Highbury College in Portsmouth, UK has improved communications across its multi-site campus with a digital signage solution from Onelan. The college wanted to display information that would be of use to its students and would update automatically.
As part of the college’s multi-million pound and multi-campus redevelopment programme it sought a better way to communicate with its stakeholders in a modern and more efficient manner.
It wanted to display dynamic content such as live student timetable information from the student management information system that would provide useful and up to date information for students and that changed automatically. As a multi-site organisation, Highbury wanted to ensure that consistent messages were published centrally to all sites. The digital signage system also needed to show RSS feeds with live content incorporating college news and events.
Highbury has installed five Onelan Net Top Boxes (NTB) 615, four NTB 610s (one running as a publisher) and one NTB 510S.
All the NTBs are located in data server rooms around the college with signals distributed via Smart-E Cat5 solutions. While the NTB’s are spread across three campuses in Portsmouth, they are all working off the central publisher located at its main site.
As part of the digital signage network, Highbury also has Onelan’s Data Collection Engine (DCE), a framework of software functionality that provides connections between a wide variety of customer data sources to Onelan’s NTBs. At Highbury, the DCE shows live timetable around the college showing all lectures starting in the next half hour in an “Airport” style layout with room, description, time, and lecturer information. For each different area, relevant information is displayed.
The system also enables the college to stream live TV to the student recreation areas and the College gym. The management of this can then be devolved to various College staff, with the head of IT assured that they can only control areas of the system that they have been delegated to control.
The system’s flexibility means that various departments in the College can access and contribute to it. The Print Centre has overall responsibility, however a number of other departments are contributors.