Software and operation

Every signage package sells itself on its media library. That is the easy part. It gets interesting where everyday life begins: when three branches run the same menu board, one of them has its own lunch offer, and the apprentice is supposed to change the prices without wrecking the layout.

Many underestimate that log. As soon as you rent out surfaces or have to account for things internally, proof of play is the only paperwork that counts.

Both routes work, and the choice has little to do with technology and a lot to do with your organisation. A bakery with eight branches wants to change prices from home. A hospital would rather keep its data in-house.

The last line is the most important. A decent player downloads its content and plays it from its own storage. If the internet fails, the screen carries on, only nothing new arrives. If a screen goes black or shows a loading symbol during an outage, its player is streaming instead of caching. For data protection the revised Swiss law applies: record where the data sits, who has access and what happens to recordings from cameras or sensors.

A poster can do only one thing. Your screen can show something different at eleven than at four, and that is where the difference that pays lies. The bakery shows croissants and coffee until half past nine, then the lunch menu until two, cakes in the afternoon and from four the bread to take home. The same surface, four messages, no extra handling.

The most important point is the end date. Promotions nobody clears away are the most common reason an installation loses credibility. Give every item an expiry date as you upload it. An empty surface is better than a false statement.

The part of an installation that lives without an editor is the part that saves it. Any software worth the name pulls data from other sources and builds slides or zones from it. We set this up on almost every installation: it keeps the screen fresh even in a quiet week.

A car dealership uses this to show the used cars actually available: if a car is sold, it disappears from the shop-window display the same evening. Only one thing matters: define what the screen shows when a source does not respond.

An installation needs three responsibilities, and they have to carry names, not departments. The editor creates content and keeps to the plan. The approver checks the statement, the price and the spelling – and is a different person from the editor. The third role is the technical contact in case of a fault, often your IT department or us.

Put it in writing; half a page is enough: who maintains content weekly and how much time is set aside for it, who approves and within what deadline, who gets called when a screen is black, and who decides when the branch and head office have different ideas. That half page is the difference between an installation that runs and one where everybody assumes somebody else is doing it.

With several sites a mixture has proved itself: head office supplies the campaign and locks it against changes, the branch fills in two or three local slides itself. That keeps the appearance calm, and the site still recognises itself.

A screen that is not running does not report itself – unless the software does it for it. Every player should check in at short intervals, and the system should raise the alarm when a check-in fails to arrive. A simple network reachability test is not enough: a device can answer and still have been showing a frozen image for days.

The replacement unit is the cheapest insurance there is: a prepared second device turns an outage of days into an outage of hours. How displays are designed for continuous operation is covered in the chapter on hardware.

The decline of an installation follows a pattern I have been seeing in the same order for years. In the first month enthusiasm is high and new slides arrive every week. In the second month one person handles the upkeep on the side and the intervals grow longer. In the third month only the last promotion is still running and nobody looks any more. From then on the screen is a piece of furniture.

Only sobriety helps against this. An editorial plan over twelve months, with one line per month, is entirely sufficient – topic, person responsible, date. Plus a time budget written into someone's workload, even if it is half an hour a week. A good share of automatic content, so the surface does not age even in a quiet week. And a reminder in the calendar that always asks the same question: is everything running there still correct?

A gym worked out for me that upkeep costs a quarter of an hour on Monday morning – the realistic effort when templates exist. How such templates are built you will read in the next chapter.

At purchase everyone thinks about the device; in operation what counts is the contract. A service contract need not be thick, but it has to answer four questions: what is covered, how quickly is there a response, who comes, and what happens if a part fails.

Note the difference between response time and restoration time. The first only says when somebody gets in touch. What matters is by when the screen is running again and whether a replacement unit is standing by for that. For a shop-window display that carries revenue, that commitment is worth it; in a meeting room the next working day is fine.

It should also cover: remote access and how it works technically, responsibility for updates, spare parts over the years, the procedure in a warranty case, plus cleaning and on-site inspection on a fixed rhythm. Clarify as well who owns the content and how you get at your data if you change provider. That question comes up late and always at the wrong moment.