Select Admin/Story/Elements from the main menu and use New button to create new story elements. OCTOPUS defines 7 basic story element types (out of which 2 are mostly for backward compatibility) and 3 special elements types:

Here are some of the custom elements definition based on basic element types:

When a story is created in OCTOPUS one of the story templates has to be used. Story templates contain a sequence of elements in an order that they would commonly be used, for example ST/VO or ST/PKG. Story templates can be edited in the same way as a script allowing entry of predefined text, formatting or other parts of the script.

For example, you can create a template for the show opening with a basic welcome sentence and a lower third for the anchor, which speeds up the script writing for journalists. To create a new story template go to Admin/Story/Templates from the main menu and hit the NEW button on the toolbar. Enter the name of the story template (this would typically be in the format ST/PKG for example) and tick the box if this should be the default template for all newly created scripts. Next, select the new story template and click on the SCRIPT button on the toolbar, this opens the template and allows editing in the same was as creating a script. (See the OCTOPUS User Guide for details on script writing).

The story status identifies how far along the production process the story currently is. There are 16 states with definable colours and rules; these should be configured to indicate the different stages of your story production process.

Here is one example of how story status might be configured:

To define a new “workflow checkpoint” or status, go to Admin/Story/Status and then choose the states tab. Choose one of the unused rows and click the EDIT button on the toolbar. Type the name of the new story state and tick the active tickbox.

Next choose the colours tab to choose a colour to be displayed when the rules matching your new story state are met. Click NEW on the toolbar and then click on the coloured square to display a palette of available colours, click the required colour on the palette. You can also choose some text to be displayed within the coloured status indicator, such as S for script, V for visuals etc. There is also an option MASTEREDIT, this should generally only be ticked for your READY TO AIR status.

To create the story state rule, click the Rules tab. To create a new rule click on the NEW button on the toolbar. The New Story Status Rule dialogue contains three drop down lists, the first is for choosing IF/IF NOT, the second for the name of the story state and the third is the colour that should be displayed if this criterion is met. Rules can be dependant on other rules, this can be achieved by leaving the top level rule without a colour defined and then dragging and dropping other rules on top of that – as in the below example.

On top of story status, stories can also have different colours. You can define rules for story colours in Admin/Story/Color rules, rules are based of story format (ie. order of elements). You can either enter exact story format such as "STUDIO/VO", or you can use wildcards. Supported operators are "?" meaning one element of any type, "+" meaning one or more element and "*" meaning any amount of them. If you want to mark stories with LIVE element inside, you could either use "LIVE" in rule, which would only match stories with exactly one element of LIVE (so LIVE/VO would not match) or "LIVE/*" which would match LIVE, LIVE/VO, LIVE/LIVE and so on.

Up to 8 plain-text description fields for stories can be defined. In most newsrooms, just one story description is sufficient and nothing extra needs to be added. However, it is possible to create multiple story description tabs. This is particularly useful for planning/newsgathering folders which allow editing only of the description tabs and not the actual script body. Please see the Story Folders chapter of the user manual to become familiar with these types of stories.

To create extra story description tabs, go to Admin-Story-Description and click the NEW button. All that is required in the new story description dialogue is to enter a name and tick the enabled box.

Story description templates allow you to have text and formatting automatically added to the description tab. If you would like to create a story description template for use with this new story description tab, go to Admin-Story-Description Templates. Choose the newly created story description from the drop down list below the toolbar and then click on the NEW button on the toolbar. Give the template a name and then enter in the text field below any text that you would like to have added by default to the story description when this template is applied, click OK.

The new story description will now be available when a new script is created or later when editing the script properties in a normal scripting story folder. In the newsgathering/planning folders, these story descriptions will be displayed when double clicking the story from the list or by selecting the story and clicking EDIT on the toolbar.

You need to predefine your Jingles and Character Generator templates in order to be able to use them in stories/rundowns later.

The types of shows in your schedule are defined here. Rundown duration does not matter for show types, at this stage you only need to define the type of program. For example, you might have a program News at 6, with 20-minute duration and another News at 10 with 30-minute duration. Just one show type 'News' can be created. A different show type would be created for a Sports bulletin, however.

As journalists may work on one particular show type, but should not have access to others, different user rights can be set up for each show type and channel combination. For example, you might have two show types, News, and Sports; and a journalist that should have the rights to work on the News , but not the Sports programs – defining these show types allows you to define the user rights accordingly.

