At Washington and Lee University, we tend to pride ourselves on our clear communications to everybody on campus—and if we’ve got to cancel or amendment categories or events, we wish everybody to search out out as shortly as potential. Our thirteen digital aggregation screens, positioned in key places across field just like the Commons building and a number of other dorms, alert employees and students to the events at the University, in conjunction with updates on our sports groups and native weather. once we put in Google Chromeboxes to switch the crash-prone Windows machines running the screens, it became a lot of easier to bring news to the field whereas it’s contemporary.
The personal computers we tend to were victimization to run show screens had many issues, with undependableness at the highest of the list. They were slow to update, and would typically crash, going away the screens fully offline. That meant a delay in delivering data to students and employees till we tend to may revive the machines remotely. The machines were conjointly slow. once we uploaded data to be displayed, it may take half-hour before viewers saw it.
These delays may become an enormous deal if we tend to needed to deliver time-sensitive data to screens, like weather-related field closings or emergency things. while not quick notifications, students and professors may waste time traveling to categories or events that weren’t happening.We knew we would have liked higher hardware to unravel the issues of speed and instability.
Rise Vision, the developer of the free, ASCII text file platform we tend to use to make and manage our show content, advised we tend to replace the PCs with managed Chromeboxes. we tend to discovered that as a result of Chromeboxes run Chrome OS, they update mechanically, therefore updates don’t interfere with the displays. we are able to operate Chromeboxes in stall mode therefore we are able to run the digital aggregation code at full-screen, that makes our displays look higher. Management is basically hands off. I don’t got to bit the boxes and therefore the reboots ar quick and automatic.
Each Chromebox is many hundred greenbacks but one among the PCs we tend to were victimization before, therefore that’s an enormous and for North American country. They’re extraordinarily reliable and super-fast—when I transfer new content from my workplace, it seems rapidly on the field show screens. It’s onerous to believe I’m not operating directly on the Chromeboxes themselves. They’re conjointly powerful enough to run made media like HD 1080P videos while not stormy playback.
Perhaps the most effective factor concerning victimization Chromeboxes for our screens is that we’ve finally been ready to kick our emergency notification system into high. If we tend to bear another tough winter, we are able to quickly force emergency notices concerning colleges closings, weather delays, and event cancellations. in operation our screens with quick, reliable Chromeboxes helps North American country keep everybody on field not simply sophisticated, however safe and sound.