the form completely.
The different subscription methods describe how you want the audience of this topic to receive the announcements.
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Now that you've added a new topic, you must, at a bare minimum, define the audience of the topic. From the home screen of the Announcements Admin portlet, select the cog icon ("Manage") from the icons next to your new topic.
This brings up the topic management screen. The topic management screen is divided into two sections: Announcements on top and Permissions below. In the Permissions section, locate the column labeled "Audience Members" and click the "Edit" link.
You may select any combination of groups or individual users. Enter users by their unique portal user IDs. When you are finished, click "Update." In this example, we've selected "Everyone" as the group, which is mapped to the uPortal root group in the portlet.xml file.
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Click on "Add Announcement" to bring up the new announcement screen. Here you must fill in all fields except Link (URL), which is optional. When announcements are displayed, the abstract is not shown when users view the full announcement. So if you have important information in the abstract, be sure to repeat it in the message body. You must also set a date to begin displaying the announcement and a date to stop displaying it. Dates can be typed in the MM/DD/YYYY format or selected from the date-picker by clicking the calendar icon.
Save the announcement to place it into the queue for the topic.
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Announcements in the queue show a status of "Pending" with a red background in the topic management screen. Click the green checkmark icon ("Publish") in order to publish the announcement. If the announcement is scheduled to display today, the status changes to "Showing" with a green background. However, if the announcement is post-dated, it will show a status of "Scheduled" also with a green background. When an announcement has expired (and before it is automatically deleted) it will show a status of "Expired" with a red background.
Unpublishing an Announcement
Similar to publishing an announcement, to unpublish an announcement, click the red stop sign icon ("Take Down") in order to unpublish the announcement. The announcement is immediately changed to a status of "Pending" and is no longer displayed to users.
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An announcement in the pending state will still be automatically deleted once its end date has passed. |
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Announcements that expired the previous day are automatically deleted at 3 a.m. each morning. This includes announcements with a "Pending" status. You may also delete an announcement manually by clicking the trash can icon ("Delete") in the topic management screen.
Deleting a Topic
If you are a Portal Administrator as defined by the "Portal_Administrators" group in portlet.xml, you may delete an entire topic. Doing so will delete all announcements within the topic and the action is not reversible. To delete the entire topic, click the trash can icon ("Delete") in the "Admin Home" screen.
Delegating the Workload
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To add an emergency announcement, follow the same procedure as for any other topic. Click the cog icon ("Manage") from the Admin home screen.
A live emergency announcement is depicted below.
