“Welcome John Doe!“ – Digital Signage for Welcome & Reception Screens in Business and Public Offices

The software development company mirabyte, based in Hamm (Germany), has come up with an easy to install and use software solution for this task. ”FrontFace for Public Displays” is a digital signage software for displaying a variety of multimedia content such as images, videos, text, news tickers, Web pages and more on digital screens and TVs. In addition to traditional use cases such as advertising screens, corporate information screens or digital blackboards, the software is well suited for digital welcome boards and reception screens.

FrontFace has a timer- and event-based scheduling system that provides for scheduling the displayed content either by pre-defined time slots or by events that may be triggered by external systems such as a calendar on a Microsoft Exchange server or on a Lotus Domino Server. By this method, a user can easily schedule a general playlist with corporate information or news as the default, but also a dedicated welcome playlist that is shown every time a visitor is expected. The software can also process additional information from a calendar-based appointment, such as the name of the visitor, and use this information to fill in placeholders automatically. After installation, the entire welcome board system can be operated simply by adding appointments to an Exchange Calendar using Outlook, which can be conveniently handled by clerks or secretaries.

Creating playlists with FrontFace is also very easy: The “Display Assistant” is an application that comes with FrontFace to help users compose playlists from various multimedia content such as videos, images, Web pages, texts, news tickers, etc. Additionally, the entire scheduling and integration of external systems can be done with the Display Assistant.

Finally, once everything is set up, the Display Assistant is used to publish everything to a player PC (a PC that is connected to the flat screen or TV on which the welcome messages are displayed!).

FrontFace is on-premises software (no SaaS, no Cloud) that can be installed at the user’s site. It only requires a Windows-based PC system and can be updated remotely on the fly via a local network connection, over the Internet or also offline with a USB thumb drive.

The software is licensed per player PC at the price of $599.95 USD for a lifetime license. To integrate external systems for triggering welcome messages, the “External Calendar” plugin (purchased separately) is also required to enable the connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Notes/Domino, Excel or ICS (iCalendar).

A free, fully-functional trial version and a step-by-step PDF manual for setting up personalized welcome screens is available for download on the mirabyte homepage.