A Guide to Shared Channels: Collaboration & Duplication

Creating and distributing large amounts of content with a small team can be challenging. You're often managing budget constraints, time limitations, and the perpetual quest for engaging content.

Rather than recruiting more people, opting for efficient digital signage tools, like ScreenCloud's Shared Channels now with collaboration and duplication enhancements, is a straightforward solution to boost your team's effectiveness. When tech can take over smaller tasks, it gives your team members more capacity to do the work they love and accomplish more for your company.

What are Shared Channels?

The Shared Channels feature allows you to share your Channel and all of its content to other spaces within your organization, either in a read-only format or with collaboration abilities.

This feature promotes cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that multiple teams can access the same content without duplicating efforts. It accelerates the content creation process and alleviates the struggle of sourcing content.

Now let's get into all the different ways you can share Channels.

Collaborative Shared Channels

Collaborative Shared Channels is an enhancement on the existing Share Channels feature, allowing content managers to contribute content to a shared Channel, giving Channels a local touch.

For instance, if your company uses spaces to organize screens by regional office or branch, each content manager can tailor content to meet the specific interests of their local audience, whether it's showcasing promotions, events, or news relevant to a particular department or region.

When sharing a Channel, content from the original shared Channels remains intact, providing reassurance to content managers and leadership that company-wide announcements will be preserved when shared across your organization.

How to use Collaborative Shared Channels

1. To start, first navigate to the Channels section in Studio.
2. As you hover your mouse over a channel, the share icon will become visible to you. Then click on the button to open the sharing settings window. You can also click on the share icon while previewing or editing a channel.
3. After clicking the share icon, you will see a set of sharing permissions, this is where you determine if users will be able to contribute content to your shared Channel or not. Select if you would like to allow the space to view the Channel only or allow local content to be added.
4. After setting your permissions, next select which Space you would like to share the Channel with.

Duplicating a Shared Channel

Just like a regular channel, you can duplicate a shared channel using the Duplicating Collaborative Shared Channel feature.

Once a space receives a shared channel, the receiver can duplicate it to create multiple copies while maintaining a link to the original content.

You can then contribute your own content and create different versions of the Channel for various topics or use cases. For example, HR might share a channel for company-wide announcements, which can then be duplicated to add personal touches like employee recognition posts or location-based communications.

This allows you to streamline your digital signage content management by centralizing all your content into one Channel without needing to switch between Channels.

It also eliminates the need for manual updates across multiple Channels across your organization. When a change is made to the original Channel, all duplicated Channels automatically reflect the updates instantly.

How to duplicate a shared channel

This duplicate action follows the same rules as with duplicating a regular channel.

1. First, navigate to the Channels section, and locate the Channel you would like to duplicate, then select the "Duplicate" button in the top right.

2. The new duplicate Channel contains content from the owner space (the "content bound to" space) and all pre-existing settings, including zone layout.

It is important to note that the content bound to the owner space is locked, and the zone layout settings cannot be altered. If the original owner decides to delete the original Channel, then the Channel will be deleted in every space, including the duplicated Channels.

To learn more about Collaborative Shared Channels, check out this help article here.

What are the benefits of Shared Channels?

Using shared Channels, if one department successfully implements engaging communication, the collaboration feature allows users to quickly share those best practices with other teams to build upon them. Here are some more benefits:

1. Efficient content management: Content creators will no longer experience workflow disruptions by having to switch between playing local personalized messages and company-shared channels.
2. Mix central and local content: Original content cannot be removed, giving HQ control while allowing teams to contribute location-specific content to make screens more relevant and increase screen engagement.
3. Promotes collaboration: Eliminates the barriers to collaboration, promotes teamwork and the seamless sharing of valuable resources from all departments, and takes the weight off of small content teams.
4. Saves time and resources: Eliminate the time-consuming task of tailoring content individually for each location by allowing users to build upon established templates. This ensures a uniform message and brand identity across various locations, maintaining compliance and consistency throughout locations.

ScreenCloud's support team is available to help users with any questions they may have about the Shared Channels feature or any other aspect of the platform. Users can reach out to the support team here if they require any help.