There will often be times when you will need to make a change to the system, where you need to take JIRA down for a period of time. In a production environment, where there is a high reliance on the uptime, this can lead to unnecessary disruption to the users if not planned and communicated accordingly. JIRA recognizes this and provides a facility to help by letting administrators place an announcement banner on every page in JIRA. Together with traditional methods, such as e-mail alerts, day-to-day business disruptions caused by system downtime can be minimized.
Perform the following steps to put up an announcement banner in JIRA:
- Browse to the JIRA administration console.
- Click on Announcement Banner in the left panel. This will bring up the Edit Announcement Banner page.
- Specify the announcement. This can be any simple text, valid HTML markup, CSS, or JavaScript.
- Select if you want this announcement to be public, where everyone will be able to see, or private where only logged-in users can see.
- Click on the Set Banner button to put up the announcement.
In the following screenshot, we create an announce banner that will warn users about a planned outage. We also use some JIRA CSS classes, so the output will be consistent with the general look and feel of JIRA:
The following screenshot shows the result of the announcement banner we have set up. The banner will be at the top of page and will be visible on every page in JIRA until you remove it:
