Introduction to alerts
Alerts is an Appspace feature that allows the broadcasts of important or critical messages such as executive communications, weather updates, or emergency announcements across a network, immediately or at a scheduled time, via a sign. Alerts is supported on all Appspace App driven devices, and the Cisco Edge 340 media player.
Alerts consists of the following features:
Templates
A collection of broadcast templates such as announcements, weather warnings, and emergencies are included in Alerts. You can be reuse the templates and position them for immediate or scheduled broadcasts. Templates are also assigned with user-defined categories in an organization. The various content types that you can use with Alerts include image files, dynamic content, and webpages.
Categories
Categories are defined within Alerts to aid the user in quickly identifying the various preconfigured templates. They also serve as a visual color-coded guide to sort the numerous messaging template types available such as announcements, weather warnings, emergencies, etc.
Broadcast Trigger API
The Broadcast Trigger API is used to generate a web handler based on the user’s selection of the site and broadcast template. Once configured, external systems utilize the API method call (in the form of a URL) to instruct Alerts to broadcast the selected template to the chosen site(s).
Alerts Interface
The following illustrates the layout of Alerts in Appspace.
Dashboard
The dashboard lists all the sites in a network that alert messages should be broadcasted to. From the dashboard, users are able to:
- Broadcast messages targeted to all sites, a group of sites, or a single site.
- Deactivate broadcasts currently in progress.
- Sync registered sites within Appspace.
- View active and scheduled broadcasts.
- Generate a broadcast web handler via the Broadcast Trigger API.
Templates
This section contains a collection of broadcast templates that have content items allocated and a broadcast type assigned. The top-level interface displays a quick thumbnail collection of the various templates along with their category labels and names.
Categories
This section contains a collection of broadcast types defined as different categories. Each broadcast type can be associated with a content item.
