BrightSign in Los Gatos offers their solid state digital signage appliances, displays, and content distribution and management software platform BrightAuthor for designing the content to be displayed, with optional templates.
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Chrome Sign Builder
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Chrome Sign Builder, from Google, is a digital signage utility that allows users to schedule and display content across managed Chrome devices and networks, built to make it easy to show web content content such as restaurant menus, images, and YouTube videos and playlists–as well as Google Presentations, which can be edited by anyone who has access to the presentation.
Well suited to get content out to employees quickly and easily. Images and videos are the best. It might not work well for stagnant PDF and PPT content.
If you are looking for an inexpensive, set-and-forget digital signage solution and your content isn't customized often, Chome Sign Builder is a win. It is easy to set up, includes multiple identity providers, and its Kiosk mode makes displaying the content a breeze on many different supported devices. It also doesn't require much maintenance, so if your team is small, it's a perfect fit.
Use Chrome Sign Builder to display menus. For example, to show menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, create 3 schedules. Each schedule has its own menu URL to display the menu content.
create a presentation using Google Slides and display it using Chrome Sign Builder.
When you publish the presentation, set it to start as soon as it loads and restart again after the last slide.
Ease of use and convenience of getting content to employees. I would give it a 10 if there were video tutorials for first-time users and live chat support.
Chrome Sign Builder is pretty much a learn on your own and support yourself option. There is precious little by way of assistance offered by Google for the product, and responses to reports of bugs and even updates are painfully slow in coming if they come at all. If you are an IT guru, this may be ok. If you are not prepared to fend for yourself, then keep looking.
We selected sign builder because of its ability to work across platforms and the promise of dynamic updates so that members and guests would have access to up-to-date information. Unfortunately, Chrome Sign Builder is a low priority at Google, suffers from reliability issues, requires significant user investment in learning the system, and failed to meet our needs. We have gone back to paper calendars and synching issues while we evaluate other products. A bit of time spent on research on the front end would have saved us considerable effort and time. In a volunteer organization, our only cost was goodwill among members while we tried the system.
