Fleet Management for digital signage – An Introduction

What’s fleet management?

Here at SocialScreen, we’re always working on improving our digital signage software. Thanks to our developers, we can finally launch our fleet management solution! But what exactly is fleet management, and how does it work when it comes to digital signage?

Long story short; Fleet management is a solution for businesses with a lot of screens, and it gives you the option to show content on specific screens, set rules and dependencies, override playlists and much more. The reason we’re celebrating implementing the fleet management solution is the big quality of life improvement our clients will get. Controlling your content on your screens should always be quick and easy, regardless of how many screens you have. Fleet management helps solve exactly that.

The technology that’s behind our fleet management of course has some depth to it, so in this article we’ll be diving deeper into what exactly fleet management helps with, and how it works.

Filtering content

If you have unlocked fleet management for your business, you’ll get a big selection of all the screens you have access to in your organization. You can also get access to all devices which is below the department you’re logged in to. Fleet management is flexible here, as it gives access to multiple different users with different access level across the business.

So an example; a store owner could use fleet management to control the screens at that specific store, but a user on a higher company level who has access to all the different stores around the country can use the same fleet management service and control the screens in all the different stores.

Once you have access to this, you’ll also get the option to filter your devices and screens based on text, tags, playlists, device status (whether it’s offline or not), what OS version it is, rotation and layout. From this filtration, you can then select or de-select single devices you wish to change or to leave alone.

Tags

Something new that we’re also adding together with our fleet management, is “tags”. Tags allows you to put a “tag” on everything. Whether it’s a device, playlist, slide or even an organization. This is a new way to group devices in our software. Through the fleet management you can group different devices in different tags, and make changes to these devices even easier. That’s how you do big scale signage efficiently.

The tags can also of course be administered. You do this through the “organization”-page in the software. Here you’ll be able to change the name of the tags, remove them or even update them.

So what can you do in the fleet management?

After sorting and filtering your devices, cleaned up your tags, and made ready the changes you want to do, we get to the actions themselves. The possibilities when it comes to fleet management are plentiful. You’ll have the option to:

  1. Assign playlists. This will add a playlist in addition to existing playlists. This will also create a “policy” or a “rule” which can be further edited through scheduling or dependencies. We’ll come back to what a “policy” is later in this article.
  2. Overriding playlists. By overriding a playlist you’ll show your selected playlist instead of the playlists that’s already been added to the device. This will also create a “policy” or a “rule” which can be further edited through scheduling or dependencies.
  3. Overriding the layout. By overriding the layout, you’ll show another layout instead of the existing one. This will also create a “policy” which can be further edited.
  4. Force a playlist. By forcing a playlist, you’ll remove all the previous content on devices, and instead forcing the new content you want to play. This will not create a “policy” or “rule”.
  5. Add playlists. This is an option where you simply add another playlist in addition to the existing content on the devices. This does not override anything.
  6. Remove playlists. Pretty straight forward, this option will help you remove playlists from devices.
  7. Assign a layout. This allows you to assign a new layout on selected devices.
  8. Remove layout. Allows you to remove the existing layout on selected devices.
  9. Scheduling. With fleet management, you’ll also get the option to put scheduling on all your selected devices. Scheduling allows you to show different content based on different times. You’ll also have the option to remove scheduling from your selected devices.

“Policies” or “rules”

“Policies” or “rules” is something new in our software that is being launched together with fleet management. “Policies” are rules which are placed on devices in the software.

Under the tab called “Policies” inside the fleet management, you’ll be able to see which rules have been created. Here you’ll also be able to delete or change policies or add scheduling to existing policies.

Under the tab called “Organization” inside the fleet management, you’ll get the ability to add “policies” even to the organizations themselves. This comes in handy if you’re a business with different departments and offices.

Smart prioritizing of content

So let’s say you’re in the fleet management, and you want to add playlists, or show important content without removing what already exists. Perhaps there are several people with access to the fleet management that also has playlists or content they want to show. How do you know what content will be shown first and in what order?

We have implemented algorithms which decides what content will be shown on the device and in what order. We have elements which decides what content should be shown, such as creation date and what level in the organization the user is that created the content / policies. From there these elements are compared in a type of point-system, which in turn prioritizes what order the content should be shown.

Fleet management is a new product in our software which is locked behind our “Enterprise” subscription. Do you want to test it out and see if it something that will work for your business, feel free to contact us on support@socialscreen.com. Or you can test it yourself for free in our software -> go.socialscreen.com. Free trial.

Start your free trial today!

Get started in a matter of minutes. No credit card needed!