Enter the Administrator/Show/Types option and add all the show types you need for your schedule. Once entered, the show type can only be edited or archived, not deleted; so be careful to only add necessary show types. The default rundown template can also be assigned here (these will be created the next chapter Step 7). It is possible to set up automatic actions for the show types, including archiving, deletion, or deep archiving (additional configuration is required for this – ask OCTOPUS support). For each automatic action, you can define a period of time in either hours, days weeks or months after the show has ended that the action should take place. It is important to either archive or delete old rundowns particularly in 24/7 news channels as keeping numerous rundowns active in the database will take up space necessarily and may eventually slow the system down.

For each show type at least one rundown template should be created. You may also have several templates for each show type, for example for a “News” show type, there might be a different template for “News at 6” and “News at 10.”

To create a new rundown template go to Administration/Show/Rundown Templates and click the New button; you will be presented with a dialogue for entry of the template name and planned duration – enter these details and click OK.

For each template, content can be defined. Click the Content button on the toolbar to get to template editor. The template can consist of any of the usual rundown content; jingles, predefined stories (such as news opening and closing studios), breaks, commercials, segments, text notes and an off-air line. Stories may be marked as skipped if required in the template as well. Any of these items can be created by clicking on the down arrow next to the New button on the toolbar and selecting the relevant type of slug. Reordering can be achieved with drag and drop. Creating rundown templates is the same as creating an actual rundown, so for more details on how to create this template, please see the Rundowns and Broadcasting section of the OCTOPUS User Guide. When you have finished editing the content, just close the tab.

If you have the same program repeated at different times of the day, with the same duration – generally the same template can be used for all of these rundowns, this will make the workflow more straightforward.

OCTOPUS rundowns are created in advance, automatically, according to the defined show schedule. This means that producers will have the basic outline of the rundowns ready each day, including content like headlines, bumpers etc.

To create the show schedule, go to Administration/Show/Scheduler and click the New button on the toolbar. In the new Show Schedule dialogue, you need to name the plan and choose how many days in advance the rundowns should be created from the drop-down list. When the Recreate Rundowns checkbox is checked, OCTOPUS will automatically recreate any shows that have been deleted before their scheduled start time as long as this is after the Create Rundowns From time. You can also add a description for the plan, if this is the holiday schedule then describe its intended use here, then click OK to save it. More than one show schedule can be created for each channel, but only one at a time can be assigned.

To add rundowns to the schedule, select your newly created schedule and then click Content on the toolbar. The schedule is defined on a weekly basis, to add a new rundown to the schedule click New on the toolbar. Choose the required Show Type and Rundown Template, enter the scheduled start time, and check the days that this show will be aired, set MOS redirection (if using MOS) and define the desired Automatic action (Archive, Delete, Deep Archive) and the time frame after the schedule start time that this action should take place. Rundowns can be also scheduled as Connected, which means that the connected rundowns start time will be equal to the end time of the previous rundown, regardless previous rundown’s duration.

To edit the properties of shows that have been added previously to the schedule, select the rundown or rundowns (using Ctrl + click or Shift + click) and then click the Edit toolbar button.

To delete rundowns from the schedule select the rundown or rundowns and hit Delete toolbar button.

When all rundowns have been added to the schedule, go back to the list of show schedules and assign the plan to a channel by clicking Plan assignment on the toolbar. The plan assignment dialogue allows you to assign a schedule for each channel and to specify how long the plan should be applied for in the date and time fields Create Rundowns From: and Create Rundowns To:; if you are going to specify a date range, don't forget that you will need to assign a new plan to the channel at the end of this period. By specifying a date range you can prevent having rundowns created for more than one plan when the switch to a new plan takes place. If no dates are entered the plan will be assigned indefinitely, but note that it will never create rundowns for a time already past or beyond the configured number of hours in advance. The schedule will be applied when the OK button is pressed; the procedure which creates the rundowns automatically runs periodically throughout the day – if you want the rundowns created immediately, click Schedule now on the toolbar.

Stories in OCTOPUS are organized in folders. The folder structure is very flexible and can be configured according to your newsroom workflow; consultation with management staff should help you with defining this structure. There are two types of story folders, scripting folders and newsdesk folders (which allow access only to story properties and the background information tabs. If your organization plans to use Assignment desk folders, possibly you might have separate assignment folders for each day of the week (Mon-Sun). Scripting story folders are generally either based on subject e.g. sport, business, economics; or these folders could be based on shifts Morning, Afternoon, Late etc. The folders structure is dependent on your newsroom workflow; therefore management staff could help you with its definition.

