Cisco Digital Signs 5.4

The Power of Engagement: Cisco Digital Signage is a complete, platform for interactive media experiences. Now you can easily deliver and manage applications to communicate, connect, and engage. Imagine delivering compelling and interactive media to any store, bank, manufacturing floor, or hospital, to engage customers and employees in a whole new way.

The scalable, network-based Cisco Digital Signage platform includes endpoints, management, and services. On top of this, Cisco’s diverse partner ecosystem tailors your deployment to your needs. This gives you new opportunities to create a consistent user experience across multiple channels, increase revenue and maximize operational efficiency.

Cisco Digital Signs

Cisco Digital Signs uses the Cisco Digital Media Manager to allow you to conveniently and quickly publish and view digital media programs interactively through the Cisco Digital Media Player (DMP), over an IP network, through your standard- and high-definition displays. It uses standard video-streaming technologies to deliver compelling live and on-demand media content for an immersive digital signage experience. Supported on the Cisco Digital Media Player 4310, and Digital Media Player 4400 systems, Cisco Digital Signs fits easily into your organization's existing IT infrastructure. Cisco Digital Signs supports established video formats, including MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 (Part-2), and Windows Media 9 on both the DMP 4400 and DMP 4310 platforms. The Digital Media Player 4310 system also supports H.264 (MPEG4 - Part 10) format.

Cisco Digital Signs includes a web-based design tool, the Cisco Digital Media Designer (DMD), which resides on the Cisco Digital Media Manager (DMM). Through the DMD, you can create your layout and design your digital signage presentations, playlists, and media assets to create rich digital signage messaging. The Cisco Digital Media Designer tool allows you to customize your DMP presentation on the screen by adding images and Adobe Flash-based content or by selecting from the many templates provided for tailoring your messaging.

Cisco Digital Signs includes the following integrated products:

●   Cisco Digital Media Manager (DMM): This web-based media management application allows you to easily manage, schedule, and publish digital media through the web to the desktop and to digital signage displays.

●   Cisco Digital Media Players (DMPs): The Digital Media Player 4310, and Digital Media Player 4400 systems allow for both live and on-demand streaming digital media across an IP network in a variety of encoding formats.

Together, these products span the digital media value chain and can help your organization reach customers, partners, employees, and students with real-time, relevant content and communications.

Applications for Digital Signs in a Range of Industries

Using the network as a platform for digital media publishing and access provides organizations in many different industries with innovative tools for internal and external communications, marketing, sales, education, and training. For example, through Cisco Digital Signs, you can publish targeted marketing messaging across widely dispersed branch-office locations or communicate corporate messaging to your employee base through live access to a CEO keynote broadcast, along with internal business communications programs or educational broadcasts with interactive access to these programs after the live event.

Other applications include:

●   Financial services: You can update remote locations with up-to-date customer information related to services and information about how to contact representatives for further information - all without the time and expense of making printed posters.

●   Retail: You can offer customers quick and easy communications about new products and promotions through the high-definition displays, and offer broadcasts of live promotional events.

●   Education: You can extend the classroom to include remote, live broadcasts of lectures as well as on-demand access to past recorded events.

●   Government: You can facilitate live simulcast access to government meetings and hearings and provide access to digital media-based information about relevant regulations and laws.

●   All sectors: You can broadcast emergency messaging instantly to all DMPs on your network to quickly communicate event status and safety information for employees, students, or customers.

Features and Benefits

Cisco Digital Signs: Publish Immersive Digital Signage

Cisco Digital Signs makes it easy for you to publish compelling content in standard- or high-definition formats. The application offers sophisticated functions, including:

●   Discover, configure, manage, categorize and group, and monitor Cisco Digital Media Players on the network.

●   Control playback of content and playlists on digital signage displays, including instant updates or scheduling of content frequency and duration (day-parting).

●   Create and design screen layouts, divide screen real estate into regions, and populate content into these regions using a drag-and-drop web interface.

●   Create and manage playlists and configure on-screen Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or static text tickers.

●   Remotely control and manage digital display properties such as on/off, contrast, brightness, and volume.

●   Add and archive digital signage content and assign metadata to assets.

●   View reports for content scheduled for playback on digital signage displays.

●   Provide extensive Proof of Play reporting for content based on DMP groups and campaigns (up to 200 DMPs).

Cisco Digital Media Designer: Digital Signage Design and Layout Tool

Taking advantage of the Cisco Signs Digital Media Designer (DMD) tool, you can create and edit presentations for deployment on the Cisco Digital Media Players (DMPs). Some important features include:

●   Insertion of objects such as text, images, and multimedia content

●   Arrangement and placement of objects and content

●   What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing

What’s New in Digital Signs 5.4

New Scheduler

The Digital Media Manager 5.4 content scheduling function is based on a Channels model which provides for a more efficient calendar-based view with multiple options for recurring events and display timing. The new natural workflow allows users to quickly select, assign, and subscribe DMPs to the desired Channels while still providing endpoints the flexible option to display content independent of the content scheduling function.

Updated User Interface

The overall Digital Media Manager has been updated to support the new cross-Cisco user interface guidelines. This modern user interface standard provides a UI that offers improved software controls and addresses key accessibility requirements. The major DMM functions are now also organized to better reflect the overall workflow to shorten the initial product learning curve.

Improved Role-based User Account Granularity

Administrators of the Digital Media Manager will now be able to provision different role-based accounts with varying levels of access to the server applications easily and efficiently. Additional granularity within each role can be further customized and permissions may be specified down to individual assets or DMPs within the server.

New System Serviceability Information

New system information options are introduced based on Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) and DMS engineering experiences that will help reduce the resources and time needed to resolve potential issues and help make the system more available for operation.

DMP 4310 Web Browser and HTML5/JavaScript Support

The 5.4 release will provide the DMP 4310 with a built-in web browser that has JavaScript support as well as the ability to support the emerging HTML5 standard to grant the Digital Media Player accessibility to a much wider set of content sources.

Product Specifications

Table 1 gives features and Table 2 gives client requirements for the Cisco Digital Media Manager.

Table 1.       Cisco Digital Media Manager Features

Table 2.       Cisco Digital Media Manager Supported OS and Browsers

Warranty Information

Find warranty information on Cisco.com at the Product Warranties page.

Ordering Information

Table 3 provides software upgrades and add-ons information for the Cisco Digital Media Manager.

Table 3.       Software Upgrades and Add-Ons

Cisco Services

Cisco and our partners provide a broad portfolio of intelligent, personalized services and support that can help you realize the full value of your video investment, and increase business agility and network availability. This portfolio of services drives business transformation through a network-based collaboration platform that enables business to collaborate anywhere, anytime. For more information about these services, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/services/digitalmedia.

For More Information

For more information about Cisco Digital Signage, visit http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/dms/digital_signage.html or contact your local Cisco account representative.