Administrator Settings
Video Transcript
00:06
Now, before I jump into any of the control panels on this,
00:11
I want to go to the Administrator.
00:13
I said before that we’re going to do a lot of bouncing
00:16
around between different areas of the designer software,
00:19
and the Administrator is one of the ones we’re going to
00:21
be using the most frequently.
00:22
You can do that by either hitting the little bullhorn
00:25
icon at the top or by going to Tools > Show Administrator.
00:29
The Administrator,
00:30
as a reminder if you don’t use it very frequently,
00:32
is a separate app installation that comes along with
00:37
CUS whenever you download it.
00:39
You can access it here within Designer,
00:41
but you can also give that app just to someone on the
00:44
site who only needs sort of administrative roles,
00:48
who is not an engineer and should not ever be touching CIS,
00:51
but they do still want to do specific things.
00:54
The paging system is one of the things that is
00:56
still in Administrator rather exclusively.
00:59
So, here’s a window of what your Administrator window looks like.
01:03
If you haven’t opened this with a PA router in your system before,
01:07
you wouldn’t know that there are three tabs that only exist
01:10
once the PA router is in your design.
01:12
We have the PA Global Settings tab, the Page Stations tab,
01:16
and the PA Zones tab.
01:18
I would strongly recommend that whenever
01:21
you start setting up a paging system,
01:23
go to the PA Zones tab first.
01:25
This is the first thing you always want to do.
01:27
This is a list of all of the zones that you’ve created.
01:30
I have five zones in here right now;
01:32
they’re named Zone 1 through Zone 5,
01:33
which are terrible names.
01:35
These names will propagate in various places in the
01:39
public address components,
01:41
so you want to do this now to make your life easier later.
01:44
So, I’m going to rename these.
01:45
This is my lobby, as you may recall.
01:48
This is my conference room, my conference room.
01:52
This is NPR1, NPR2, and NPR3.
01:59
What’s nice about this page right here is that
02:02
you can also create something called tags.
02:04
Tags are a way of grouping things together with a common name,
02:08
the same way hashtags work on any social media platform.
02:11
A hashtag is a way of taking two completely disparate
02:16
pieces of content and linking them to each other
02:18
by them each having the same hashtag.
02:20
Rocks play the air horns.
02:26
Did they play the air horns,
02:27
or did I just really embarrass myself?
02:29
I think they didn’t even add that in post.
02:31
That was pretty embarrassing.
02:32
Okay, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to
02:35
hit the plus button and create a tag.
02:38
This tag could be used to group these together.
02:39
Maybe one of the tags is going to be something like NPR.
02:42
I could create that NPR tag and then drag it
02:45
onto all three of these NPR rooms.
02:48
What that’s going to let me do is, later on,
02:52
rather than select all three of those rooms to page them,
02:55
I could just select the NPR tag,
02:57
and it will automatically be distributed to any zone that has that tag.
03:01
You could do it the other way around.
03:02
Rather than create the tag and then add it to the zones,
03:05
you could click the zones and then create the tag.
03:07
Like, what if I select Lobby and then the three
03:10
NPR rooms and hit the plus button?
03:14
Maybe these are all on the ground floor of our hotel,
03:17
so I’ll call this Floor One.
03:20
Look, they all now have a Floor One tag.
03:23
Every zone can have multiple tags,
03:25
probably as many tags as you can possibly
03:26
think of to add them.
03:27
Conference One is the only one that’s not included now.
03:29
Now, if I want to page all the rooms on Floor One,
03:31
I can just hit the Floor One tag and be settled.
03:34
This is really, really useful,
03:35
especially when you think about things like an
03:37
airport where these kinds of paging systems will be installed.
03:41
If you’ve got maybe a gate that is owned by one airline
03:45
during the morning and a different airline in the afternoon,
03:49
you can make sure that they have the right tag for that airline,
03:52
and you can make sure that everyone in that airline across
03:55
all the gates gets the same page without having to
03:57
individually pick every single possible zone
04:00
that is operating at the moment.
04:01
This will speed up your time, I promise.
04:04
By putting these names in here now,
04:06
it’ll save you from having to keep an Excel sheet
04:08
open or a piece of paper next to your monitor that
04:10
writes down what every single possible zone is.
04:13
So, we’re doing that work now, and then we’re going to hit Update.
04:16
While we’re here in the Administrator,
04:19
I want to jump up to PA Global Settings.
04:22
Global Settings is the first time that we’re going to see
04:24
the priority system I was talking about.
04:27
Here is where you kind of set up the framework for
04:30
whatever priority you want to use.
04:32
Right now, I can see that I’ve got five priority
04:34
levels down here at the bottom.
04:37
These five priority levels, when you first look at them,
04:40
I’m going to say this:
04:41
they’re not the best names because this sort of
04:44
implies that you could only ever send a page at
04:48
priority level one,
04:49
and you could only ever send a message at priority level two.
04:51
That’s not accurate.
04:52
These are just names that were thrown into the software.
04:56
You can change them;
04:57
you should change them to make more sense for you.
