Visix, Inc. has released a beta signage software version of their AxisTV Alert software application for digital signage. The new alerting platform gives customers time-saving workflows to deliver important updates and critical alerts across their digital signage system.
“This is a fantastic tool for safety and security managers on a college or corporate campus,” says Sean Matthews, president and CEO of Visix. “We’ve streamlined this platform to make it fast and easy to create and send time-sensitive messages and urgent alerts to digital signs. We’ve achieved this through an intuitive web interface dedicated to alert functionality and not crowded with non-alert items.”
AxisTV Alert is designed as a stand-alone platform for reliability, scalability and performance. It can be used alongside any digital signage content management solution, including Visix’s own AxisTV Signage Suite. The application is built around Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standards, and easily integrates with popular third-party alerting suites like Alertus and Rave Mobile Safety.
CAP is a simple but general format for exchanging all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over all kinds of networks. OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is responsible for the CAP standard. CAP allows a consistent warning message to be disseminated simultaneously over many different warning systems, thus increasing warning effectiveness while simplifying the warning task. It also facilitates the detection of emerging patterns in local warnings of various kinds, such as might indicate an undetected hazard or hostile act.
The new product combines a central alert management application (AxisTV Alert) with playback software (AxisTV Siren) for an unlimited number of players, and can be used with both on-premise and hosted signage systems. AxisTV Alert uses asynchronous and multi-thread processing for high performance while consuming CAP messages from third-party mass notification vendors and rapidly communicating with media players running Siren.
The AxisTV Alert notification module allows for manual alert overrides using the beta signage software interface and provides multiple ways for integrated third-party systems to automatically trigger alert notices—by posting CAP messages to the content manager, sending e-mails to the content manager, or by communicating with the available API. These external systems can include mass notification and text messaging services, emergency notification systems, public address systems, and others.
Messages can be important reminders or critical safety alerts, with users configuring standard fields like headline, description, instructions, contact, and web link. Clients can also style their text messages with choices for font, color, style, background image, and more, while the beta signage software automatically sizes message text to fit the display area on screen. Clients can have multiple messages running on the system at once, and can also override all screens for a select period of time.
The beta version is available to all Visix clients, with the final product expected to launch in the first quarter of 2019.
