[Announcements] Add Save & Publish button to Annoucements

[cdoherty]

To make behavior in Announcements consistent with all other tools in Canvas, there should be a Save & Publish button added. The Save button could then act like a 'Save Draft' feature, as it is in all other tools. There has been much confusion for our instructors because they expect the Save button to work the way it does in all other tools, saving their work but not publishing it. They don't expect it to post the announcement and send notification. Instructors have also expressed the need to save an announcement as they work (sometimes their announcements are very long) and the ability to preview how it looks before sending. That's why I think a 'Save & Publish' is a better choice than just changing the Save button to a Send button.

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you so much for your submission Christine.  Your idea will open for voting December 2nd.

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[RobDitto]

Also see in which the Product Team mentions that an Announcements publishing capability is potentially under consideration (as of this writing, still in the formal Gathering Info state). 

For consistency with other Canvas tools, adding a Save & Publish button to Announcements definitely will get my vote.

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. December 2, 2015 - Wed. March 2, 2016.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

[canvas_admin]

YES!   I've had issues recently with some of my announcements not properly displaying images.   Since there is no "draft state" for announcements, I ended up deleting and re-creating the same announcement several times before it displayed properly.   This would be super helpful!

[krissywilson]

This feature exists in Brightspace by D2L!

[admin_brake]

Yes, consistency provides better quality.

[jthoms]

In our instance, we've gone so far as to include a disclaimer on the announcement creation page, and have changed the button to read "Send / Save." I totally support this request!

[allison]

This seems like a perfectly reasonable request and in line with the feature we already support to publish announcements on a future date. Enhancements to Announcements are not a priority right now, but I will speak with our engineers to get an idea around how much work would be required to add the Save/Publish functionality to Announcements.

[cdoherty]

Allison, I would argue that this is not an enhancement, but rather a request to rectify a usability bug. The inconsistent behavior sets up instructors for failure, when they expect the save button to save, not to publish as well. The Announcements tool is of highest importance to our users at Stanford and the current behavior is giving our transition to Canvas a black eye.

[allison]

Hi all,

I agree that not having the "Save & Publish" button in announcements is an inconsistency that can set instructors up for failure (not good!). One of our engineers has looked into this and it's actually much harder to implement than we anticipated (probably why it wasn't implemented when we first rolled out the draft state feature in Canvas). We plan to dig a little bit deeper and find out what is required before we make a final decision. Just wanted everyone on this thread to know that we are looking into it!

Allison