Announcement Portlet Admin Guide

Adding a Topic

Every announcement must have a topic, so the first step to getting an announcement published is creating a new topic. You'll notice that there is already a topic named "EMERGENCY." This is a reserved topic for posting emergency announcements only. (That will be covered later.)

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.

Additionally, you may choose to offer this topic as publicly-viewable RSS. Only audience members are provided with the RSS link, but anybody who knows the link may gain access to the announcements.

Setting up Topic Permissions

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.

Adding an Announcement

Before you add an announcement, be sure that you have created a topic and assigned some audience members to it.

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.

Publishing an Announcement

Announcements must be published by a user with Editor privileges or higher. When announcements are edited, they must be published again.

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.

Deleting an Announcement

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

You should try to delegate your workload by allow other users to become Topic Admins, Contributors or Editors of a certain topic. You assign them in the same way that you assign Audience Members (see Topic Permissions). Additionally, a diminished UI is provided for each type of role. For example, contributors and editors cannot see the "Permissions" section of the Topic management screen. See the chart below for the differences between roles.

Emergency Announcements

The Portal Admin can manage a special topic named "EMERGENCY." This topic cannot be edit nor can it be deleted. There can only be one emergency topic. It is created automatically when the Announcements Portlet is loaded for the first time. Whenever an announcement is added to the Emergency topic and published, a special announcement appears for all users specified as audience members. Although the Portal Admin can choose to assign different audience members to the Emergency Topic, it is advised to leave it as is. You can add contributors, editors, and topic admins to the Emergency topic just like any other topic.

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.