Announcements

Broadcast a message to your team directly in their inboxes. You control who receives it — the entire organization, specific roles, or individual people — and can track how many have read it.

How it works

Announcements are messages sent from Strata to organization members' inboxes. When you publish one, Strata delivers it to your chosen audience — immediately, or at a future time you schedule. Recipients see the announcement in their Inbox sidebar, where they can read and dismiss it. Admins can then review read statistics and recall (delete) the announcement if needed.

Unlike notifications tied to agent runs, announcements are broadcast messages — they let you communicate directly with your team about policy changes, system updates, feature launches, or urgent alerts.

The announcements list

Navigate to Organization → Announcements to see all announcements you've created. The list splits into two tabs:

• Sent — announcements that have gone out (or are going out now).
• Scheduled — announcements with a future publish time that haven't sent yet. Each carries a Send now button to publish it early, and can be edited or recalled to cancel the schedule.

The list shows:

Click View to drill into the full announcement and see who read it, or click the row itself to open the detail modal.

Reading and read receipt

The detail modal shows:

• The full announcement body as recipients see it.
• Three stat cards — Read, Unread, and Recipients — showing how many people have opened it, how many haven't, and the total resolved audience.
• A collapsible Read by N people section listing each reader's name and when they read it.

Only admins see who has read an announcement. Members aren't told that reads are tracked unless you turn on Read receipt under What recipients see, which adds a line saying so.

Composing a new announcement

Click New announcement from the list page or the top header button to open the compose page.

The compose page is a document editor, not a form with a preview — you type the announcement exactly as recipients will read it, in the inbox's own typography, so nothing shifts between writing and reading. There is no separate preview pane; the canvas is the preview.

The canvas

Type directly onto the page:

1. Title — a required headline (up to 200 characters).
2. Summary — an optional one-line summary (up to 400 characters), shown below the title.
3. Body — the main message (up to 50,000 characters).

The ribbon

A Word-style ribbon stays pinned at the top of the editor: undo/redo, paragraph style, the character run (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, inline code), text color and highlight, alignment, bullet / numbered / checklist lists and indent, links, block quote, code block, and divider. The right end of the ribbon carries the Strata writing-assistant mark (see AI-assist below) and the Publish button.

The insert palette

A floating palette at the bottom of the canvas — collapsed to a pill until you open it — inserts richer blocks: tables, charts, callouts, embeds, images, code, quotes, and dividers.

Drafts autosave

Every change autosaves to a private draft (debounced, plus a flush when you navigate away or close the tab). A draft is yours alone — never a half-published announcement — so you can leave the compose page and reopen it later to pick up where you left off. Deleting the draft, or publishing it, removes the draft.

The Publish modal

The writing surface holds only the message. Every delivery decision — audience, priority, what shows alongside the message, the call-to-action button, and the lifecycle (expiry and scheduling) — is gathered when you click Publish, which opens a short modal you step through: audience, then priority, then lifecycle. The Targeting audience, Priority and display options, Auto-expire, Call-to-action button, and Scheduling and publishing sections below describe each of those controls.

Targeting audience

On the audience step, choose who receives the announcement:

• Everyone in the organization — every active member of the org. A deactivated account can't sign in to read it, so it isn't counted, and neither is the organization's API bot.
• Specific roles — one or more organization roles (e.g., Admin, Analyst).
• Specific groups — one or more groups; every current member of the group receives it.
• Specific people — hand-picked individuals by name or email.

You can target multiple audiences at once. Search by name, email, role, or group, and toggle selections; people are found on the server as you type, a page at a time, so the picker is the same at any size of organization. Each role shows how many active members it reaches and each group its member count, so you can see how many people a choice reaches.

Note

The Specific groups option only appears if you also hold the Manage users permission — reading the group list is user-management-gated. An announcements-only admin can still target everyone, roles, or individual people.

Warning

An announcement sent to a role or person list uses each recipient's own database permissions, not yours. If a recipient lacks access to a resource you link to in the CTA button, they'll see the button but may not be able to view the destination.

Priority and display options

Priority

Choose the announcement's priority level (appears as a colored dot in recipients' inboxes and preview):

• Information (green) — general updates, new features, policy nudges.
• Heads up (gold) — schedule changes, deprecations, recommendations.
• Urgent (red) — outages, security issues, mandatory immediate action.

