New version of digitalsignage.NET about to go live

We are pleased to announce the impending release of the new digitalsignage.NET system which will be enabled soon after we have communicated with our users in order to transition them to the new system. Some of the key new features are …..

1. New UI based on Flex
2. Conceptual support for single player accounts as well as Group accounts. Single accounts can be migrated in and out of Group accounts with ease. Easiest way to think about this is two styles of accounts. Group accounts for those that wish to manage a network of screens, and single player accounts for those that just wish to control a single player with a simpler interface.
3. Concept of local content insertion, so a a Group admin is in control of how much local content (i.e. playlists and content created by the local player account) is shown in a particular screen zone
4. Support for organisations, such that one portal can contain multiple ‘organisations’ – ideal for a provider selling to many different accounts who all need to be isolated from each other.
5. Support for marking content as ‘public’ so that the digitalsignage.net community can share your content. increasing its potential reach
6. AIR based player for platform independence

As part of this move we are also moving from Microsoft Azure to Amazon as our cloud provider. The reasons for this are primarily technical – Azure is ‘not quite’ a standard Microsoft server technology, and you only find out what it cannot do when you develop a feature leveraging a Microsoft Server API and it doesn’t work, and then Microsoft say “Oh that isn’t supported!! rather than telling you upfront”, so as Amazon provides 100% Microsoft Server technology it is a better platform for API compliance than Azure. Also Amazon are just as scalable and resilient as Azure (they have also been doing cloud longer than Microsoft).

Also now we have frozen the UI we will be starting the task of screen shots and Videos (Tour etc) for the website so that people can get a glimpse prior to signing up for a free 30 day trial