Electronic Noticeboard System

Some examples are shown on the right, but put simply the noticeboard or digital signage screen can be split into multiple display areas. A multi zone system makes leaving an important message on view all the time simple, as you simply select a panel or zone on the main signage screen to display the message. Each display zone is a complete electronic noticeboard player in it's own right, and can display either a single page or multiple pages in a slide show along with page scheduling.

DCS - Dynamic Content Spread
DCS allows you to allocate a number of zones on a screen to operate as a single virtual display zone. An example might be that you have a screen split into four zones. With DCS you could put all four zones into a single virtual display group 20. Then, from the signage control system you put everything you want displayed on that screen into the group 20 list and DCS will split the pages equally around the zones. DCS simply allows you to treat a multi zone screen as a single zone one.

Typical Multizone Use
A large display screen could be placed in say a school reception area and different school departments could have individual control over their own section of the screen. This is ideal if there is an important message that the staff or students need to read that may get missed if it's somewhere in a slide show of twenty pages on a single zone system. Simply display the message in its own section of the screen for as long as you need.

Often a problem with display screens is that the content from the editing system is output at a specified resolution, so all your display screens need to be working at the same resolution. This system is able to display the same page on different resolution screens or zones as the page is scaled up and down on the fly as it's displayed.

TV - Pages with live TV content
The system also supports live television or video that is again shown in one of the images on the right. The television plays uninterrupted in one section of the screen while message players can be placed around the TV and operate independently.

Signage Zone Layout
The signage player software has a number of different zone layouts built into it that allow you to quickly select a layout ranging from a single full screen zone to the full sixteen zones with a number of variations in between, including portrait zones.

The zone sizes will be calculated to fit based on the screen resolution.

For more control of the layout we have a WYSIWYG layout manager (shown below) built into the player software. This allows you to put the display zones anywhere on the screen and at any size along with selecting the display group or channel of information it will show. The zones are shown as yellow rectangles that can be resized and positioned with the mouse.

Look in the Videos section for a training video on how this works.

Digital Signage Screen Configuration Options
There are a number of options associated with the noticeboard zones all of which are easily configured from a control panel. The features are:

Page Transitions and timing - A number of transition effects are available so as your zones change content to the next message page they can use a transition such as fade or dissolve (requires IE8 or below to be installed on the player PC).

Zone Borders and Border Colour - Shows a thin border around each zone. The border can be set on or off.

Display web pages in the zones. This enables you to show any web content such as from your Intranet content management system.

Reboot - Automatically reboot the signage player PC on a certain day and time of the week. Some third party software such as flash could have memory leaks and eventually cause your signage player to run out of memory. Rebooting the unit ensures that your players are running fresh each week. This feature can be switched on or off.

Hardware
See our range of digital signage player PCs

Our standard hardware platform is built on 1.8GHz Intel Atom based motherboards running Windows 7 Professional and is available in a small form factor chassis.

We also supply digital signage players with multiple graphics cards that can give you separate control of up to ten screens. This type of system is often used for showing meeting information outside conference rooms in places such as hotels.

Chassis designs will vary and won't always be as shown in the photograph. As we use the the mini-itx platform for our one or two screen units they will always be very small units.

We can of course supply you with the software to install on your own PCs. Our digital signage players typically draw around 35 Watts of mains power so are very inexpensive to leave running 24 hours a day when compared to conventional PCs.

You can have a system based on a single player, or multiple players. Digital Signage players start at £450 and offer a pretty much plug it in and go solution as the unit includes Windows 7 along with our web server and player software.