Content Management System for screens (also referred as CMS) is a fundamental part of digital signage. The CMS is the basic tool to create, schedule, broadcast and later on, manage (re-scheduling, monitoring, and even bill) the content presented on digital screens at any location, for almost any purpose.
The same way as the wider domain of digital signage evolved in the last decade or so, the Content Management System evolved as well – from a locally installed, heavy and over engineered ‘video editing’ tool, to light, cloud based, Software as a Service, widget based software tool.
The modern digital signage CMS is rich in content, easy to implement and more important – easy to operate. The Content Management for screens must allow and enable connection (via simple to implement API) to social networks: Facebook, Yammer, Instagram, Google+ and Twitter. The dynamic nature of the social networks and the ability to connect to the screen audience, makes this one of the most important widgets in the current generation CMS.
The next generation Content Management System for screens will need to become even richer (and smarter!) by adding IoT widgets, from camera with face recognition to ‘event driven’ capabilities that can use external interrupt/event (button, temperature, RFID, barcode, gesture or movement) to change the content on the screen, using smart scheduling and robust players.
As the digital signage moved from the almost exclusive use of big corporations and organizations, with specific professional technicians ramped up to implement and support it to all sizes of businesses and almost all levels of IT skills, the CMS had to, and still must be kept simple yet rich, accessible yet personalized and robust!
The CMS must be OS and hardware agnostic, avoiding the customer from ‘vendor locking’.
Content Management System for screens – a key of for your digital signage software success!
Dana.