To create story folders, locate to Administrator/Story/Folders section in the main menu. Click New on the toolbar and enter the name for the folder and enter any required automatic actions (Archive, Delete, Deep Archive), it is a good idea to apply automatic actions to avoid keeping the unnecessary material in the database.

Create all the story folders that you need, note that it is possible to add subfolders by dragging and dropping the story folder onto another story folder. Next, go to Administrator/Menu Structure. To keep the main menu tidy, it is a good practice to put the story folders in a folder; click the New button on the toolbar, choose Folder from the drop-down list in the Main Menu Item dialogue and name the folder e.g. Assignment Desk or Story Pools. Next start adding the story folders by again clicking the New button, but this time choose Story Folder from the Type list. Name the story folder, then select the story folder you created earlier from the list below.

If this should be an Assignment Desk type of folder, choose Story Only from the Available Edit Story Mode list; if this will be a standard scripting folder, choose Both, Script Default.

Calendar mode enables a calendar filter for the folder, this might be particularly useful for Assignment Desk folders so that reporters can easily filter assignments according to date.

If you would like to add a tree (top level folder and sub-folders) to the menu, choose the top-level folder from the list of story folders and then choose Selected and Subtree from the Subfolder Tree Mode list.

In addition to OCTOPUS automatically saving user forms for viewing lists and users being able to create their own forms, you can define system wide forms which will be the default for all users when they first open each section of OCTOPUS. For the Media and Rundown list sections custom filters can also be created to allow sorting of the items. It is also possible to change the labels displayed as column headers for all users to localize this part of the interface.

To allow proper management of bids and guests you must define the bid statuses in Admin/Contacts/Bid Statuses. Typically you will need at least two statuses, a status for a NEW bid and another for CONFIRMED bids. To create a new status, click the New button on the toolbar enter the name of the status and click OK. For the confirmed status, you should tick MOVE TO GUEST LIST, so that all confirmed bids will automatically be added to the guest list.

Assignments are used for the planning of the events. You can schedule the event, assign the people and link attachments like pictures, files, URLs, text notes, and stories. Assignee receives the notifications about the changes in the assignment.

There should be a menu item called Assignment folder under Administration in the Octopus client. If not you can add it into the menu. Go to the Administration / Menu and click New. Search for menu type called Admin assignment folder.

There are two possible types of user authentication in OCTOPUS, Basic and LDAP. Under Basic authentication, the username and password are stored in the OCTOPUS database; all users must be added manually. If LDAP is being used, users can be imported from and authentication will be handled by the domain controller. OCTOPUS client stations and the OCTOPUS server should be included in one domain. The username is a unique identifier and administrator should make a policy not to make changes to it during the system’s lifetime, although it is possible. Regardless of the authentication type, adding users is done via the Admin/Users/List section of the Main Menu.

To create new users manually, click New on the toolbar and then enter the mandatory details: User name, Long name, Short name, Password, Department, and Title. The Department and Title lists depend on your local environment and dictionaries of these need to be created in the Admin/Dictionary/Department and Admin/Dictionary/Title sections.

To import from LDAP, click on the User import button, this will show all users in the OU specified during the system configuration. The multi-select list displayed can be filtered. You will still need to edit the imported users to add the mandatory details that are not automatically completed. Users cannot be deleted, instead, they can be deactivated to prevent them from logging to the system in the future. Users are kept for the audit and they might also be connected with the content of the database.

The non mandatory fields are accessible to the users by right clicking on the green server status dot in the center at the bottom of the screen and choosing USER PROFILE.

After creating users, they should be assigned a channel. Click the CHANNELS toolbar button to assign users a channel.

User rights set up can be accessed under Admin/Users/Group List. To create a new User Group, click on the NEW button. Under the basic Tab, Enter a Name for the group and then add members to the group either by clicking the '…' icon and choosing users from the multi select list or by starting to type usernames into the text field next to this.

You can also copy the settings of the existing group. Click the Copy button from the toolbar and enter the Name of the new group, you may select to just copy the members, the rights of the group or both. This option will avoid configuring almost the same rights to a new group (with majority of similar rights) again.

User groups can be configured as a hierarchy, just drag and drop one group onto another and it will become the child group - see the screenshot on the next page. User rights are inherited from the parent group to the child, so the least powerful users should be in the parent group and the basic rights like Read Own should be applied at this level. More senior users should be added to the child groups where additional rights can be applied. User rights that have been applied in a parent folder will appear grayed out in the child folder if a rule applying to the same section is added. For a complicated user rights configuration, you can have many separate top level groups/hierarchies - the Show Rights button available from Admin/User/List toolbar will be useful to determine effective rights in this situation. There are no 'No Access' rights, this removes a layer of complication.

