Active Digital Signage?

March 21, 2010 3:12 PM

Digital Signage: I have to set up digital signage at work - 3 or 4 large monitors which will display data that management consider pertinent to the employees. Displaying inactive data - eg branding, general company info - seems do-able with something like Xibo, but what solutions are there for displaying active/ live data - eg yesterday's on-time deliveries, or what's due to ship today - which is reported in either MS Projects or SharePoint?

In the past we've just done digital signage using an XP server running PowerPoint, and the ppt was updated manually with the previous month's figures.
Now "they" want current data to be displayed, which would be sourced from MS Projects or SharePoint.
I know that SharePoint can output an RSS feed of a page, but I don't think "they" would be satisfied with just a ticker.
How do folks who run active digital signage do this?
(Oh, and I've also seen digital signage which shows stuff like timezone clocks - I'm guessing this is expensive specialist software?)
Also, any suggestions on how to make the display not look boring or amateurish will be greatly appreciated.

posted by forallmankind to Technology (7 answers total)

I'm unfamiliar with Xibo but their site does say that it supports embedded webpages into its display. You could build a page (or pages) in the relevant SharePoint site that either match the chrome of your signage or strips away all of the formatting so that data will look right in your sign.
posted by mmascolino at 3:21 PM on March 21, 2010

Good answer - I've never used Xibo either; I read their documentation, but it didn't include the bit about embedded web pages I now see in the About section.
posted by forallmankind at 3:27 PM on March 21, 2010

Follow Panic's lead and just hack up a pretty web app!
posted by floam at 3:46 PM on March 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

I also thought back to Panic- What're your web skillz like? It wouldn't be too crazy to maybe brew up a PHP app to pull and display information all purty. Maybe a quick and dirty CMS to allow folks to choose which data to display etc.
posted by GilloD at 5:29 PM on March 21, 2010

I don't know what the answer is, but this seems like exactly what a lot of those public access cable channels do. Maybe the software they use can be easily modified for yours?
posted by gjc at 7:42 PM on March 21, 2010

I'm doing something like this for my research unit based on Air (Gumbo, if anyone's counting), pulling data from XML files generated by several systems (only a couple of which I maintain). I'm not sure if you could get XML out of SharePoint, but if you could, that (or an HTML/AJAX) approach might work. Air's a good fit for us because several of our coders use it, and it handles (sanely-sized) XML files very easily.
posted by Alterscape at 8:44 PM on March 21, 2010

Here's a post about rolling your own Panic-inspired dashboard, and related discussion.
posted by harmfulray at 7:39 AM on March 24, 2010