Advanced Scheduling for Your Content

We’re happy to announce the release of a powerful new XOGO feature called advanced scheduling. Users are now able to schedule items within any playlist so they will appear on-screen at specific times, and on specific days of the week.

Why is this important?

Many types of businesses need to display different content at different times of the day, and/or on different days of the week. For instance, a restaurant may wish to have their breakfast menu appear on-screen all morning, then automatically change to a lunch menu at noon, and then change to a dinner menu at 5pm. A bar may want to advertise happy specials from 5-7pm on weekdays, while the rest of their content plays full time. And an event center may want to display different information to visitors every day of the week, in order to let them know which events are happening in which meeting rooms.

In the past this would require a user to log into XOGO Manager occasionally and change playlists back and forth. With the new scheduling feature, however, users can set up a playlist and schedule their content for the entire week, so everything plays automatically. This set-it-and-forget-it approach is just another part of our effort to make digital signage as easy and approachable as possible for our users.

How do I use the scheduling feature?

In order to access the scheduling feature simply click on any of your playlists, then click the schedule button at the top of the screen. You’ll see a screen displaying the days of the week, and blue bars that represent the time of day. By default all of your playlist items are set to play 24/7, so if you want them to play full time you can stop here.

In order to adjust the days/times when you’d like a playlist item to play, simply drag the ends of the blue bars in order to adjust the timing, and click ADD in order to add additional times.

Tips for scheduling your content.

You can drag the ends of the blue bars in order to quickly adjust the beginning/ending time for any content item. If you’d like to be more precise, click inside any time box to type the start or end time in HH:MM format (24-hour clock) and then click tab.

Let’s say you want one playlist item to play Monday-Friday from 5am-12pm as shown in the example above. You would simply drag the right side of the top blue bar back into Monday. Click in the top time box and type in 05:00 as the beginning time and then click tab. Click in the bottom time box and type in 12:00 as the end time, then click tab. The item is now scheduled to play from 5am-12pm on Monday. You would click ADD on the right side of the screen in order to bring up another blue timing bar. Drag the bar (grab it in the middle section) into Tuesday and then repeat the process above, entering 05:00 as the start time and 12:00 as the end time. Continue as you’d like, until your item is scheduled to play at all the days and times that you’d like.

The interface lets you see at a glance whether you have any “blank times” where no content is scheduled. Remember that you can have items that play all the time mixed in with items that only play on certain days and at certain times. We recommend having at least one item scheduled to run all the time, so there are no blank times and black screens.

What types of content can I use?

The new scheduling feature works with any type of XOGO content, from graphics and videos to dynamic content feeds. You can adjust the duration of each graphic as usual (i.e. 60 seconds apiece) but any given item will only play on the days/times that you’ve scheduled it for.

I’m having trouble getting my content scheduled.

If you run into problems scheduling your content, feel free to contact our support team in order to get in touch with us and ask a question.