Digital Signage App Overview

Apps Getting Started Updated June 02, 2026 212 views

Digital Signage App Overview

Turn any browser-capable screen into a workplace display. Register a screen once, copy its token URL onto a TV, Fire TV, repurposed tablet, or Raspberry Pi, and that screen starts rotating fresh content from across your platform — no partner hardware, no signage server, no per-screen license fee.

What is Digital Signage?

Digital Signage is the platform-tier marketplace app that drives lobby TVs, break-room screens, and factory-floor monitors directly from MangoApps. Each screen you register gets its own unique, URL-safe token. Point a fullscreen browser at /signage/display/<token> and the device boots into a fullscreen kiosk page that polls the platform for content updates.

There’s nothing to install on the device. Any modern browser works — Chromium on a Raspberry Pi, Fire TV, a smart TV, a Chromecast, or a repurposed tablet. The token is the authentication boundary, so no user login is required on the screen itself, and every screen is hard-scoped to its own business — there is no cross-tenant content leak.

Who it’s for: internal-comms teams, HR, operations leads, and facility managers who want to reach deskless and on-site staff with up-to-date content on physical screens, without running a separate signage product.

Pricing: per-employee, no per-screen license fee. License-required and disabled by default — admins opt in from the Apps Marketplace.

At a Glance

📺 Screens	🖼️ Custom Media	🚨 Live Alerts	🔄 Content Sources	🧾 Audit Log
Token URL on any browser	Upload + schedule + approve	Real-time push, pinned	7 rotating sources	Who changed what, when

Perfect For:

Lobby and reception displays that show company news and events to visitors
Break-room and floor screens that reach deskless staff who don’t check email
Manufacturing and warehouse safety screens that pin critical alerts instantly
Multi-site organizations where corporate pushes content while local managers manage their own facility’s screens
Tenants already running BrightSign / Scala / Signagelive who want MangoApps to feed one content zone

Registering a Screen

From the Screens tab, click Register screen (it opens in a side drawer). Give the screen a name, an optional description, and optionally bind it to a facility/location. Each screen carries its own:

Display URL + token — a 32-character URL-safe token. The display URL is /signage/display/<token>. Copy it onto the device’s browser and the screen comes alive.
Theme — light or dark, per screen.
Refresh interval — how often the screen polls for new content (30–300 seconds; defaults to the app setting).
Rotation interval — how long each slide stays on screen.
Branded header image + footer text — upload a header/footer image directly (no URL pasting required).

Token rotation: if a screen is replaced, lost, or compromised, click Regenerate token to mint a new one. The old URL stops working immediately; update the new URL on the device.

Activate / deactivate: screens can be toggled on or off without deleting them. A deactivated screen’s URL returns the inactive fallback page.

Online / offline monitoring

Every screen sends a heartbeat roughly once a minute. The dashboard shows online/offline status per screen at a glance, so you can spot a kiosk that lost power or network.

A daily sweep job emails admins when any screen has been offline for more than 24 hours — so a display that went dark overnight doesn’t silently stay dark for days. The Analytics tab also tracks uptime and flags stale screens (no heartbeat in the last 24 hours).

Content Sources

A screen’s playlist is aggregated fresh on every poll. Each content source can be turned on or off — at the tenant level in Settings, and overridden per screen. The seven sources, in playlist order:

Custom media — admin/manager-uploaded images and video that originate in Digital Signage (see below).
Critical alerts — pushed in real time and pinned to the top of every active screen. Urgent alerts pin within ~1 second via real-time push; the regular poll is the fallback.
News Feed posts — recent published posts on rotation. Must-read posts are pinned; a 14-day recency window keeps old posts from dominating.
Recognitions — recent employee recognitions (opt-in per tenant; off by default).
Calendar events — upcoming events in the next 7 days.
Shifts — open/unfilled shifts, scoped to the screen’s location when set (off by default).
Training reminders — certifications expiring within 30 days (off by default).

Sources that depend on another app (Recognition, Calendar, Shifts, Training) degrade gracefully — if the source app isn’t installed for a tenant, that source simply contributes nothing rather than erroring.

The Custom Media Library

The media library is what turns the portal feed into a real signage CMS — content that originates in Digital Signage rather than being mirrored from another app.

From the Media tab, upload an image (PNG / JPG / GIF / WebP) or a short video (MP4 / WebM / OGG) and give it a title and optional caption. Each media asset supports:

Scheduling — set a start (active from) and end (active until) time. The asset only appears on screens inside that window. Leave them blank to run indefinitely.
Facility scope — bind the asset to a specific location, or leave it unscoped to play on screens everywhere.
Zone tags — tag the asset (e.g. safety, cafeteria) so it only routes to screens carrying a matching zone tag. A screen with no zones sees only the all-zone (untagged) assets.
Display duration — how many seconds an image slide stays up. Videos ignore this and play to their natural length.

Only approved media that is inside its schedule window, matches the screen’s facility, and matches the screen’s zones is ever served to a screen.

The Approval Workflow

The media library is built around a “corporate signs off before it goes live” story. Authoring and review are split on purpose:

Authoring (upload, edit, submit, delete) is open to the app’s allowed roles — so a facility manager or local user can upload content for their own location.
Review (approve / reject) is admin-only — so corporate signs off before anything reaches a screen.