The Rights tab in the New/Edit group dialogue is where user rights can be assigned to the following sections: Main Menu, Wires, Story Folders, Channel & Rundown, Story Fields, Story Archives, Story Trash, Story State, and Roles. Throughout the rights section rules can be added in the same way, select the area on the left that you would like to configure rights for and then right click in the gray area on the right and choose ADD RULE. After adding a new rule in Menu, Wires, Story Folders, Channel & Rundown and Story Fields you will receive one or more drop-down lists. Leaving the drop-down selection as blank is a wildcard which means that the rules will apply to all of the options in the list. Some of the lists also include groups of items, such as the Main Menu list which will allow you to apply rules to Main Menu items that you have grouped together in folders.

The first requirement is to assign rights to the main menu, this determines which folders will be displayed and accessible to users in this group. Anything that you select from rule lists will grant the users in that group access to that menu item, there are no tick boxes for these types of rules. Access to the main menu item does not necessarily grant access to the contents of the section, this will depend on subsequent rules.

Wires - Select the wire folder that you would like to apply rules for or select the blank option to apply a wildcard. The options available include:

Story folder: user rights can be assigned to story folders or story folder groups, the available rights include:

Channel and Rundown - rights can be applied to any Channel and Rundown Type combination or wildcards of either type:

Story Fields - this section allows user rights to be assigned at the level of story and slug fields. In most situations it may not be necessary to define user rights at such a detailed level, in this case adding full rights to the wildcards is all that is required. If you want to give users access to only certain fields you will need to specify the columns from the list and assign the appropriate rights, which include: Modify, Modify Own, Read, Read Own. There are following fields groups available:

Story Archive and Story Trash – These rights are all self-explanatory. You can define whether users can Read or Read Own and Purge or Purge Own in the Trash and Archives. Rights can also be assigned to allow users to Empty Trash or Empty trash Own.

Story State – For Each defined story state you can specify whether the group has Read or Modify access to the state. If the story state is Ready for Air (including Masteredit) for example, modify rights should be restricted to an Editor group.

Right Group - This option was added to the more recent versions of Octopus. It allows non-administrator users to manage the membership of other users to different groups in the system. Access to the Admin user group list menu item has to be provided of course (commonly found in Administration-User-Groups). The options available are:

Role – The following roles can be granted to users:

All agent share some properties. All of them can run as Windows services and they can run in the background on linux. Each of the agents can also be run from the command line, in that case it is necessary to execute 'java -jar Name_of_Agent.jar' Agents will typically be installed by the OCTOPUS engineer as part of the initial installation. The most important feature for the administrator is accessing the configuration interface, generally, this can be started by running setup.cmd or config.cmd in the directory where the agent is installed (typically C:\OCTOPUS\services\name_of_agent). If the setup.cmd/config.cmd files are not available the config interface can also be run by executing the command: java -jar Name_of_Agent.jar -s (please note the last parameter -s).

Some of the configuration parameters are common to all of the agents – these parameters are found in the tabs called: Log, Warning, and Server (tab Server is not present in Wires Agent as it does not need to connect to the database).

The WiresAgent should be used when the receiver (satellite, modem or any other device) is connected to the computer through a serial (RS-232) communication port. Configuration details vary from device to device. Please ask your service provider for connection parameters. To add a new wire connection, click the ADD button on the PORTS tab. The following screenshot is an example of how it can look after completing the required details.

In the Wire Agent, the Name field is just used to distinguish the sources.

The connection parameters required from the service provider include:

COM port settings: COM port (which port is a device connected to), Baud rate, Data bits, Parity, Stop bit.

Information about the raw data: Charset, Start and End characters (Characters used to indicate the start and end of each wire message)

The received messages will be saved as text files in the directory specified in the Location field, therefore a connection to the OCTOPUS server is not required.

Sometimes it is necessary to use a translation table, this allows you to convert characters to something more suitable when the charset of the raw data differs from the charset on the computer running the WiresAgent. The characters which we don't want to display can be replaced by other characters.

The translation table needs to have the extension .trt. Each line should contain an entry like: A = B. A is an unwanted character, B is the replacement. B is always a string value. A can be in one of following formats:

Example formulas: x4F = "c" | u0A = "r" | 125 = "z" | "\u" = "u"

When you have completed all the required fields in the ADD new wire dialogue, click OK to save the changes. To modify these settings use to select the wire from the list in the ports tab and click the EDIT button, or to delete it click DELETE.

