Communicating with Your Users

Upgrades and maintenance go smoother when users are not caught off guard. This page covers how to warn users before you take a product offline, and how to keep them aware of new features once you’ve rolled them out.

Notifying users of maintenance

Each product handles this differently.

  • Posit Connect: set a system message or banner through Server.PublicWarning. Users see it on every page while it is set.
  • Posit Workbench: two mechanisms, for two different moments.
    • Advance warning: serve a custom sign-in page before the maintenance window starts, so users see it while they can still plan around it.
    • During the maintenance window: run sudo rstudio-server offline to take the server offline. This shows a built-in offline message, suspends sessions, and terminates running computations. Bring it back with sudo rstudio-server online.
    Workbench has no admin setting for a dismissible banner inside the logged-in dashboard. If you want users to see a warning after they have already signed in, you are limited to the sign-in page and the offline message.
  • Posit Package Manager: there is no formal maintenance-banner mechanism. Notify users through whatever channel you already use for team communication (email, Slack, etc.).

Setting up the Workbench sign-in banner

The sign-in page mechanism works by inserting HTML around the login form. You control this in one of two ways:

  • Save the HTML file directly as /etc/rstudio/login.html.
  • Save it anywhere else and point Workbench at it with auth-login-page-html in /etc/rstudio/rserver.conf.

Restart rstudio-server for the change to take effect.

Advertising new features and driving adoption

As an Admin you are well positioned to inform your users about the new features after an product upgrade. Use the strategies below to help your users stay engaged with the products:

  • Connect has a built-in “What’s New” news feed that surfaces release highlights directly to users. Point them at it when a release ships something they’d care about.
  • Book regular demo sessions with Posit and use them to walk through relevant items from the release notes. A live demo lands better than a changelog entry.
  • Seed a data-science community inside your organization that meets on a regular cadence. Adoption spreads faster peer-to-peer than through admin announcements.
  • Use the Posit blog, Posit Academy trainings, and posit::conf as ongoing adoption channels. They reach users who are not reading your changelog but will hear about a feature from a talk, a course, or a blog post.

Your CSM or the Customer Care team are also here to help if you need ideas or help with communicating new features to your team or driving adoption of the products.