The University of Greenwich has chosen a Onelan solution to meet its aim of presenting visual information to staff and visitors across all three of its campuses. With three fairly spread out locations in South-East London and North Kent, the university wanted a better way of giving staff and students a better idea of what goes on at other campuses – to improve the feeling of community.
Historically, communications for staff and students have taken the form of traditional printed posters and leaflets. The Service Development & Communications team realised that digital signage would fulfil the University’s requirements for better communications, and having selected Onelan, are testing the system and gradually rolling it out across the university.
The team currently manages the digital signage content but, as the system evolves, this will be delegated to others across the three campuses.
The university has the Onelan Content Management System (CMS) and a Onelan 4K player driving a 3×2 video wall in the main reception at Greenwich. Different zones display bus and train travel information, students’ work and event-specific information. An RSS feed at the bottom shows BBC news.
There are also two other screens within the building showing department-specific information, and that will be able to show data extracted from the university’s website in the future.
For a number of years the University of Greenwich has ‘dabbled’ in digital signage, with various departments providing their own different solutions. With the creation of the Service Development & Communications Team (SD&C Team), the University now has the expertise and drive to develop a single community-wide digital signage solution. In its brief to develop new technologies for the university, the team have looked at a number of different solutions, from open source to higher cost systems.
The browser-based CMS, while easy to navigate, is powerful enough to manage multiple players in diverse locations, reducing the need for a physical presence near the displays. Another crucial feature is the ability to devolve content management to various members of a digital signage team.
Put these powerful features together with OneMedia, which specialises in content creation for video walls, signage and bespoke UI and Touch Interactive solutions and you have an extremely powerful and flexible communications tool limited only by imagination. The university is confident that by upgrading from traditional messaging systems to digital displays, it will be able to engage more effectively with staff and students, and promote a sense of community.
Onelan develops network appliances for standalone and end-to-end digital signage network solutions. The Net-Top-Box is a multimedia, multi-zoned solution capable of Touch Interactivity. With a browser based user interface, the system is fully multi-lingual and capable of displaying both stored media and live media e.g RSS feeds, web pages and broadcast TV or locally streamed video. Further members of the product family cater for Enterprise network management and integration with external data sources.
Onelan’s Net-Top-Boxes are now installed in a wide variety of organisations across the world in markets including retail, schools, hospitals as well as corporates such as TalkTalk, the Financial Times and Virgin.
Visit Onelan’s website for more information.
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