The purpose of InjectAgent is to read any text file (whether received by WiresAgent or not) and insert it into the OCTOPUS database. Open the InjectAgent configuration interface and select the Wires tab, click the ADD button to open the new wire dialogue.

The Name field is very important in the InjectAgent wire tab. Most of the wire filter rules will be based on this field, in the OCTOPUS admin/wire/rules section, it as referred as 'source'.

In example above, the Inject Agent is watching the folder /OCTOPUS/wiredata/APTN (Location) every 10 seconds (Interval) if new files (Watch events) are created. Also all files in the specified location would be processed on startup of Inject Agent.

After processing, the files are moved to folder /OCTOPUS/wiredata/APTN-done (After and To fields). The option force means that file with the same name would be overwritten. Files that cannot be parsed would be moved to /OCTOPUS/wiredata/APTN-failed any problems (Move Failed To:). It is not essential to move or copy the files after processing, the field 'To:' can be left blank.

Translation table field has the same functionality as the Wires Agent translation table. Please see the previous section for details.

In our example, the parser called IPTC7 (Title switch) is being used for the APTN wire. Inject agent contains some other built-in parsers like NewsML or NewsML2 for XMLs. For wire formats that do not follow the industry standards, a custom script can be created. To start writing a new script choose 'Custom script' or 'Custom JavaScript' in the combo called Parser and then click the button Edit (on the right of the Script field). Writing a custom script is quite simple, the required syntax and instructions are available via the Help tab – see screenshot below.

For advanced scripts (necessary in cases where not all wires in the feed are in the same format) it might be necessary to write a Custom JavaScript instead. On-screen help is available in the same in a tab as with the Custom script. If you need assistance with writing these scripts, contact OCTOPUS Support.

The general tab of the RSS agent configuration includes a few basic settings; most of the configuration for RSS feeds can be done in the Admin section of the Octopus client. The settings available are:

To add a new RSS feed, go to the Admin/Wires/RSS feeds section of the Octopus client and click the new button on the toolbar. You will see a dialogue box like the one below. Enter a name for this RSS feed in the Title field. The URL of the RSS feed should be entered as it would be accessed in a web browser into the URL field. Should credentials be required, just put them into URL like http://user:pass@server/location. The source is used for setting up wire filtering rules, so whatever you enter here must match your entries in wire rules. You can also set up wire rules within this dialogue by choosing from the available wire folders in the Store To field and ticking the Change Filter Rule tickbox. The refresh interval will determine how often the RSSAgent will check the RSS source for new items. Additional options include Save Offline and Extract Text from Page, choosing extract text from the page will allow the body text for each RSS item to be viewed in Octopus.

Octopus SMS integration requires a GSM module to be connected via a serial connection to a machine with the Octopus SMS agent installed. The general tab of the SMSAgent has a few basic options, much of the configuration can be done in the Admin/SMS section of the Octopus client. The Name field on the SMSAgent general tab should match the name given to the SMS agent in the Admin/SMSAgent section of the client. The Port field is for entering the COM port that you have attached the SMS module to, and speed allows you to choose the appropriate baud rate.

The configuration options within the Admin/SMS section of the Octopus client are shown in the table and screenshot below.

To enable sending of SMS messages via Octopus Instant messaging or chat, GSM providers must be configured and users mobile numbers must be entered in their profile. To add GSM providers, go to Admin/Dictionary/GSM and click the NEW button on the toolbar. Enter the name of the service provider, the dialing code eg +420, the SMS format e.g. TEXT, and lastly the SMS character limits for the subject and body of the message. Users must edit their profile, choose a GSM provider from the drop-down list in the contacts section and enter their mobile number in the field next to this.

Octopus FAX agent needs to be installed on a machine that has the fax modem connected. Installation and configuration of the standard agent tabs (Log, Warning, and Server) is as described in the above section Working with Octopus Agents. The general tab of the FaxAgent has the following options:

You will need to configure wire folders and wire sorting rules in the Administration section of the Octopus client to display the received faxes in Octopus, this procedure is described in the following two pages.

To receive Wires, RSS feeds, E-mails, SMS and Faxes into OCTOPUS you must have already created the wire folders and wire filter rules. To create a new Wire folder, go to Administration/Wires/Wire & Email Folders and click the NEWbutton on the toolbar. Name the wire folder according to its intended contents, for example, all wires from a source agency might be stored there, for example, AP or Reuters, or all wires according to a category such as Sport or Economics. There are two settings related to the purging of wire messages to avoid storing thousands of old wire messages in the database, Number of days – messages older than the set number of days will be purged, and Number of messages – once this limit is reached the oldest messages beyond this limit will be deleted. If you want to allow wires to be edited by OCTOPUS users or to have locally created wires, you can tick the boxes to 'Apply rules to manually updated messages' or 'Apply rules to manually created messages' to ensure that local content is sorted in the same way. The drop-down list 'After Wire Update:' includes options to have manually updated messages to be moved to the top of the list or to have a copy made with a version number assigned to it.

Wire filter rules are always applied when a new message is inserted into the database by one of the OCTOPUS Agents. OCTOPUS will apply all rules starting at the top of the list matching the new message.

Every rule has two parts: a condition (what we are looking for: source, keywords, category etc.) and an action (what will happen to the message: it will be moved to a folder, it will be marked with a colour etc.).

The wire rules are configured in the Admin/Wires/Rules section. To create a new rule click on the NEW button on the toolbar.

The possible conditions are:

- Always (blank); Source; Priority; Title; Keywords; Category; Subcategory

- IS (blank); IS NOT

- equals; starts with; contains

- String value

- Actions: move to folder; copy to folder; set/reset flash flag; set colour; delete

Rules can be created with any of actions or conditions. Rules can also be created that have sub-conditions, this can be done by dragging and dropping one rule on top of another. In the below example there are three rules applied to all wires that have the source CTK, if the priority equals 1 then the wire will be coloured, if the category equals sport the wire will be copied to the Sport folder, and all will be moved to the CTK folder. If you want to apply subsequent rules to a wire you should COPY the wire and then the last rule should MOVE the wire.

When creating the rules you can use also the keywords like {TITLE}, {PRIORITY}, {CATEGORY}, {SOURCE}, {SUBCATEGORY} and {KEYWORDS}, for example set subcategory to {TITLE}.

This is done using report forms (JasperReports). Forms are created in visual designer iReport Designer or in Jaspersoft Studio when Java8+. The used version of iReport has to be compatible with the jasper libraries used in Octopus. As of version 5.5.0, Jaspersoft Studio will be the official design client for JasperReports. iReport will remain as a supported product in maintenance-only mode until December 31, 2015, meaning we will continue to fix critical defects in upcoming releases but no new features will be added to the iReport client. Continue to maintain your existing reports with the new Jaspersoft Studio!

You can find iReport Designer version archive in http://sourceforge.net/projects/ireport/files/iReport/ iReport Archive.

You can find Jaspersoft Studio releases on http://community.jaspersoft.com/project/jaspersoft-studio/releases Jaspersoft Studio Releases page.

You can find following sections in the right pane called Report Inspector

List of all fields is available in the print form template with all fields. You can easily change the size of the boxes, also the position. You can also delete the fields if you want.

Every field has own properties available in the left pane. There is a plenty option see just few of them: position and size of the filed, colours of the field, style, stretch option, print option, text field properties and text properties like font and alignment, spacing etc.

Right click on the file will give you another option

You have to always search for desired option for example, Bands have height, every box has height, and then you have a font size. So you have to be aware what exactly do you want to change if the size of the box or just the text or both.

If you select the name of some band, for example, "Column Header" you can define the height.

You can find another objects in "Palette" pane which you can use during the designing of the print form.

You can check whether the print form is fine by compiling - it is the Compile Report button next to the zoom out button in the toolbar. It will give you the results and descriptions of the problems.

If the print form is without errors you can switch from the Design mode into the Preview mode. The iReport will ask you about the content of the fields in the form and will generate preview of the form according to your inputs.

Once you are done in iReport with the print form template save it under different name for example, "rundown-test".

Now you can go into the octopus client Administration/Print/Form and click on New select the type "Rundown" and write the name of the form which you want to see in Print/Custom.... Click on the ... right next to the Open and select your modified print form and press OK

You can add new print form. Click on the New and you will get new window:

You have to get the message "Print forms were successfully reloaded" in the left down part of the status bar. If there is some problem with the form you will get the message here too.

Then you can open any rundown and click on the Print select Custom...and you will find that template in rolldown box called "Form".

This section can be found in the menu under Administration/CG/CG Devices. This is a simple list of the different CG devices that will be used with OCTOPUS CG Control. The only options on the toolbar are New, Edit and Delete. The NEW and EDIT dialogue just allows entry or modification of a single field, the NAME of the device. Devices in this list can later be chosen by journalists when adding CG's to rundowns and can be used to filter CG's according to the device in the CG Control section.

CG Connection is a more detailed dialogue containing most of the required settings, this can be found in the menu under Administration/CG/CG Connections. Again the toolbar has only New, Edit and Delete buttons. A screenshot of the New/Edit dialogue window is displayed in this chapter. Enter the name of the connection and choose the CG device (as created in CG DEVICES section), this will be used with in the Basics section.

The CG settings section needs to be filled with details relevant to the CG device: you can choose between Chyron or Aston drivers, enter the path to the Font directory, enter the Target page number and choose the charset that needs to be used with this device. Supported charsets include ASCII, Unicode, UTF8, and custom (described in the next section CG encoding).

COM settings contain all the necessary configuration options for the serial communication. Choose the Port that the device will be connected to on the OCTOPUS client used for CG control. Baud rate, data bits, stop bits and parity can be chosen from the drop-down lists according to the settings used by your device.

To make a customized translation table or character map to be used for CG device encoding, access Admin/CG/CG encoding in the menu. This can be used for translation of Unicode characters to Ascii characters. To create a new table click the New on the toolbar. Enter a name for the new translation table. The dialogue has a button FILL WITH ASCII, this might be a good starting point for the new table. You can then use the ADD button to add a new row to the table. In each row you will have to add a valid Unicode hexadecimal entry in the first column and in the third column a decimal in the range 0-255 (you can also enter two decimal entries separated by a semicolon for example 48;48 for 00). Other options in this dialogue include EXPORT XML TO CLIPBOARD and IMPORT XML FROM CLIPBOARD.

CGControl is another menu type that has to be added to the menu. CGControl allows you to use the configured connection and load the rundowns, filter the stories based on the graphic objects inside and send them to the selected CG device.

The main menu allows users to access the different OCTOPUS sections. The menu is highly configurable, it is possible to add/remove all sections to match station's workflow. Once the main menu has been defined, access to some sections can be restricted to particular user groups via user rights.

In order to modify the menu, go to Administration/Menu/Menu Structure. There are three buttons NEW, EDIT and DELETE allowing users to create a new menu item, to edit an existing item or to delete an existing menu item.

To create a new menu item, click the NEW and then choose the required menu item type and type its display name as you would like it to appear in the menu (see image below). There are two general types of menu item: folder and others. Folders are designed to contain other items, thus it is possible to create a menu with any desired structure. For other types of menu item, some additional configuration may be required, particularly wire folders and story folders – which are described in more detail in the Story Folder and Wires sections of this guide.

The New menu item is always inserted under the currently selected item. In image example above, it will be inserted between XINHUA and TASS wire sections. Items can be moved around the list by drag and drop, the new position is marked with the red line before the drop.

There is no limit to the number of items in menu or the number of subfolders.

The following table lists the available Main Menu items:

Depending on your version, you may attach shortcuts to the main menu items and also change the colour and background colour for them. This is done from the Administration/Menu by right clicking on the desired menu item and selecting the Advanced tab.

In order to add a shortcut press Add then the desired keys combination followed by enter. You may also Reset the process or Remove existing entries.

If you wish to change the colour of the selected menu item simply click the left box to choose the background colour and the right box in order to change the font (text) colour. The preview should be helpful in seeing them together before applying the changes by pressing OK.

You can re-import default menu by running server with argument of "--import-menu Administration"

First of all you have to have the license for the API as mentioned above. You can access the API from the octopus server web page http://%name_of_your_octopus_server%/ (http://%IP_of_your_octopus_server%/) there is a link to the REST API documentation. Here you can find the manual for octopus REST API or directly http://%name_of_your_octopus_server%/api/v1/doc/documentation.html (http://%IP_of_your_octopus_server%/api/v1/doc/documentation.html). You can find all object types, fields and actions.

You can test your queries in the sandbox of every each object type or have a general sandbox here http://%name_of_your_octopus_server%/api/v1/doc/sandbox.html (http://%IP_of_your_octopus_server%/api/v1/doc/sandbox.html).

You need the user of type API client and as all API requests do respect the octopus rights you need to assign proper rights to that user.

General request structure is http://%server_name%/api/v1/OBJECT_TYPE/[ID][SPECIAL_ACTION][?fields=][&createMissing]

Keep in mind that globalId have to be used instead of ID in case of Multisite configuration.

MAIN server;MASTER role - all Octopus services, Openfire and PostgreSQL are set to start automatically.

BACKUP server;SLAVE role - all Octopus services and openfire are set to manual start. PostgreSQL service is set to automatic start. Just the PostgreSQL starts automatically and re-establish the replication.