What recipients see

A member reads an announcement like a message from a person: the sender beside it, the priority and who it went to in its first lines, then the title, summary and body (see Reading a message). In the Publish modal, toggle which of these elements frame the announcement body. Each toggle is reflected live on the canvas as you set it:

• Sender — the avatar, name and role of who sent it, beside the message.
• Sent date — when it was sent: the time for today, the day for earlier ones.
• Priority dot — the priority beside the sender, a dot and its word: Heads up in amber, Urgent in red, Information in muted ink with a green dot.
• Org logo — your organization's logo on the compose canvas; the member's page shows the sender instead.
• Sign-off — a closing line, e.g. "— The <your org> team".
• Read receipt — a line telling recipients Admins can see who has read this message.

Recipients always see the title and body. They also always see who it went to (groups and roles by name, people counted, never named), your button if you added one, Ask Strata about this (which opens a new chat with the announcement quoted in the prompt box, sending nothing), and when it leaves their inbox if you set an end date.

Auto-expire and mandatory notices

Two lifecycle controls let you decide how long an announcement lives and whether recipients can clear it.

Auto-expire

Under Auto-expire, choose how long the announcement stays in inboxes:

When an announcement expires, Strata stops surfacing it in recipients' inboxes — you don't have to recall it. While it's live, recipients see an Expires <date> line on the message.

Let recipients dismiss this

By default, recipients can dismiss (clear) an announcement from their inbox once they've read it. Turn Let recipients dismiss this off to make it a mandatory notice: the dismiss control is hidden, and the announcement stays in the recipient's inbox until it expires (or you recall it).

Tip

Pair a mandatory notice with an auto-expire date so an unavoidable banner doesn't linger forever — e.g., an outage notice set to expire in 7 days.

Your organization's defaults

Both controls start from your organization's settings in Organization → Member defaults → Announcements (see Organization): Remove announcements after a number of days (blank means until it is recalled) and Members may dismiss announcements. A new announcement opens on those values, and you can change them for that one announcement. A draft, a template or an announcement you are editing keeps its own values.

Either setting can be pinned with the padlock beside it (Same for every announcement). A pinned value wins over a draft, a template and an announcement being edited: its control in the publish flow is shown but disabled, with the line Set by your organization in Organization › Member defaults. Changing these settings doesn't change announcements already sent or scheduled.

Through the API, a create or an edit that sends a value different from a pinned one is refused with 400 and code: "announce_policy", naming the field and the organization's value, for example Your organization sets how long announcements stay: 30 days. A new announcement that leaves a pinned value out gets it filled in; an edit that leaves it out doesn't change it.

Call-to-action button (optional)

Under Details, toggle Add a button to include a clickable button at the bottom of the announcement.

When enabled, set:

• Button label — the text shown on the button (e.g., "View the dashboard", up to 60 characters).
• Where it goes — choose A page in Strata (internal link) or An external link.
  • Internal links open a search dropdown of common Strata pages (Chat, Agents, Admin settings, etc.).
  • External links must start with https://.

AI-assist for drafting and refining

Click the Strata writing-assistant mark at the right end of the ribbon to open a floating prompt box, or highlight text and click Ask Strata on the selection toolbar that appears. Either way, Strata can draft or refine your announcement:

Draft mode (empty body)

Type a description of what you want to communicate, and Strata generates a full draft with title, optional summary, formatted body, and recommended priority. Example: "We're sunsetting the old dashboard next month. Be encouraging about the migration but clear about the date."

Strata respects Apple-style voice rules: calm, direct, no marketing jargon, one idea per sentence. It avoids exclamation marks and banned words like "leverage", "transform", "synergy", etc.

Refine selection (highlighted text)

Highlight a portion of the body and give an instruction like "Make this shorter" or "Explain this for non-technical users". Strata rewrites just that selection, keeping the surrounding text intact.

Rewrite mode (whole body)

If the body has text but nothing is highlighted, Strata rewrites the entire body per your instruction (e.g., "Make it more formal", "Tighten the language").

Note

AI assistance routes through the same Azure AI Foundry your organization uses for the rest of Strata — the one you connect under Organization settings → AI engine — so announcement drafting uses that same model and tenant binding.

Applying and undoing AI edits

Strata applies its edit directly to the announcement — the title, summary, body, and preview update in place. There's no separate "accept" step. Keep editing by hand, or send Strata another instruction to iterate further. If you don't like the result, undo it the same way you'd undo any edit (the editor preserves your earlier text).

