InfoIQ

The builder

An announcement is a sequence of pages, not a block of text. Each page carries a title, rich content and an optional image or video. Pages can be reordered — by dragging, or with the move controls — and previewed as the reader will see them before anything is published. A PowerPoint deck imports as one page per slide, so there is nothing to rebuild by hand.

Readers can ask the author a question from inside the announcement. Questions are private between the reader and the author until the author chooses to publish an answer, at which point everyone targeted by the announcement sees it.

Targeting

Targeting has two halves, held by two different people. Who receives an announcement is a named audience, built once by an administrator from profiles, roles, users, public groups and queues, and picked by the author from the library. Where it shows is the author's: an application, a page type and, on a record page, an object. Authors never handle criteria, so the definition of "the support team" lives in one place.

Audiences are evaluated against the org's own data at delivery rather than copied into a list, so people who join a team next month are covered by the audience written last month. Membership of a group or a queue is counted the way Salesforce counts it: by name, through a role and its subordinates, and through nested groups.

The size of the audience is measured when the announcement is published, and every coverage figure is stated against it. An audience in use by a live announcement is locked, so nobody can quietly change who a running campaign reaches.

An unrecognised criterion never silently widens an audience: it is treated as no restriction only after being logged, so a misconfiguration is visible rather than invisible.

The reading experience

Recipients see a card in the corner of the Salesforce page they are already on, and open the announcement when they choose; it reads as a modal, page by page, at their own pace, or put off for an hour with Later. Once they have opened it, it is not offered again. A Critical announcement is the exception: it cannot be put off, and comes back until it has been read through or closed. So is one that asks readers to confirm: it comes back until they tick that they read and understood it. The package records how far they got: which pages they reached, and how deep into the announcement they went.

Analytics

Two measures, kept deliberately distinct:

• Reach — how many targeted people opened the announcement at all.
• Attention — how far into it they got, page by page.

On each announcement, the Readers tab names who it targets and where each of them stands — never shown, shown, opened, finished, and confirmed when the author asked readers to confirm. Your administrators decide how far it goes: every detail, names and status without the times, or the totals alone — by organisation, profile or user. One click reminds everyone it is still owed to with a Salesforce notification, at most once a day, whichever they chose.

A deleted announcement keeps contributing to your corpus statistics: a snapshot of its figures is written before the deletion, whichever way it is deleted — from the app, a list view, Data Loader or the API — so a year of reporting is not quietly rewritten by a spring clean.

Permissions

The package recognises three personas, each shipped as a permission set group. Readers receive and read announcements, and can ask a question. Authors also write, target and publish, answer questions and read the analytics of their own announcements. Administrators also curate the audience library, set the Critical priority and read the diagnostic log.

A reader reads what they were sent — and nothing else: they cannot enumerate who read an announcement, nor read the questions their colleagues asked. That separation is enforced by the platform's sharing model, not by hiding buttons in the interface. A data migration has a switch of its own, granted to no one by default: a setting ticked for the user who loads the data, who must also hold a custom permission — either alone does nothing — lets imported announcements keep the dates they originally went out on, and both are taken back once the import is done.

Setting it up takes one permission set group per person and one component: the Announcement Host, dropped on the pages where people work or added once to an app's utility bar, set to start automatically. From the utility bar it shows its card on every page of the app, list views included. The whole setup fits in two minutes:

Documentation

The administrator and user guide covers installation, the permission sets, building an announcement page by page, curating audiences, placing an announcement and reading the analytics. It is published on this site rather than behind a login, so you can read the whole thing before installing anything or talking to anyone.

Requirements

Salesforce editions

Enterprise, Unlimited and Developer editions

Deployment

Managed package installed from AppExchange, for administrators only: each person then receives their permission set group. No external components to host.

Lightning Experience

Required, on desktop. The reading experience is a Lightning Web Component, and the app and its components are not offered in the Salesforce mobile app.

Permission set groups

Must be enabled in the org to install the package: the three personas ship as permission set groups.

API version

65.0

Security

Runs entirely in your org: no callouts, no outside code, no Jalon Works access to your data. How it is secured.

Documentation

Administrator and user guide, also available as a PDF.