My Signage Rocks

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The link to our new blog.

Our new blog

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Computer Setting Recommendations

Setting up your Windows PC properly is important for having the best looking and secure digital signage. Here are a few things to consider while setting up a PC for digital signage.

Have your machine auto logon with a non-admin account

Have your digital signage client boot on start up

Do not run any unnecessary software on your machine

Have a way to remote into the machine that will not affect the signage (NoMachine,VNC connect, etc )

Disable all unnecessary network services

Disable screen savers and sleep mode

Move windows updates to off hours 

If you follow the recommendations above, you will avoid a great deal of windows base digital signages failures. If you are in the market for digital signage, check us out at https://www.mysignage.rocks!

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Xibo and Education

Why should an educational institution use xibo as their digital signage solution? I’ve put together a short list to answer the aforementioned question.

1) Easy to use. From day one your designers will be able to create content. How can I make this promise with confidence? Xibo is intuitive and has advance features that will make anyone with web design experience feel right at home. Plus, with all the resources online about how to use xibo anyone can start designing content quickly.

2) Permissions. With Xibo you set permissions on layouts, displays, and media assets. This will ensure that only the right people have access to the resources they need access to.

3) Single sign on. Most enterprise software has sso capabilities, your digital signage solution should be no different. Xibo supports saml 2.0 as an authentication mode.

4) Cost effective. No matter if you run xibo in the cloud or on premise, xibo will most likely be a fraction of the cost of other signage solutions.

If you are ready to give xibo a try, you should give https://mysignage.rocks a look. We provide xibo hosting and other digital signage services.

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Xibo and Shibboleth

If you work in a university and deal with authentication, most likely you know what shibboleth is. For those who don’t know, shibboleth is a single sign on system that allows users to use one password across different systems. Giving users the ability to use one password is of great benefit as it makes a user’s life that much easier. When shopping for digital signage for a university, or any large institution, it is a good idea to look for this feature.

I run across many digital signage solutions that only allow for local accounts. This can lead to more work for IT departments as they may need to field more inquiries about why a user’s password doesn’t work and handling more password reset requests. Luckily, all this can be avoided.

Xibo has support for SAML 2.0 based authentication. This means that your shibboleth environment can be utilized to provide authentication to your xibo CMS! I’m happy to report that I’ve set up a few xibo environments myself with shibboleth, and it has been rather painless.

You can find the documentation to set this up for yourself here (http://xibo.org.uk/manual-tempel/en/users_saml.html). If you are looking for an xibo hosting company that can set this up for you, check out https://mysignage.rocks!

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Xibo and Emergency Messaging

Digital signage is a great communication tool for event and office spaces. People use signage to share events, news and other important information. Oddly enough, one thing people often over look as an use case for their digital signage is emergency messaging. 

Companies will spend money to email, text, and call employees in case of an emergency, but do not think much about using their existing display infrastructure to reach more people. I can understand why in some cases. Some digital signage solutions make it difficult to integrate to an emergency messaging system. Luckily, Xibo is not one of those digital signage solutions. With just a few API calls, you can connect your signage to your emergency messaging system. 

The Workflow

The way this works is simple. We will check a rss feed provided by an emergency management system. The feed will be empty if there is no emergency, but will show a message if something is happening. If we detect an event, we change the layout on a group of displays. When the event is over, we roll back to the normally scheduled layout.

The Set Up

Before we can start using the API, there are a few things we need to do in the CMS. First, we need to make a layout to be switched to in case of an emergency. The id of the layout needs to be noted, more on this later. Second, we need to group our displays together in a display group. We need to note the id of the display group (http://xibo.org.uk/manual/en/displays_groups.html). Third, we need to set up the api keys needed to use the API.This post will not cover how to authenticate with the Xibo CMS API. Check out this link for more information on authentication (https://community.xibo.org.uk/t/1-8-api-introduction/7702?source_topic_id=10152). After these things are done, we are ready to start making API calls.

Using The API

Before using the API you should check out the xibo documentation on the subject (http://xibo.org.uk/manual/api/ ). Now let’s get down to business. The following section will show you the workflow needed to show our alert. If we see an event on our rss feed we must do a POST call on the following url:

 /displaygroup/{displayGroupId}/action/changeLayout

{displayGroupId} must be replaced with the id of the display group we created earlier to house our displays. We need to pass three arguments for this API call to work: displayGroupId, layoutId, and changeMode.

displayGroupId: the same as what we used above. The id of the display group.

layoutId: id of the alert layout we want to show

changeMode: set this to ‘action’

When we detect that the event is over, we must now do a POST call using the following: 

/displaygroup/{displayGroupId}/action/revertToSchedule

Again, the {displayGroupId} is the display group id that was used above. We must also pass the display group id as a parameter with name ‘displayGroupId’. This will switch our alert layout off and show the scheduled layout(s) in it’s place. 

Now one question you may have is, “how long will it take to switch layouts”? Since Xibo uses XMR (Xibo Message Relay) it will only be a delay of seconds to switch layouts. You can learn more about XMR here (http://xibo.org.uk/manual/en/xmr.html).

So it’s not that hard to integrate Xibo with your emergency messaging system. It’s worth the time and investment to bridge these two systems. If you need some help with your integration or just need an Xibo hosting company, check us out at https://mysignage.rocks!

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Just getting started with xibo? Check out our video on getting started with creating layouts!