Andy Koenig, Senior LAN Analyst for the Office of Medical Computing at the University at Buffalo (UB) had a small problem – digital signage hardware is useless without good content management software. “We had a dozen or so flat-panel displays just sitting around, so we thought we’d put them to good use.”
Koenig was visiting the State University of New York’s Geneseo campus and saw their AxisTV system. “It seemed to work for them and the user interface is basically as simple as it gets – it seemed really doable for us, so we bought it.” Within a couple of days, they had purchased AxisTV digital signage software.
UB’s South Campus houses the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Dental Medicine, Public Health and Health Professions, and the School of Nursing. Displays at the main entrances show AxisTV layouts split into different content zones – one for long-term information, one for weather and Doppler radar maps, and one with the building directory – and a text crawl at the bottom for general information.
Koenig enthuses, “It sure works – students show up where they are supposed to, even with last minute changes in scheduling.”
End-users from different departments send Koenig and his team an email with the graphic or text file and they then create and publish the graphic. “We put out a lot of images – PowerPoints, JPEGs, Photoshop images. The main advantage is we can get information out that you can’t do in any other way. It’s quick, up to date and visual.”
UB also uses AxisTV web features. “We have a couple of calendar systems publishing info to a webpage and then we use the web capture to pull it out and display it.”
Other schools in the State University of New York system have expressed an interest in AxisTV digital signage software after seeing it in action at UB. “Even the food service people want in. They want five displays to display their daily menus as well as a video feed,” says Koenig. “We may have to expand the system before too long.”