What is EMS?
EMS Software™ is the industry’s most powerful enterprise-class workplace and campus management platform. More information can be found at https://www.emssoftware.com/
How can it be used in Carousel?
Carousel's Event Schedule Bulletins can use EMS data as its calendar source. This allows you to create an automated data connection between the EMS SOAP API and Carousel to create always up to date display of room and event bookings. This feature is available in Carousel 7.3 and beyond.
How do I set this up?
First ensure that you have EMS software with the Basic (Read Only) SOAP API licensed and set up. You will need to have username, password and URL information for the EMS SOAP API available.
- Navigate to Settings > System > External Authentications
- Create a new External Authentication
- Choose EMS as the Authentication Source
- Enter the location of your EMS Web Services API
- Enter the authentication credentials
- The password for the authentication account cannot contain these characters: & < > ” or '
- Save
Now that you've created an EMS authentication, go ahead and create a new Event Schedule Bulletin. From the Event Source drop down choose EMS. There are several filters you can select in order to choose the right set of events for the bulletin you are creating. Select the appropriate Buildings, Rooms, Types, and Statuses you wish to display. If you wish you can also choose one of the status types to highlight a specific color and append text to (we use this to mark 'cancelled' meetings most frequently). After making these filter selections, go ahead and customize your bulletin as you would any other dynamic bulletin and publish it.
What if I'm upgrading from 6.X now that EMS is supported in Carousel 7?
Good news! you shouldn't have to do anything other than create the authentication, edit your bulletin once so that the authentication gets selected and your 6.X bulletins will continue to work. This assumes, of course, that you have the EMS SOAP (basic) API installed and licensed.
But I already upgraded to Carousel 7 before this was released.
You probably noticed that your EMS bulletins were marked as 'Corrupt'. If you haven't deleted them, then contact our support team and they can get them out of the 'Corrupt' status for you. If you have already deleted them, then you're going to need to re-create them. If you happen to still have access to your 6.X system, you can export them and then import them into Carousel 7.3+ and they should work just fine.