Digital Signage Remote Management – 3 Essential Layers of Support

Dom Hinchcliffe

6 years ago

When investing in digital signage, the cost is not the only thing to consider – the level and quality of support you receive if something goes wrong is arguably more important.

This is because a blank screen or an unreliable piece of software can vastly reduce or nullify your return on investment.

Digital signage remote management – the ability to use software to remotely resolve issues and control your network – is crucial for digital signage projects, especially for large deployments across multiple locations.

With that in mind, here are our three layers of remote support software:

Our Secret Weapon – TeamViewer

As our network of users increased, both in the number of screens and geographical spread, having to travel when an issue arose quickly became unsustainable, especially when it was often stemming from user error.

To address this, we began the search for remote device management software that would aid us in supporting our growing network. With over 1.7 billion active users, TeamViewer seemed the obvious choice.
Once installed onto our Android media players, it enables us to take full control of a player from anywhere in the world, as long as there is an established internet connection. The vast majority of support issues can then be swiftly resolved without the need for a physical visit.
Should your network require it, we can even help create your very own TeamViewer support profile. This will then be followed by the relevant training in the software so that you are able to diagnose and resolve potential issues within your own network.
While invaluable to us and our clients, TeamViewer, isn’t the only digital signage remote management software that we use. Two further layers of support are in place to ensure the success of your network.

Our Administrator Console

The ability to quickly access the accounts of our users is imperative to us. Without it, aiding with the initial set up of the account, as well as troubleshooting the majority of user errors, becomes both difficult and tedious. This is because it would mean that every time we need to log into one of our users’ accounts we’d either have to remember their details or refer to a separate interface.

Fortunately, our software has an administrator management console that allows for remote access to all accounts via one master login. This allows issues pertaining to user error within the software to be solved easily. Creating content for new users is also simplified as it can be created directly in the user’s account, without the need for exporting and importing individual pieces of content. This piece of software also has the added benefit of allowing us to make changes to a user’s account without them having a strong and constant internet connection.
An additional feature within the management console is that there is the ability to assign premade templates and media into relevant accounts. This makes distributing content that is applicable to multiple screens far more fluid, whilst also retaining the ability to make changes to the content locally. This can be especially useful, for example, when at a head office location you’re wanting to distribute corporate messages to multiple sites but still want local branches to be able to customise the content.
For our users with large networks and multiple accounts, we can offer a separate master administrator console, branded to them, that lets them oversee their accounts. Please note, this feature is only available upon request.

Traffic Light Network Reporting

Our last support apparatus for digital signage remote management is our traffic light network reporting dashboard.
This software can be accessed both by us and our users using their own standard login details. It informs users of the network connectivity status of all the players on their network, based on a quick and easy to read traffic light coloured system from green to amber, red and finally black.
More than just telling you whether a player is online (green) or offline (orange-black), you can see how recently it was connected and successfully downloaded content. In addition to this, you can find the IP address a media player is connected to, as well as the playlist currently assigned.
Our network reporting dashboard helps us determine whether we need to use TeamViewer or our admin management console to resolve an issue so is usually our first port of call as problems are almost always simply internet related.
Another feature of the software is that we are able to receive live notifications for when a media player goes offline. Rather than having to wait until our clients report an issue, this usually means that we will catch an issue before it reaches the attention of our users. This pro-active approach helps us ensure maximum uptime.

These three solutions, especially when used together, make us highly effective in supporting our growing network of screens. More than just equipping our support team to better serve our customers, users themselves can have access to these tools to give them confidence in their network’s performance.