Better bulk object management for Folders, Users, Groups, etc.
Eric Phetteplace
Whiz Kid
Most of the objects in Panopto present the same limited interface on the admin side: you can perform a simple query to find a single object, or sort their order by own of their properties (e.g. users by their role or last sign-in). But filtering to a particular set of objects is impossible in many instances and once you've found a set, you can generally only perform one batch operation (delete, though you can bulk share folders, too).
It'd be great if all the property columns like role, added, last sign-in offered filters instead of only sorting. Furthermore, and this is a different way of doing the same thing, it'd be great to have an advanced search for these objects where you could structure queries better. For instance, asking for "all folders with a certain phrase in their name that were created before a certain date and have X sessions in them" would be powerful. And then, once we have the ability to filter to a targeted set of objects, it would be good to be able something more than delete them. For instance, changing the settings of a large number of folders or users at once is immensely tedious right now. It takes a long time both to find the folders and then to edit them. With better filtering and bulk action tools, this would be easy.
I'll admit, I haven't actually ran into any problems yet, but looking at the admin interface I'm very nervous about what happens when I do need to do a bulk operation. It seems quite limited and is already hard to find some objects I'm looking for, like folders associated with a particular course, even though we have virtually no content in Panopto yet.
Comments
I have found some bulk operation to be difficult. For example, approving multiple videos in a folder or requesting captions in bulk.
Yes requesting captions in Bulk would be very beneficial. I ran into this when I was uploading videos for my first course that I am facilitating. I wanted to bulk order all of them before pushing the videos live, but found that I needed to go in manually to each one to do it. So, from an instructor standpoint, I totally agree. Even an option to "bulk automatically caption" would be helpful for faculty.
Bulk moving folders would be a dream come true.