04:59
I think the real benefit of having these names in
05:01
here right now is that it kind of lets you know which
05:04
direction our priority schema goes.
05:07
If these were just absent and you only had one through five,
05:10
then you might sit there and wonder,
05:12
“Wait a second, is one important because it’s number one,
05:15
or is five important because it’s higher than one?”
05:19
Even the colors do the same thing: red through green.
05:21
Like, is red important because it’s on fire,
05:24
or is five important because green means go?
05:28
Does red mean stop? Does green mean it’s safe?
05:31
Just our schema means that number one is the highest priority,
05:35
and higher numbers are a lower priority.
05:39
That’s just how it works.
05:40
So, let’s rename these.
05:41
I’m going to say that number one is full-on emergency.
05:44
That is game over, man, game over.
05:47
All right, priority number two,
05:49
that is definitely, you know, they’re inside the room.
05:53
That’s not possible;
05:55
something must be wrong with your motion tracker.
05:57
Maybe they found something that’s not on the blueprints.
05:59
I don’t know.
06:00
Number three, yeah, that’s a xenomorph sighting for sure.
06:03
You know, they’re not attacking you yet,
06:05
but they’re in the building.
06:07
Number four, that’s face huggers, absolutely.
06:09
And then number five, everything’s good, affirmative, right there.
06:14
You can have more than five, by the way.
06:15
You can hit this plus button, and you can add as many as you want.
06:20
I don’t think there’s actually a cap to the number of
06:22
times you can add priority levels.
06:25
Theoretically, I think the math on it might cap it at about 2 million.
06:29
If you’re using two million different possible
06:31
priority levels in your design,
06:33
please quit everything you’ve chosen to do in life.
06:38
You need to make some other choices in general.
06:42
For each of these, you have some options called Retry,
06:47
Archive, and Split.
06:49
So, let’s talk about those.
06:51
If I choose to retry an announcement of a certain priority,
06:56
that means that if it gets booted,
06:58
if it gets interrupted by a higher priority announcement,
07:02
do you want it to enter the queuing system or not?
07:05
If it gets booted, maybe you’re fine with that.
07:07
Think about it: the low-level announcements that you’re
07:10
sending out are probably things like,
07:13
“Hey, this is a reminder that the white zone is for loading and unloading,” right?
07:16
You don’t need to retry that.
07:18
That’s on loop;
07:18
it’s going to happen every 10 minutes or whatever about your parking area.
07:22
It’s fine if that gets interrupted.
07:24
A higher priority one, yeah,
07:27
you might want to make sure that gets retried if it gets interrupted.
07:29
The same thing is true with archiving for vocal pages.
07:34
If you are talking into a microphone and you are sending that message,
07:38
or I’m sorry, that page out into the system,
07:41
you probably want some proof that you did that.
07:45
Especially, there are a lot of instances where there
07:47
may be insurance companies involved to make sure
07:51
that you actually did page certain things at specific times.
07:55
For example, “I am trying to sue the airline because they left without me,”
08:00
and I can say,
08:01
“Hey, you didn’t notify me that I should have been at my gate,”
08:04
and they can say,
08:05
“Actually, sir, we did page you three times.
08:07
Here’s the proof of the page that we recorded when it went out,
08:10
and here is data of the times that it was sent to the areas
08:14
that you should have been in had you been in the airport.”
08:16
But I wasn’t because I was late.
08:17
Anyways, we want to make sure that you
08:20
have the ability to archive vocal pages.
08:22
So, engage archive on anything that you might want to save,
08:26
and that’ll do two things:
08:27
it’ll save those pages automatically in a folder on
08:31
the core that’s called Page Archives,
08:34
and it’ll also allow you to export those via FTP right here in the Archive Export.
08:39
So, if you have an FTP server and you want to save those for longevity, do it here.
08:44
The ones on the core, generally speaking,
08:46
will only save pages for about a month or so,
08:49
or when the space does not allow it to take any more.
08:52
So, the Archive Export is for real covering yourself.
08:57
The ones on the Archive Export are for shorter-term saving.
09:02
Alright, the last one: split.
09:04
This is an interesting one to think about.
09:06
What happens when you are sending an announcement to two or more zones,
09:13
and one of those zones is busy with some higher priority message already,
09:19
and another zone is available?
09:21
What do you want to occur?
09:23
By default, if split is not engaged,
09:27
the system’s going to wait until both of those zones are fully available,
09:31
and then it will play them in both simultaneously.
09:34
That might be the behavior that you want.
09:36
If you’re doing that to a lot of zones,
09:39
like every zone in your entire building,
09:41
and this building is a system where you do have a lot of PA traffic,
09:46
you might be waiting a really long time for every single
09:50
possible zone to be available simultaneously.
09:54
If that’s the case, this announcement that’s sitting
09:56
in your queue might eventually be a victim of the queue timeout,
10:00
or it’s gone on too long, whatever.
10:03
So, if you’re sending to a lot of areas,
10:06
splitting will basically treat this announcement as if it
10:09
were being sent to each zone individually.
