Welcome

Thank you for your interest in Ticker Tape.

Ticker Tape allows you to 'broadcast' unobtrusive messages to workstations spread over one or more disparate sites - ideal for Service Desks or Administrators wanting to proactively advise people of issues affecting them, in one or more locations. It's especially useful where other means of communication, such as email, are unavailable due to outages.

Its intuitive administrative interface allows you to choose from a range of previously defined 'template' messages, construct your own or control the Agent software across multiple Sites with just a few clicks.

The light-weight Ticker Tape Agent installed on each workstation periodically checks for messages sent out by the Ticker Tape Administrator and unobtrusively displays them at the top of the users screen, sized to ensure that the title bar and window controls of any other application displayed underneath it are still fully accessible (using default settings)

The user can then choose to either let the message to scroll across the top of the screen, interact with it by dragging it or double-click it to view the whole message in a standard dialogue. If required, it can be dismissed to the Notification Area (a.k.a. System Tray) where it remains until it either times out or is replaced or cleared by the Administrator.

The Agent software is specifically designed to ensure that it doesn't steal focus when it shows a message or affect the user's ability to work in any way, ensuring they continue to work as normal with no interruptions.

The completely free unlicensed version of Ticker Tape is identical in all respects to the fully licensed version, other than it can only manage messages for up to three individual Ticker Tape 'Sites' (however, each Site could contain thousands of workstations). No functionality is lost and there are no annoying ‘nag’ screens to contend with!

If you wish to manage more than the three Sites in the unlicensed version, there are several very cost-efficient license options available, allowing you to manage up to a maximum of 42 sites which could be spread across the globe. Licensing only takes a few minutes and the received license code can be used to immediately enable the additional Sites in your existing Ticker Tape installation.

Many aspects of both the Ticker Tape Administrator and the Agent software installed on other computers can be configured direct from the Administrator software itself, allowing Sites, 'template' messages and the look, feel and functionality of the Agent message to be easily defined, including its font, size, colours, speed, screen position, whether the user can exit it and a custom pop-up menu prompt that can be used to direct the user to additional information, such as an Intranet page.

The recommended environment for Ticker Tape is Windows XP or above - however it has also been tested and works on Windows 2003, 2008, Vista and 7. We hope it’ll work fine for you but if you do encounter any problems, it’s likely that there’s already a knowledge base article available in the Ticker Tape Support section of the AmberSoftware web site. However, if you do need any additional help, please don’t hesitate to send us an email or submit a support ticket - we’ll do our best to help you.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve Ticker Tape, please let us know also - the easiest way is by completing the short Ticker Tape Survey which takes literally 5 minutes. You feedback will be used to guide the future development of Ticker Tape, improving it for all of its users. As an added bonus, if your suggestions are incorporated into a future release, you’ll be credited in the software!