Microsoft PowerPoint was designed as a presentation tool for corporations back in the early 1990s. At no point did Microsoft envisage this product being used for digital signage purposes especially not in an education environment.
No Recovery
One of the key elements of Digital Signage is what happens if a display or a computer looses power. How does it recover? How does it reboot? What happens to the content on the screen? Microsoft PowerPoint was not designed with any of these recovery features in mind. In short, if you loose power to a screen with Microsoft PowerPoint then you physically have to visit that screen and manually re-configure it.
No Remote Updating
Having the ability to update the content on the digital signage is paramount. What usually is the case with “proper” Digital Signage is that you are able to update the content remotely on your devices and then ‘push’ this content out to the screens. If you are using PowerPoint as a means to deliver content, what you are going to find is that like in the recovery scenario above, you will need to physically visit the screen to update the content. Quite often, this is an inconvenience and it is something that can be avoided by deploying a more robust and complete digital signage solution.
No User Control
PowerPoint lacks that ability to assign user roles to the editing and deployment of the Digital Signage so what this means is that you have no user control what so ever. Every person has the same access rights which is fine I guess if you only have one screen to manage. However, if you are managing several different screens then this could be an issue.
Limited “Widget” Support
“Modern Day” Digital Signage is made up of multiple file types and also multiple widgets. Widgets for RSS feeds. Widgets for weather feeds and news feeds. Widgets for clocks etc etc. All of these elements are not available with PowerPoint. You can show text and pictures and that is it. Trying to incorporate any kind of widgets into PowerPoint simply isn’t going to happen. It has not been designed that way.
No Scheduling
It is not possible to schedule PowerPoint presentations. One of the key elements of Digital Signage is the ability is being able to schedule what content is going to be played on what screens. For example, in order to save power and be more energy efficient and green, you may want to shut the screens down at a certain time of the day for them to turn back on in the morning. PowerPoint doesn’t have this functionality.
What’s the answer?
The answer to all these problems is Contribute Signage. Contribute Signage has been designed so that it addresses all these requirements in a simple and easy to use web control platform. The web platform enables you to create signage and it also allows you to deploy it to your playback devices. What makes Contribute Signage especially interesting, is that it is able to convert the in-classroom interactive LEDs into digital signage screens through the playback android app.
Why not take a trial today of Contribute Digital Signage – head over to http://www.contributesignage.com
