Portal Tip - Managing Portal Annoucements

Joe_Burrows

Typically when people want to create an announcements they want it to appear instantly to end users so they can be alerted of an issue. Customers will commonly face the below issue:

Why is it end users cannot see announcements targeted to certain groups? Using Analysts or specific support groups works as expected.

The cachebuilder only enumerates and stores membership of the below groups, and does so every two hours as per the cachebuilder schedule (See https://support.cireson.com/KnowledgeBase/View/1176/)

- Mapped within Support Group Mappings

- Already in use in a current role:  Analysts, KnolwedgeManager, AssetManager, LocalizationManager

- A Security Group

- A specified Team Group

- A specified Group Form

- Announcement Group 

*Note the group does also need to exist in service manager so the distinguished name can be retrieved

Typically as a workaround I advise people to create an announcement thats expired already targeting the "Domain Users" AD group, this way the membership already exists in cache and when you create that new announcement for your domain users it will appear instantly rather than having to wait the two hours.

Here are also some good SQL queries to run against the servicemanagement DB to help check if the membership is enumerated:

SELECT U.UserName FROM CI$User U 
INNER JOIN GroupMembership_CI$DomainGroup_CI$User GM ON GM.UserId = U.Id
INNER JOIN CI$DomainGroup DG ON GM.DomainGroupId = DG.Id
WHERE DG.UserName = 'ADGroupName'

Or vice versa to check which groups a user belongs to:

SELECT DG.UserName FROM CI$DomainGroup DG
INNER JOIN GroupMembership_CI$DomainGroup_CI$User GM ON GM.DomainGroupId = DG.Id
INNER JOIN CI$User U ON GM.UserId = U.Id
WHERE U.UserName = 'joe.burrows'

I would recommend reviewing the below KB articles for more information:
https://support.cireson.com/KnowledgeBase/View/1176
https://support.cireson.com/KnowledgeBase/View/22