10:11
So, in the zones where it is busy,
10:13
it’ll wait and be queued and play when that zone is ready.
10:17
In the zones that are available, it plays immediately,
10:20
right now, because it’s there.
10:21
That is a good idea if you want to make sure that this
10:23
announcement gets heard in every zone as quickly as possible.
10:27
Well, if that’s the case, why would you ever choose not to split, you ask?
10:30
Good question.
10:32
What if you have zones that overlap each other geographically in the space?
10:37
Again, I’m going to go to that airport example.
10:40
You’ve got Gate 13 and Gate 14 right next to each other.
10:43
You know there are people sitting in the middle of
10:45
those that can hear Gate 13 announcements and Gate 14 announcements.
10:48
If you split your announcements and it plays in
10:53
Gate 13 right now while Gate 14 was just finishing an announcement,
10:58
well then guess what?
10:58
It’s going to start playing in Gate 14 like half a second later,
11:02
and now the people sitting in between those zones are
11:04
hearing the same announcement with like a half-second delay,
11:07
and it’s indecipherable because your brain gets
11:09
miswired and can’t understand what it’s hearing.
11:11
So, if you have zones that are overlapping in their
11:16
footprints in your space,
11:17
I would generally suggest that you don’t want to
11:20
split them amongst those zones.
11:22
But if you’ve got zones that are completely segregated
11:25
—they’re their own room,
11:26
they’re on opposite sides of the building—
11:27
then yeah, split it that way.
11:29
Make sure it gets heard as quickly as possible.
11:31
That is retry, archive, and splits.
11:34
Also, on this page at the very top, the priority mode.
11:38
So, generally speaking, right now we start off in station user priority mode.
11:44
That means that the page station from which
11:47
every single page or message is sent gets its
11:50
priority from the station itself.
11:53
I’ll show you how you can assign a page station a priority level.
11:56
That means that no matter who or what type of
12:00
announcement is sent from that page station,
12:02
it’ll go out with a higher or lower priority based on
12:04
the setting you’ve made.
12:05
So, maybe you’ve got a page station that is in the administrator’s office,
12:09
and even if he just wants to make an announcement
12:11
that he thinks puppies are cute (which they are),
12:13
it’s still going to go out at a high priority level because it’s his page station.
12:18
Whereas, you could change this to command priority.
12:22
When we’re in command priority, the commands themselves,
12:25
the type of announcement that you’re sending,
12:28
each get their own priority level,
12:30
which you can establish (and we’ll show you how as well).
12:32
That means that no matter who sends that,
12:35
even if it’s sent from the kiosk at the cafe,
12:40
when they’re sending out an emergency announcement,
12:42
that emergency announcement still gets its high priority level that you’ve set.
12:46
Regardless of which of these you pick,
12:48
you can override that rule for specific exemptions.
12:52
For instance, like I just said,
12:53
if you’ve got an emergency announcement,
12:55
whoever sends that from anywhere in the world
12:57
should be able to always have that override any other
13:01
priority global assignments that you’ve made.
13:04
So, even if it’s in station user priority,
13:06
you can choose to override that at the command level.
13:09
Whereas, if you are in command priority,
13:11
you could choose to override that at a specific page station level.
13:16
I know, like I said, it could get a little tricky.
13:18
There are lots of little overlapping things all throughout
13:20
the software where you can set this and then override this.
13:24
It can get really granular,
13:26
but that means that you have the flexibility to give it exactly
13:29
what you want to give it.
13:30
I’m going to keep mine in station user priority for now.
13:34
You also have queue timeouts.
13:36
This allows you to decide how long something should
13:39
exist in the queue before it gets booted.
13:42
If it’s in a queue for longer than a minute,
13:44
you could say that’s too long; now it’s no longer important.
13:46
Set that as high as an hour, or just leave it at no.
13:49
If it’s at no, then there’s no timeout ever,
13:51
and something could live in the queue indefinitely
13:54
until it’s time to finally play it.
13:57
We also have cancel delay.
13:59
After you hit go on an announcement,
14:01
you could add 5, 10, or 15 seconds of reconsideration time
14:05
where you second guess yourself as to
14:07
whether or not you made the right choices.
14:09
Then you could cancel the thing that you
14:11
just sent before it actually gets delivered.
14:13
And then finally, retry count.
14:15
If something does get interrupted and
14:16
re-enters the queuing system,
14:18
how many times do you want that to happen?
14:20
Once, twice, three times, four times?
14:22
If something got interrupted four times,
14:24
was it really that important in the first place?
14:27
Probably not.
14:27
It’s probably time to let that particular message go.
14:31
Okay, whenever you make changes in the Administrator—
14:33
by the way, I’m going to delete my extraneous priorities I added down here—
14:38
whenever you make changes in the Administrator,
14:39
be sure to hit Update in the big glowing orange box at the top,
14:43
and then those changes will all go live.
14:46
Alright, we’ve made the critical initial changes in Administrator.
14:50
We’re going to go back and take a look at the components.
14:53
Let’s take a quick break first.