Dynamic Channel Membership

Overview 

Focusing on reaching the audience of applications and services is often a vital necessity. The Heed client offers a "discovery mode" option, enabling it to monitor the usage of pre-configured applications and web services. Subsequently, it can automatically adjust channel memberships to facilitate the seamless delivery of content to the users of these applications or services.

Usage Discovery

Enabling discovery mode

Before configuring dynamic channel membership, you must activate Discovery mode in the system settings. Follow these steps:

1. Open the Heed Admin Portal and click on Settings.
   
2. In the General section, scroll down to the Desktop Client section:
   
   
3. To enabled discovery, ensure that the Discovery Enabled checkbox is checked.
4. Then, click Save Changes at the top of the page.

Configure the Channels

After activating discovery mode in the system settings, you can proceed to set up the processes and web addresses for the channels.

1. Open the Channel browser and search for the channel that you wish to configure.
2. Click on the Edit Channel option.
   
   
3. Then, select the Discovery tab.
   
   
4. Enter the name(s) of the executables that you would like to track. Executable names should be entered without the extension, e.g. ".exe".
   Enter the web addresses that you would like to track; e.g. example.com.
5. Then, press Save.

Points to consider 

Discovery configuration updates are automatically pushed to online desktop clients in real-time, while offline clients will receive the configuration changes during their next startup.

The client monitors usage at intervals determined by the check intervals specified in the system settings. The server processes the tracked usage data and updates channel memberships every 2 - 3 hours. If a user hasn't utilized any of the configured processes or web services within the last 30 days, they will be removed from the channel.

When a discovery list is applied to a channel, its membership will be governed by the discovery service. Consequently, if any users are manually added to the channel and haven't used any of the configured processes or web services, they will be removed from the channel.