How to show SharePoint Online on Digital Signage

SharePoint News on Digital Signage

Businesses use SharePoint to increase productivity, enhance collaboration and employee engagement. But if your latest news and posts in SharePoint go unseen, there’s no business value for the investment.

This is why smart companies are putting an effort in the right places:

  • Successful end-user adoption
  • Use Digital Signage to amplify the reach of your communication

The Use cases for SharePoint on Digital Signage

Digital Signage & SharePoint can go hand-in-hand. In this blog we cover the basic use cases and steps how you can connect digital signage to your SharePoint online.

Use #1 Drive traffic to SharePoint

A highly used best practice to drive SharePoint adoption is actually to drive traffic from other channels and media. One of the media that receives a high attention rate in the workplace is Digital Signage.

Share the great content you have in SharePoint on digital displays around the workplace to engage employees and drive traffic.

You can drive traffic to your SharePoint intranet by giving the latest news some screen time on digital signage displays throughout the office.

Automate the latest content, news or posts from SharePoint to digital displays throughout the workplace to highlight what is trending and what is going on.

Use Case #2 – Reach all employee groups

In companies in manufacturing there can be non-desk workers that do not have immediate access to SharePoint. This can be a large group of employees that are not within the easy reach of daily communication.

Take your latest intranet news to factory floor using SharePoint & Digital Signage. SharePoint news on Digital Signage is a great way to make sure internal communication can reach all employee groups.

Follow these steps to connect SharePoint online to Digital Signage

Valotalive is a workplace digital signage that has a ready connection to SharePoint online cloud.

Before moving on make sure you have a valid SharePoint online account.

Step 1 Create your Valotalive account

Sign up to Valotalive clicking here (free trial provided)

If you do not have done so already, you can test Valotalive today as a FREE trial is provided for you.

You will be taken to Valotalive main page. Where you can do many things, but most of all you can find your SharePoint app icon there.

Step 2 Activate Your Display in Valotalive

Make sure you have an active display in Valotalive. You may test the service with a Chrome Extension display during the free trial.

Later you will need a mediaplayer to connect Valotalive to your displays around your office. You may use any existing display with HDMI. We recommend using professional Full HD or 4K displays.

You have some options to go forward:

Option I – use Chrome devices as media players

You can order the preconfigured, ready-to-go devices from Valotalive. Or you can source and manage the Chrome mediaplayers yourself. Valotalive can be found in Chrome Web Store.

Option II – use a media player running on Win 10

You can use Valotalive Extension in case you wish to use a media player running on Windows 10.

Step 3 Locate the SharePoint online app in Valotalive

– Once you’ll have your Valotalive account activated, locate the SharePoint online app in Valotalive under “Apps

– Click new apps

– Browse through the apps or select the “News” category to shortlist the available app. Scroll down to locate SharePoint Online app.

Step 4 Choose SharePoint online app

SharePoint App in Valotalive

– Click “Choose this app” to activate it and set your preferences.

Step 4 Set your preferences & authenticate

As one of the first steps you will be asked to authenticate Valotalive with your SharePoint Online account using your MS / Azure AD credentials. This is the secure process using Microsoft’s native API.

Sharepoint authentication

Use your Microsoft Credentials to authenticate. Valotalive – Microsoft is enabled via a standard and secure authentication that uses Azure AD / OAuth.

Choose your site to follow

Once you have activated your app, you will be taken back to Valotalive. You can now choose which SharePoint site’s news you want to follow. You may create multiple apps, each one following a specific site.

Brand the look & feel

You can use themes to set the look & feel for your app. Valotalive provides multiple default themes or you can create a company specific theme to match your brand guidelines.

Step 5 Go live- add you SharePoint app to your displays

Once you have saved your SharePoint app, you can add you app to Flows linked to a specific display or display group(s). This will be done in Valotalive.

SharePoint News on Digital Signage

A custom and optional call to action can be automatically added to all posts all posts.

 

Step 6 The Content

Once running Valotalive SharePoint app will display your news on office TVs from your SharePoint account from a selected SharePoint team Site or a Blog Site. Anytime you add a news post on the selected sites, they will be automatically shown also on office TVs.

Valotalive will show the following content items on your displays:

– News image, if included

– Headline

– Ingress/body text

– The date and channel

Read more about integrating SharePoint with Digital Signage

 

Test Valotalive

You can test Valotalive without any hardware using our FREE Trial account. Read more about SharePoint online and free trial here.

Steps forward

I do not have any prior digital signage service

If you do not have any digital signage service yet, you are good to go with Valotalive as it has all the features needed for a small company or enterprise use. Activate your Valotalive account here.

I already have a digital signage service in place

If are already using some digital signage service, but that does not offer integrations to the required business systems, such as SharePoint online, you might like to consider running Valotalive in parallel with the service.

The other option is to replace the service with Valotalive entirely.

All you need to do here is to:

1. Activate your Valotalive account

2. change the media player. A media player is running the content behind the digital displays. You can:

Option I – order your media player from Valotalive or selected partners

Option II – Set up one to run Valotalive yourself

Further reading:

https://valota.live/apps/sharepoint-digital-signage/

https://valota.live/workplace-digital-signage-for-internal-communications/
https://valota.live/digital-signage-for-production-facilities/

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