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Under review

TotalCMS Social Broadcast limitations

Kevin M. Cox 5 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated by Brad Boner 5 years ago 6

I'm posting here as part of a formal feature request and also to see how the rest of y'all are working around this limitation.

What we've found is that social media broadcasts from TotalCMS are more often then not failing to actually happen. Support pinpointed that this failure will occur anytime an article gets edited (by a line editor or page designer) in between the time an asset gets a Site Tag and passes the Start Date/Time. For us this is a large portion of content.

Here is the note from support:

"The failure of the articles broadcasted from the TotalCMS system results from broadcasting an article that has a start date/time in the future that has additional revisions made to the asset in-between the time it was broadcast and the time it goes live. If the revisions are made after the start time has passed then the broadcast of the asset will be successful.

"To avoid this issue I would not broadcast the asset if the asset will need to be revised before it goes live or be sure to re-broadcast the asset after additional revisions are made before it goes live."

And my response:

"This is behavior that definitely needs to be corrected to support a real-world newspaper publishing workflow.

"We expect reporters to compose the social broadcasts because as the authors they are most closely associated with the content.

"However all articles still need to be edited before publication.

"With the details you've given us it means that we would have to ask the page designers to go back and set the social broadcast information after they have finished designing the pages at the end of the night which just isn't realistic.

"I'm sure we could make some minor changes to our workflow as well, but I feel like there might be some middle ground we need to work towards here.

"If the behavior cannot be changed there definitely needs to some change in the TotalCMS GUI that alerts users to the fact that the broadcast was cancelled. Right now it still just shows the "Syndicated..." text exactly the same as if the broadcast was successful."

In my feature request I'm asking that they either correct the problem of the broadcasts not happening or at a minimum update the GUI in that situation so reporters are aware the broadcast was cancelled due to a later edit.

How are y'all working around this problem or are we the only ones dealing with it due to our workflow?

I asked a similar question and received a similar answer. 

Wowsa.  That's gotta be priority fix.  We're supposed to be adopting Total CMS this spring, and that would throw a major monkey wrench in our workflow.

Checkout Christine's reply in this topic: https://community.townnews.com/communities/1/topics/604-set-broadcast-time-separate-from-start-datetime

It looks like it might solve this issue, but she hasn't confirmed it.

Under review

I'm still trying to get a super definitive answer on this... I will let you know!

The TotalCMS aspect is complex because the product launch phases are so different. So we had to built the new hosted environment so that it understands the legacy TotalCMS broadcast system, as well as the new Total CMS Notifier system at the point where it is launched in the future on appliances. Because of that, I may actually have to get someone to replicate the specific workflow, but I will let you know. =)

Thank you Christine. And I understand if the issue won't totally be fixed until after TotalCMS catches up with the BLOX releases from hosted a couple months later.

I brought this up in a support ticket in August 2017

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