For 2017-2019, prior to Covid-19 we had been providing graphic design services for the Edmonton FarmTech Conference, held at Northlands, now known as Edmonton Expo Centre.
FarmTech had 7 breakout rooms, each with a typical daily program consisting of 4 different speakers on various agriculture based topics.
The conference, with that content changed over in each room, operating over three days, found itself requiring about 75 unique breakout room specific signs that were programmed to change after the scheduled block for each speakers designated speaking time.
Being that it is a temporary installation of digital signage, only needed for the duration of the event, we chose to implement a cloud based content deployment platform that operated via an application that run independently on IntelCompute sticks, allowing us to remotely monitor, update content, and configure devices without having to physically run to each sign for each changeover.
Of course, being a conference centre, we also setup a local network using long range access points used exclusively for those devices, limiting the problems that sometimes occur with high occupancy and shared networks.
Overall the system proved to excellent at operating as intended, with incredibly high uptime, and had the ability to adapt to schedule changes as sometimes a speaker would get caught in customs on the trip in, and fail to make their assigned speaking time.
Unlike printed signs, it was fairly painless to open the original graphic design templates and update with new information and push the content to the signs remotely.
Ultimately our role onsite was a hybrid content management one for the whole of the event, as well as production and stage management as needed.
