Azure DevOps - Announcement
Have you ever wanted to have a send an Announcement to everyone who is using Azure DevOps? It could inform them of:
- Change of Organisation Name
- Maintenance work on the Build Agents
- Deadline for a release
Azure DevOps enables you to put a banner message on the top of the browser window to display a message. The message below is an example of how it will look. Every page on Azure DevOps will show this message until the user closes the banner bar, or the message expires.
How to Get Started?
There are two different approaches to this. There are a couple of different ways to do this.
- Using Banner Settings Extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-eswm.banner-settings-hub
- Using Azure DevOps CLI
- Using the REST Web Services - I won’t be covering this approach in this post
Using Banner Settings Extension
You need to go to Azure DevOps Extension if you haven’t done this before head to the top right of Azure DevOps and click on the shopping bag. Then click Browse Marketplace, this will take you to the Azure DevOps Browser Marketplace. Search for Banner Settings or navigate to https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-eswm.banner-settings-hub .
Click get it free, then select the organisation you want to install the extension. You may not have permission to install an extension so you will have to request from your Administrator.
Now it is install or download and install it on you Azure DevOps server
Navigate to the organisation settings, on the menu sidebar scroll down to the bottom, and you will find Extensions with a sub-menu of Banner.
To create a new banner message, click on Add Banner, then type your message into the message field.
To change the type and the expiry date, click on Edit more. See image below for more options.
The different levels change the colour and icon show with the message.
The expiry date and time specifies when the message is hidden from the users. Note this date is month/day/year.
If you need to add more information in the message, add all the details in a wiki page and then include a link, using markdown syntax to link to the page for example :
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Beware if you add more than one message only one will be displayed with the highest level. So Error will be shown if you have Error and Info messages added. Then if the user closes the Error message the Info Message will be shown next.
Azure CLI
With Azure DevOps CLI you can do exactly the same
Firstly login to Azure
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Now that you have logged in you can add a message. The below will add a message “Hello this is a test message” and will expire on the 24th January 2020 at 10:00am for the Azure-DevOps-Tips organisation. If you have configured a default organisation you can leave off the organisation parameter.
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The next command can be used to view the messages that have been configured.
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