Communications to the Customers

Create and publish customer oriented communications to be displayed at the top of the Enhanced Customer Portal.

Features

Create text based or image based communications (formatting including hyperlinks is supported)
Quick formatting: title / description / predefined icon
Communications are active for a predefined time-frame (i.e. they have a predefined start and end date)

Usage

To create a new Communication or to view the list of Communications, click on the menu “Communications” under “Service Management”.

The menu lists all the “on-going” communications. To see the “closed” communications, open the search form at the top of the page, adjust the search criteria and press the “Search” button.

Creating a new communication

The form to create a new communication is the following:

New Communication form

Field	Meaning
Announcer	The organization owning this communication.
Status	Automatically computed based on the start and end dates
Start date	The date (and time) at which to start showing this communication in the portal
End date	The date (and time) at which to stop showing this communication in the portal
Target organizations…	How to interpret the list of “Allowed organizations”. If the value is `Only the selected ones` the list is an explicit list of all organizations for which to show the communication. If the value is `Cascade to child organizations`, the child organizations of the “Allowed organizations” will also see the message.
Icon	An optional icon to display next to the communication in the portal. Choose “None” for displaying no icon.
Title	An optional plain text title for the communication.
Message	The actual body of the communication. Use the formatting toolbar to style the text, to insert images or add hyperlinks.

The end users do not need to have access to the announcer organization in order to view the communications in the portal. The system automatically displays the appropriate communications independently of the usual access rights.

To create a “graphic only” communication (for example a graphic banner), use the “description” field to insert a large version of the banner as either a JPEG or PNG image, leave the title blank and select Icon: “None”. The banner image will be displayed using the complete width for the browser, automatically adjusting to browser resizes.

Display of the communications in the Portal

Communications in the portal

When a communication is “on going”, it is displayed in the portal, at the top of the home page. The text of the communications are truncated in order to preserve a constant height for the communications area in the home page.

The user can click on a communication to display it in a popup dialog. This is especially useful on small screens (mobile phones) where the communication may be truncated.

Popup showing a communication

If there are several on-going communications at the same time, they are displayed one after the other, using a carousel, automatically sliding to the next communication after 5 seconds. Small bullets are displayed at the bottom of the carousel to allow direct access to the Nth communication. The carousel automatically stops sliding when the user positions the mouse hover it.

When there is no on-going communication, nothing is shown in the home page of the portal.

Limitations

The Wiki syntax (in the text of the communication) creates hyperlinks which point to the console!

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