Setting up a display panel outside a classroom

A panel outside a classroom is a special case of the display panel: the configuration is the same as for a lobby panel, but the filter targets a single room instead of a site or a level. The screen displayed next to a door shows only the occupancy of the corresponding room, which answers the question people in the corridor ask themselves: "what is happening in this room now and next?"

Typical cases:

• a lecture hall door,
• the entrance of a laboratory or a computer room,
• a multi-purpose room shared by several programs,
• a studio or a workshop (music, design, video).

Configuration

The Timetable module offers the same Display panel button as for a lobby panel. The difference lies in the filter: in the Show section, choose Classrooms and select the single corresponding room.

The other settings are identical to the lobby panel:

• Label on the administration side (for example Door B204), title on the screen side (for example Room B204 — Experimental sciences).
• Time slot: prefer + 2 h or + 4 h rather than the whole day — for a room, the user mostly wants to know the current lesson and the next one.
• Font size: Large is often appropriate for a screen read from 1-2 meters away in a corridor, smaller if the screen is close.
• Messages: handy for announcing a one-off booking (Room booked for the class council at 2 pm) or an unavailability (Room under maintenance until 3 pm).

Several rooms on the same screen

If a screen covers several neighboring rooms (a building wing, the rooms of one laboratory), you can select several rooms in the filter. The lessons of all the selected rooms are then merged into a single list sorted by time; if it overflows the screen, the panel paginates it (page scrolling). It does not alternate room by room. For a truly separate display per room, create one panel per room — each has its own URL. A single mini PC can display several panels by rotating several full-screen tabs, via the browser's or the system's kiosk feature (this is not an Omniscol setting).

URL and deployment

Each panel has its own unique URL, with no sign-in, to open in full-screen kiosk mode on the device installed next to the door. Refreshing is automatic, by periodic polling: the display re-filters itself against the current time roughly every minute, and the data is reloaded every five minutes — no manual action, but the update is not instantaneous.