In case of the cross replication the roles (MASTER, SLAVE) can be switched (BACKUP acts as MASTER and MAIN as SLAVE). In such case setting is reversed. You can find out the server role by checking the latest PostgreSQL log, most of the time under c:\octopus\data\pg_log\

MAIN server;MASTER role - all Octopus services, Openfire and PostgreSQL are set to start automatically.

BACKUP server;SLAVE role - all Octopus services and openfire are set to manual start. PostgreSQL service is set to automatic start. Just the PostgreSQL starts automatically and re-establish the replication. Octopus Server service has to be started manually.

In case of the cross replication the roles (MASTER, SLAVE) can be switched (BACKUP acts as MASTER and MAIN acts as SLAVE). In such case setting is reversed. You can find out the server role by checking the latest PostgreSQL log, most of the time under c:\octopus\data\pg_log\ and then the cluster.log most of the time under c:\octopus\server\log\%date%\cluster.log.

Logs can be found in the \octopus\server\log\%date%\mailer.log

On top of default log levels, it is also possible to set log levels to individual topics, syntax is as follows - level.<LogTopicSimpleName>=<LEVEL> - where LEVEL is one of TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL and defaults to TRACE. For example, to set logging of all HTTP related messages at level ERROR, use the following - level.Server.HTTP=ERROR.

You can find information about the licensed modules and about the validity of the license on the http://localhost/admin/ (on the server) or http://%IP_of_your_octopus_server%/admin/ (from any machine - authentication requires username and password of user with administrator role in octopus). Here in the upper right corner click on the List button - see following screenshot.

Login to the octopus server and open the simpleLogger.log located under /octopus/server/log/%date%/ and search for the particular changes of the particular story

Examples:

You can find out who and when MOS activated particular rundown. You can find it in the simpleLogger.log under /octopus/server/log/%date%/. Message looks similar to this example:

2016-07-26 09:38:14.539   122 LogTopic.Server.SIMPLE_LOGGER INFO    User 'administrator' activated rundown 'ETV - NEWS - 19:00:00' [77301651] on device 'PLAYOUT'
        

Keep in mind that the Date and Time is in UTC. User is the user who MOS activated the rundown, name of the rundown follows and 77301651 is unique showId of the Rundown and device is the MOSID of the MOS activated device. And MOS deactivate:

2016-07-26 09:42:26.887   122 LogTopic.Server.SIMPLE_LOGGER INFO    User 'administrator' deactivated rundown 'ETV - NEWS - 19:00:00' [77301651] on device 'PLAYOUT'
        

It is not possible to delete the user from octopus because of the dependencies in the database. You can only deactivate the user. Find the user under Administration / User / Users - select particular user you want to deactivate, click on Edit and un-tick the Active check-box and press OK. The user will disappear from the Active user list. You can switch between active and inactive users by clicking on the Show active in the toolbar.

In case of basic authentication, the username and the password is authenticated against the records in the octopus database. Every user can change his/her password in the user profile - right click on the username in the right bottom corner of the octopus client and choose the second option Change password.Note that Change password option is not available when LDAP authentication is configured.

In case the LDAP authentication is configured, the username is authenticated against octopus database but the password is authenticated against the Active Directory/LDAP server. It means that the username has to be present in octopus database and that the password is never stored in the octopus database. You can easily import the user from the LDAP server by clicking on User import and selecting the user you want to import in the Administration / User / Users. Keep in mind that you can not delete the user once you import it - see the "How to delete a user from octopus?" above. In case you would want to import all users related to the same group as the selected one you can tick the option Import user group membership. This is how you can import multiple users which belong to the particular user group in Active Directory/LDAP.

LDAP authentication just brings the ability to use the same password in octopus as for login to the computer so the users do not have to have a different set of passwords for octopus and for the computer.

In case that the username has changed in the Active Directory/LDAP, you do not have to import that user again. You can simply edit the account in octopus and modify the username/shortname/longname or any other field. The username just has to be exactly the same as in Active Directory/LDAP

There are several options:

All logs of octopus services are logged in UTC. It is not possible to change it.

It might happen that the fulltext index is broken. You have two options how to fix it. First option is without downtime:

If it does not help, downtime is required.

Keep in mind that reindexing might have some impact on the server performance in case the server is not powerful enough and it also depends on the size of the database. it is recommended to run reindex during non-peak hours.

You can re-import default menu by running server with argument of "--import-menu Administration"

The best tool to use for reading the octopus logs is the LogReader most of the time located under /octopus/tools/LogReader. Ask octopus support for the guide if you do not have it.