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"Alert Tags" idea in addition to Zones
As Carousel continues to grow at the UofM and expand to other campuses, our needs for emergency messaging are increasing and becoming more complex. Emergency folks on both the Twin Cities and Duluth campuses expressed a desire for increased functionality. If two campuses are already requesting this functionality, as the system expands; other (UofM) campuses probably will too.
They are requesting refined capabilities for content distribution allowing the ability to alert an entire campus at once; or narrow down to particular region of campus (east bank, west bank, St. Paul, etc); or select a specific building(s). Lastly, they hope that the selection process would be easy, ‘like a list of check boxes or something’.
After some thought, a seemingly simple solution could be a hierarchy based on tags.
Here is an initial idea of how it could work. A set of “Alert Zones” would be created, one for each building on campus containing a display. Channels would then subscribe to the appropriate Alert Zone. An ‘Alert Tag’ could then be created that would automatically copy the bulletin to all of the selected Alert Zones (set up/ managed by us the service provider).
One Tag would be labeled ”All” which would include all buildings on campus. Another Tag would be “West Bank” to include only buildings on the West Bank; and so on.
As far as the user interface (end user), the available zones/ tags might appear in one concise list (simple to follow). Tags would appear at the top of the list (alphabetically?); with the list of Alret Zones appearing below. This would allow the end user the ability to create a message, then simply click “West Bank”, or “Building X, Building Y, and Building Z”; all from one simple list.
Below are three examples of how it could work/ look. Doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that; and (I think) still fits within the ‘theme’ of Carousel.
Thoughts?
They are requesting refined capabilities for content distribution allowing the ability to alert an entire campus at once; or narrow down to particular region of campus (east bank, west bank, St. Paul, etc); or select a specific building(s). Lastly, they hope that the selection process would be easy, ‘like a list of check boxes or something’.
After some thought, a seemingly simple solution could be a hierarchy based on tags.
Here is an initial idea of how it could work. A set of “Alert Zones” would be created, one for each building on campus containing a display. Channels would then subscribe to the appropriate Alert Zone. An ‘Alert Tag’ could then be created that would automatically copy the bulletin to all of the selected Alert Zones (set up/ managed by us the service provider).
One Tag would be labeled ”All” which would include all buildings on campus. Another Tag would be “West Bank” to include only buildings on the West Bank; and so on.
As far as the user interface (end user), the available zones/ tags might appear in one concise list (simple to follow). Tags would appear at the top of the list (alphabetically?); with the list of Alret Zones appearing below. This would allow the end user the ability to create a message, then simply click “West Bank”, or “Building X, Building Y, and Building Z”; all from one simple list.
Below are three examples of how it could work/ look. Doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that; and (I think) still fits within the ‘theme’ of Carousel.
Thoughts?
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The company has this under consideration.
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Inappropriate?I think this is a really great idea. We'll discuss it amongst the dev team. I think we can get pretty close already using Full-Screen Alert zones, since channels need to subscribe to them already, and you can apply as many zone tags to FSA zones as you want. The thing we'd have to implement is the tag-based selection of zones from your mockups.
The one tricky spot I could envision is that not everyone would have permission to send a bulletin to all of the various zones, so there would need to be some complicated logic to determine what zones/zonetags are available to any given user, and only display those checkboxes.
Anyway, we'll kick it around. Thanks for the idea!
-John
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?The tricky spot could be alleviated by how someone's access is set up.
We created an emergency role in Frontdoor so all they can do is alert bulletins. UMD and UMTC Emergency folks have that Emerg. role assigned to their respective zones. If we create Alert Tags, we simply assign that emerg. role to the respective tags as well.
It'd work just like a 'normal' user.
Your right though, the only 'tricky' part might be the 'concise list' of tags/ zones.
This approach would end giving them MORE functionality then they asked for; which should be all we'll ever need...
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