Portal Announcements
Announcements are notices published into the portal. They reach one audience or everyone, can be scheduled ahead and can be withdrawn. Use them for the things people would otherwise ring up about — a price change, a shutdown week, a new payment method, a payroll date that has moved.
Writing one
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Title | What appears in the list. |
| Announcement | The body. |
| Audience | Customers, Suppliers, Employees or Everyone. |
| Category | Groups notices so people can tell news from policy. |
| Published | When it goes live. A future date schedules it. |
| Expiry | Optional. When it stops being shown. |
The states
| State | Means |
|---|---|
| Scheduled | Written, with a publish date still ahead. |
| Live | Being shown in the portal now. |
| Expired | Past its expiry date and no longer shown. |
| Withdrawn | Taken down deliberately before its time. |
When a notice is published the screen confirms how many portal users were notified.
Audience
Pick the narrowest audience that is true. Everyone is convenient and it is why people stop reading announcements — a supplier who has been told twice about a payroll date will ignore the notice that matters to them. Customers, suppliers and employees have genuinely different concerns, which is why the audience field exists.
Scheduling and expiry
Setting the publish date ahead lets you write a notice when you know about it rather than when it takes effect. Setting an expiry keeps the portal clean: a shutdown notice for last August helps nobody in October, and nothing prunes the list except the dates you give.
An announcement with no expiry stays live indefinitely. For anything with a natural end — a promotion, a temporary arrangement, a closure — set the expiry when you write it, while you still know what it is.
Notification
Publishing notifies the audience through the portal, and pushes to their devices where notifications are switched on. See Portal notifications for what reaches a phone and what does not.