Mail to signage feature request

Feature Requests
1

Introduction

Mail to signage - a simple way to upload content to the screens

User Story

Many other signage solutions offer a simple “mail to signage” feature to allow content to be pushed to screens super-easily. This doesn’t require any CMS-related skills or knowledge from the user side. There are many such situations when olny parts of the screen or only certain screens have to be updated by less skilled personnel (receptionists etc.)

The feature works like this:

  • the system has a pre-configured mail account on a standard POP3 or IMAP mail server, which is checked regularly (check interval configurable)
  • the system has an access list (acl) containing sender e-mail addresses from which it accepts messages, the rest are automatically purged and/or forwarded from the inbox to some other inbox or address
  • whenever a message comes in and passes the acl, it is being processed against some rules. For example if it has attached a jpg or a ppt or a video file it takes actions accordingly. JPG and video files taken as they are, PPTs are rendered for a series a JPGs for each page,
  • the system has a pre-configured layout with a dedicated region which accepts the contents prepared as above. This new region type has some preconfigured defaults like JPG still duration, video loop bit, e-mail subject text pattern match (to differentiate between multiple zones) and so on.
  • the system logs the mail to signage events so that it is retrievable later, if inapropriate content has been pushed out, what e-mail address sent what content to which screens (in case of abuse from the personnel). It also logs if any messages came in which don’t pass the acl.
2

Please do look at our Permissions page on the Manual as I believe that this would satisfy your ‘User Story’ by allowing less skilled personnel to only update parts of the screen or certain screens.

Users or User Groups can be restricted to only the parts of the CMS they need to carry out functions, as well as only having access to certain Media, Layouts, Regions etc.

So a User could securely log in and just have access to a Region in a particular Layout along with access to the Media item (content) that is to be uploaded to the Layout.

Again Permissions can be applied to that User so that they can only schedule content to a particular Display or Display Group.

If you still feel that this does not satisfy your requirement, or I have misunderstood your needs, then please do come back to me with further details.

Thank you.

3

The point is not to have to use the CMS at all for these users. To put on contents on the screen, they’d only have to send an e-mail with content attached to the cms’s preconfigured e-mail address.

4

Xibo allows all content to be authored within the CMS and unfortunately this feature does not fit with our long-term roadmap. However, this could be engineered through a custom integration with our API. Thank you for this suggestion and please do come back to us with any future features you would like to be considered.

Thank you

5

This topic was automatically closed after 7 days. New replies are no longer allowed.