Label by facts, not by intentions
A fact is where a screen is, what kind of place it is in, or how it is used. frankfurt. plant-floor. reception. 24h.
An intention is what you currently want it to show. summer-promo. q3-campaign. new-menu.
Facts stay true. Intentions expire, and the label outlives them, because removing a label from twenty screens is a job somebody has to remember to do and nobody ever does.
Put the intention in the playlist’s schedule instead. A campaign with an end date turns itself off; a campaign label does not.
The dimensions most fleets need
Between two and four, and a screen carries one from each:
| Dimension | Examples |
|---|---|
| Where | frankfurt, manchester, plant-2 |
| What kind of space | reception, plant-floor, canteen, meeting-room |
| Who owns it | facilities, hr, operations |
| How it runs | 24h, office-hours, portrait |
Three dimensions across a hundred screens gives you every grouping you are likely to want, from about a dozen labels.
Do not encode combinations
The trap is creating frankfurt-reception because you want to target Frankfurt’s reception screens.
You already can: a screen carrying both frankfurt and reception is reachable by a playlist targeting either. Combination labels multiply, so ten sites and five space types becomes fifty labels instead of fifteen, and every new site means five more.
Be consistent about form
Pick one and hold to it. Lowercase with hyphens is the easiest to type and the hardest to get subtly wrong.
Consistency matters more than the specific convention. Plant Floor, plant-floor and plantfloor in the same workspace are three labels and two bugs.
What a name may contain
Letters, digits, spaces, and most punctuation. Not a comma, a colon, or a double quote, and not a tab or a line break.
Up to 255 characters, though a label anyone has to read across a room in a picker should be considerably shorter.
Sanity check the scheme
Two questions.
Can you name the label for a request without looking it up? “Put this on the Frankfurt reception screens” should map to labels you can guess. If it needs a lookup table, the scheme is not doing its job.
Does a new screen get its labels from facts you already know? Site, room, purpose. If labelling a new screen requires knowing what campaigns are running, the scheme has intentions in it.