Use the Appazur dashboard from any computer or mobile device to manage the appearance and content displayed on your digital signage (TV screens / displays).
Appazur Digital Signage is designed, in consultation with schools, to provide an effective and attractive display with a minimum of maintenance effort by your staff. It is easy for multiple staff members to update content, and easy to hand off updates of the displays as staff change from year to year.
This document does not cover installation of your Digital Signage. You may also proceed with creating and previewing content as described below even before your displays are installed. You should have been given instructions on how to sign in to your Appazur dashboard. Be sure to save a browser bookmark so you can find it easily in future.
Once you have signed in, your Dashboard should look something like the following picture (although you may have fewer menus). For digital signage, you can focus on the Digital Signage section. Digital Signage online help is available in the Dashboard Guide.
Click on Slides to review or add content.
Click on + Add Slide to add content:
Enter a title for your Slide. Then, try creating your own content by uploading a photo. Choose Upload (circled above), and then click Choose File. Select an image file from your computer to use, such as a photo that you have taken or downloaded (.png and .jpg files are good examples). Alternatively, you can drag and drop a file onto the Choose File button. PDF and video files are also supported. Then click the Save button.
Your content will now be live on all your screens. You can also preview what is being shown: Click Home to get back to the main dashboard screen, then Preview.
When you preview your content, initially you will see an optional default screen layout, which you can later customize. The logo and colors were set to suggested settings when Appazur created your account. There is no need to read this section unless you are interested in changing this layout.
Here are the parts of your screen. The areas around your content are the optional Frame. These items remain shown while your slide content changes.
As part of your account setup support case, Appazur may have configured the ticker to pull the latest news or calendar events from your web site or other source, as well as configuring automatic display of any day or block order rotation you may have. If not, please contact Appazur (or take a look at the Messages to All or Calendars menus as well as the online help for those).
If you prefer, you may customize your Frame. Click Home to get back to the main dashboard screen, then Frame (or Frame Designs).
Here are the changes you can make in the General section:
If you wish to customize the frame, try clicking on each blue heading to open additional sections. The frame is further divided into the horizontal Ticker and the vertical Sidebar. For example, you can set the ticker height to zero in order to hide it if you are not using it:
Here you can also make the ticker move faster or slower. For example, entering 110 for Ticker velocity will make the ticker scroll 10% faster than the default.
Likewise you may click on the Sidebar options heading to show more settings. For example, if you only wanted the ticker, you could set Sidebar width to 0 to hide it:
The screen above shows the logo reduced to 75% of its default size. You can of course try adjusting the various position and orientation settings as well, and check the Preview window (or one of your screens) to see the result after clicking Save.
Most digital signage is installed in “landscape” orientation, but note that the system also recognizes and supports “portrait orientation” automatically (see example elsewhere in this document).
The weather information can be hidden or adjusted in the Weather section. The headline can be enabled or customized in the Today's Headline section.
From the main dashboard screen (Home) let’s go back to Slides again. If you followed the instructions above you have already tried uploading content. Now click + Add Slide again to try the other kinds of content. You can find a video on Youtube and try displaying it, or any other web site or web content that you may wish to use.
Before you do anything here, open your video in YouTube as usual, and note the length of your video. Now in the dashboard, enter the length of your video in seconds into the Duration box. (Sometimes it can be useful to shorten this a little to trim the end of the video.) Choose the External URL button and then copy your youtube video address to the External URL box.
In this example, besides giving the slide a Title, we have also chosen a few more options in order to illustrate them as well: We changed the Background Color. This colour is used to fill the extra space if the content does not fill the entire available area. We chose Full Screen for this slide. If you have a frame enabled (the default), sometimes you might want to have a specific slide take over the full screen, video being a common case where this might be appealing.
As always, click Save, and the content will be available on your displays and in Preview.
Feel free to use the tools you already know to create content. For example, if you are familiar with Microsoft® Powerpoint® or Google Slides™, you can create a slide and then save it (or download it) as an image (typically as a .png file). Then choose Upload in the dashboard as described earlier in this document. Or open a photo in your favorite photo-editing software and add custom titles or other edits.
As another alternative, your dashboard includes an editor for creating content. This is especially useful when you want to convey a message primarily using text.
In this example Background Color (highlighted above) was set for the slide, just as we saw earlier as it applies to any kind of slide.
Click on the Editor button as shown above so that the editor is displayed. In this example, a font style, size, and color was chosen. Then some text was typed and centered. The buttons that were used are highlighted buttons in the screenshot above.
You can explore the editor to find buttons to insert images, emoticons, special symbols, and tables. If you are trying to get your content to look ‘just right’ on the displays it can be useful to try the editor’s Full Screen button, and also make your browser window quite large, so that the editor has similar proportions to your digital signage screens. This is particularly helpful if you are inserting images.
Here is an example using the editor’s Full screen option (highlighted). The highlighted Insert/edit image button has been used to insert a logo image. You can use your mouse (or shift and arrow keys) to select the image, and then use the mouse to click on a corner and resize the image.
It is a good practice to give multiple staff members the ability to manage the displays and content. Click Home to get back to the main dashboard screen, then Staff, and + Add Staff. You will need to give the staff member Administrator access. Or give access to specific students (such as participants in a media class or club) and give them Editor access, requiring your approval before their work is displayed. None of the other staff settings is important.
Do you have one display or more than one? Click Home to get back to the main dashboard screen, then Displays. Here you will see your displays listed. If Last Seen is not the current time then the display is not currently running. You can also set an Alert Email to be notified if a display unexpectedly goes offline.
Check your Dashboard Guide for these topics and more:
Please do not hesitate to contact Appazur if you have questions on additional needs, for example: