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Change how the Agent message looks?
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Ticker Tape has three different Agent message bar types - Critical, Informational and Warning - which, by default, are appropriately coloured to indicate their normal use - for example, an unexpected outage to an important business service would usually be sent as a 'Critical' (red) message, while the message relating to the resolution of the same issue would generally be sent out as an 'Informational' (green) message.

While the default colours and other settings for the messages are often fine, by using the Agent 'Look & Feel' tab of the Ticker Tape Configuration dialogue, the background and foreground colour of each message type can easily be altered, along with a number of other attributes that apply to all three message types.

The Agent Sample Area allows you to see the overall impact of any changes made on a sample message in real time but, for a truer representation of how the resultant Agent message bar would look, clicking the Live Preview On button allows Ticker Tape Administrator to mimic an Agent workstation, showing a full sample Agent bar, not only representative of the message font & scrolling speed, but also correctly sized and positioned on the screen (as per the related Agent Position Control tab)


Agent Look & Feel configuration pane

The other aspects of the Agent message bar that can be controlled are;

Message Speed
The slider controls the amount of time between each scrolling movement of the characters in the Agent message bar; the shorter the time, the faster the message will appear to move. By using this control in conjunction with the Pixels per tick control, virtually any message scrolling speed can be achieved.

Pixels per tick
The slider controls the number of pixels the Agent message moves per 'tick' (the delay specified by the Message Speed slider); the smaller this number, the smoother the Agent message bar will appear to scroll. By using this control in conjunction with the Message Speed control, virtually any message scrolling speed can be achieved.

Font Family & Size
This drop-down list and slider allow you to control both the Font Family (Arial, Courier, Time New Roman etc) and its point size, between 4pt and 72pt. While larger font sizes naturally lead to a larger Agent message bar, it is important to consider that the default font settings of Verdana at 9pt are purposely designed to provide for a highly visible and easily readable Agent message bar that also doesn't obstruct the users view of any underlying software interface too much.

In general, reserve the use of very large fonts for those Agents workstations whose main purpose is only to act as a stand-alone informational status display that's not otherwise in normal business use.

Display Logo
Allows a logo to be displayed at the left-hand side portion of the Agent message bar, facilitating basic 'branding' of the message on the Agent workstations. A number of common graphic file formats are supported for the logo, including .jpg, .bmp and .gif and although any chosen graphic will be accordingly proportionally resize on the fly to fit in with the Agent message bar's vertical size, graphics that are already correctly sized and don't require any re-sizing will generally give the best results; a sample Agent Message bar with logo is below;

Note that the logo graphic chosen at the Administrator workstation should also be available on the Agent computers at the same location - so if, for example, the file 'SphereInc.gif' is chosen from the 'C:\Mycompany\Logos' on the Administrator workstation, in order for the Agents to show the logo, 'SphereInc.gif' should also be present within the 'C:\Mycompany\Logos' folder of their drive.



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