ACS “Broadcast” coming soon to beta
I was invited to a demonstration of ACS‘ newest named product this week. The product is called ACS Broadcast. It’s so new that you won’t see it on store shelves or even the company Web site. They are releasing it to a very select group of beta testers later this month. Somehow, I think by sheer luck and timing, I was invited to be a part of that group.
While most of my readers won’t be able to get their hands on the product just yet, I want to share with you its beauty. Broadcast has one main goal – to create content for information screens around your church.
Currently, in this beta, Broadcast will only be able to utilize data from Facility Scheduler. Many people have seen the Silverlight application demonstrated (to log-in you must use ACS Facility Scheduler and log-in as an admin user for your site). Broadcast is quite simply the next step in its development.
The reason it’s beautiful is the new configuration options that ACS is cooking up. Currently, you can customize the background, change the header text, and view the events in either a slide or table format. You can also change the text color, hide the clock, among several other things. Indeed, you can create different views for different displays, as well.
On their next release, it will be possible to filter the data shown on a display. For instance, the display in front of the gym may only show events that are happening in the gym, and the display in the youth room might only show youth events.
I love the possibilities here. Most beautiful of all is that you don’t have to reconfigure all of your slides if an event changes. The display can be set to automatically refresh itself with new data, creating a more-or-less hands-off system to keep members and guests in the know and on the go.
[...] link. This is also where Broadcast and the .mobi apps would pull their information from. Check out Matthew Irvine’s post on Broadcast. This is hot. (While you are at it, add his feed to your list.) If you were [...]