While a request is in flight, the prompt box shows an animated border and the preview gains a "being edited" outline. If you keep typing during a draft, Strata only fills the fields you left empty rather than overwriting your text.

Scheduling and publishing

The final step of the Publish modal decides when the announcement goes out:

• Send now — publish immediately to all chosen recipients.
• Send later — pick a future date and time (up to two years out). The announcement waits in the Scheduled tab until then, and the modal's confirm button reads Schedule instead of Publish. (A time you pick that has already passed by the time you confirm is treated as "now" rather than rejected.)

The same step also holds the Auto-expire window and the Let recipients dismiss this toggle described above.

Click Publish (or Schedule) to confirm. Strata shows a success toast and returns you to the announcements list. Closing the modal without confirming leaves your autosaved draft intact — nothing is lost.

Key

A scheduled announcement waits in the Scheduled tab. Open it and click Send now to publish early, or Recall to cancel the schedule before it fires. Publishing (or scheduling) consumes the private draft the editor was autosaving — a sent or scheduled announcement is no longer a draft.

Editing an announcement

From the announcements list, click an announcement, then click Edit in the detail modal. The compose page opens with the current content loaded.

Make your changes and click Save changes to update it. Existing recipients see the updated text the next time they open the announcement in their inbox. You can also adjust the Auto-expire window or the Let recipients dismiss this setting when editing.

Recalling an announcement

Click an announcement in the list, then click Recall in the detail modal. A confirmation dialog appears — recall removes the announcement from every inbox immediately and permanently. This action cannot be undone.

After recall, the announcement vanishes from the list and all recipients' inboxes.

In your language and on a phone

The list, an announcement's details, Read rates, the template dialog and the page where you write an announcement (its ribbon and menus, the steps of Publish and the insert windows) are in the language you choose in Settings → General, with counts, percentages, dates and the numbers on a chart written the way your language writes them. What you write stays as you wrote it: an announcement's title, summary and text, a template's name and description, and the people and groups you send to. The Audience column says who received an announcement in your language, such as Everyone in the organization or 2 groups · 3 users.

On a phone the buttons at the top of the list sit under its title, the tabs scroll sideways, and each announcement becomes a card that names its audience, read rate, status and date; a narrow window shows the same cards when the table would squeeze the titles. While you write, Publish stays in view: its row sits above the formatting tools, which scroll sideways, and the title and summary wrap rather than cut off. On a phone the audience search shows a short Search…, and an image's alt text and a template's description wrap onto a second line.

Audit logging

Every announcement action (create, update, recall) is logged to the organization's audit log:

• announcement.create — a new announcement was published or scheduled. Includes title, priority, audience count, CTA URL, and (for a scheduled send) the publish time.
• announcement.update — an existing announcement was edited. Includes before/after title, priority, and audience summary.
• announcement.recall — an announcement was recalled. Includes title, priority, and the original author and send date.

See the Audit log for how to access these records.

Limits and rate limits

• Up to 10 announcement writes per minute per organization (create, edit, recall).
• Up to 15 AI requests per minute per user.
• Up to 200 AI requests per hour per organization.
• Body size: up to 50,000 characters.
• Title: up to 200 characters.
• Summary: up to 400 characters.
• CTA button label: up to 60 characters.

If you hit the per-minute write limit, you'll see a "slow down" message; wait a moment and try again.

Permissions

Announcements are admin-only. Creating, editing, recalling, and viewing announcements requires:

• Admin access (canAccessAdmin permission).
• Manage organization settings (canManageOrgSettings permission).

Organization members (non-admins) cannot create announcements; they only see them in their inbox.

Troubleshooting

An announcement shows 0 reads. — This is normal right after sending; not everyone opens the inbox immediately. Reads update in real-time as recipients open the announcement.

I see an error "Couldn't draft" — The AI request timed out or your organization hit an hourly AI cap. Try again in a few moments, or contact your Strata administrator.

An announcement is missing from the list. — It may have been recalled, or you were not the author (admins only see announcements they created).

Recipients aren't seeing the announcement in their inbox. — Confirm they are in the target audience (check the announcement detail modal's recipient list). If the audience was set to a role and a recipient no longer has that role, they won't receive it retroactively.

Related

• Notification email templates — how system and agent emails are delivered.
• Roles and permissions — setting up audience targeting by role.
• Audit log — reviewing announcement actions for compliance.
• Inbox — how recipients view announcements in their inbox.