Menu: Manage
Managing participant connections and wipe boards
The Manage Menu is used to control sharing and joining, get participant updates and wiping the Boards.
> Enable/Disable Joining
When Joining is enabled, anyone running the CCS VFE Cards App on their mobile device, can enter the Session ID and Join the session. Use this function to prevent unwanted joining once your session is underway. When Joining is disabled, participants trying to join your session will receive a message on their App screen indicating that “Joining is disabled. Contact your facilitator.” You will need to enable joining to allow this participant to join.
Note: Session IDs are randomly generated and unique, so effectively, the only way someone is going to be able to join a session is if you or one of your participants provides the ID to them.
> Enable/Disable Sharing
When Sharing is enabled, participants are able to “Share” their card choices to be displayed on the VFE. This is usually what you want. However, there may be times when you wish to temporarily block sharing — perhaps to focus everyone’s attention on your next steps or to preserve the latest shared states.
Note: the first time a participant clicks “Share to VFE” on their CCS VFE Cards App, their cards are automatically “Placed” in their frame. All subsequent shares are considered “updates”, and are not automatically added to the VFE screen. Instead, a small purple notification bell appears above the Participant’s icon indicating that an updated share is available. The facilitator is then free to choose when and if to “Refresh” the Participant’s selection (Right-click on their icon) — effectively allowing sharing to be controlled.
However, while sharing is enabled, repeated “Share to VFE” clicks by the participant will still be sending new updates to the VFE, even though the facilitator may not be refreshing those updates. As such, when the facilitator finally chooses to refresh the selection (or Ends the session and subsequently Resumes or Reviews the session), all participant selections will be updated to the latest shared updated — which is fine, but may not always be what is desired. For instance, if a participant chooses to delete all their chosen cards and annotations and share a completely different selection, if sharing is enabled, this new selection would overwrite what was currently showing on the VFE.
The current state of the Join and Share functions is preserved when a facilitator ends the session. This allows the facilitator to control access to sharing and joining even when the session may not actually be being viewed — which is useful for pre and post session work.
Joining and Sharing can also be toggled by clicking on their respective icons shown at the righthand end of the Participant Bar.
When a session has moved to Review Only mode (meaning it is no longer “Joinable”), both sharing and joining are permanently disabled.
> Refresh Participants
Allows the facilitator to refresh ALL participant’s choices to their most up-to-date state. A confirmation dialogue will appear. Select “Refresh” or “Cancel” as required.
> Add All To Collection
Allows the facilitator to add all cards on the Participants Board to the Collection. This includes participant’s cards and cards that have been manually added.
Tip: If you just want to add all of an individual participant’s card choices to the Collection at once, use the “Add All to Collection” option from the Participant’s icon right-click menu.
> Wipe Big Board
Allows the facilitator to wipe the contents of the Big Board. A confirmation dialogue will appear — with the following options:
- Wipe Big Board with Keep Collection checked — clean everything off the Big Board except any cards that are in the Collection. All Big Board text objects and any added cards that are not in the Collection, will be removed.
- Wipe Big Board with Keep Collection unchecked — clean everything off the Big Board and remove all cards from the Collection. All Big Board objects will be erased and the Collection will be set to zero.
- Cancel — quit without changing anything.
> Wipe All
Allows the facilitator to wipe the contents of the Participants Board and the Big Board in one click. A confirmation dialogue will appear. Select “Wipe” or “Cancel” as required.
Note: While Wiping All does indeed clean both VFE Boards, it does not actually erase the participant selections from the database (or from their mobile device). As such, participant icons will still show the number of cards that are currently in each participant’s selection. Selecting “Refresh Participants” (or Right-clicking on a participant’s icon and selecting “Refresh Selection”) will restore the just-wiped card choices to the Board.