Each media asset moves through a lifecycle:

draft ──submit──▶ pending ──approve──▶ approved
                      └────reject────▶ rejected

Require-approval setting (on by default): when on, new uploads start in pending and only reach screens after an admin approves them. Editing an already-approved asset sends it back to pending for re-review, so a swapped image can’t bypass sign-off.
Approval off: uploads go straight to approved and appear immediately — useful for small single-location teams where the uploader is the admin.
Rejection comes with a reason the author can see, so they know what to fix.

The Media tab shows a pending-review count and a per-row status, and reviewers can approve or reject inline.

The Audit Log

The Audit log tab (admin-only) is an append-only record that answers the “who changed what, when, and from where” compliance question — especially relevant in healthcare and regulated environments.

One row is written for every administrative action:

Screens — register, edit, token rotation, activate, deactivate, delete
Media — upload, edit, submit, approve, reject, delete
Settings — updates and reset-to-defaults

Each entry records the user, the action, the target (with its name/title), a human-readable summary, the timestamp, and the IP address. The view lets admins filter by action type and shows the most recent 500 events. Audit writes are best-effort and never block the actual action.

Offline Playback

Screens often live on flaky networks — a break room behind a thin Wi-Fi signal, a floor monitor on a congested switch. Digital Signage installs a service worker on the kiosk page that gives screens offline playback.

When the network drops, the service worker keeps the screen rotating its last-known real content (not a single frozen frame) by serving the last successful feed and cached media from its local cache. Strategy per request type:

Feed updates are network-first, falling back to the last cached feed so the rotation keeps going with real items.
Media files (images/video) are cache-first, since they’re large and immutable once uploaded.
The kiosk page falls back to its cached shell on reload.

The screen can show a subtle “offline” indicator while it runs on cache, and seamlessly returns to live content the moment the network recovers.

Per-Screen Content Rules, Themes & Rotation

Different audiences need different screens. Each screen has its own content rules that layer on top of the tenant defaults:

Per-screen schedule — a content type can be set to show only between an active from and active until time.
Per-screen on/off override — explicitly enable or disable a content type on this screen, regardless of the tenant default.
Tenant default — falls back to the app-level Settings toggle.

So the lobby screen can run the full rotation (news, recognitions, events) on a light theme, while a manufacturing-floor screen runs alerts only on a dark theme. Per-screen, you also control theme (light/dark), refresh interval, rotation speed, and branded header/footer.

Embedding into existing signage platforms

Already running BrightSign, Scala, Signagelive, Rise Vision, OptiSigns, Yodeck, or similar? Every signage platform supports a “web URL” content source. Register a screen in MangoApps, copy its token URL, and paste it into your signage platform’s admin as one content zone among many. The public kiosk route sets Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors * so it can be iframed cross-origin. Your platform keeps its multi-zone layouts and scheduling; MangoApps supplies fresh content into that one slot.

Roles: Who Can Do What

Capability	Admin (or app admin)	Manager / Author	Reviewer
View dashboard + screen status	✅	✅ (if an allowed role)	—
Register / edit / delete screens	✅	—	—
Rotate tokens, activate/deactivate	✅	—	—
Upload / edit / submit media	✅	✅	—
Approve / reject media	✅	—	Admin-only
View Analytics	✅	—	—
View Audit log	✅	—	—
Change Settings	✅	—	—

Admins (global admins or per-app Digital Signage admins) run screens, settings, analytics, the audit log, and media approval.
Authors (managers / local users in the app’s allowed roles) can upload and manage media for their own facility, but cannot approve it — the corporate-vs-local separation.
Review (approve/reject) is always admin-only.

The visible tabs adapt to the role and to which content modules are enabled.

Settings & Sample Data

The Settings tab (admin-only) controls the app’s defaults and toggles:

Module toggles: Screen Management, Custom Media, Require-approval-before-media-goes-live, and per-source content toggles (Alerts, News Feed, Recognitions, Calendar Events, Shifts, Training).
Defaults applied to new screens: default refresh interval (30–300 seconds) and default theme (light/dark) — each screen can override these.
Roles: the allowed roles (who can author media) and admin roles (who administers the app).
Reset to defaults restores the schema defaults in one click.

Sample data: click Load Sample Data in Settings to populate demo screens so the dashboard and tabs aren’t empty while you’re learning the app. Delete Sample Data removes them cleanly.

Analytics

The Analytics tab (admin-only) summarizes how screens are performing over a configurable window (7 / 30 / 90 days):

Screen uptime — online vs. stale screens based on heartbeats.
Total impressions and a daily trend line.
Content rotation hits per kind (media / alerts / news / recognitions / events / shifts / training).
Per-screen impression rollup so you can see which screens are actually showing content.

Digital Signage composes well with:

Broadcasts & Alerts — critical alerts are the real-time, pinned source on every screen.
News Feed — published posts rotate onto screens automatically.
Recognition — recognitions can be opted in as a feel-good rotation source.
Comms Hub — calendar events flow into the signage feed; Comms Hub also exposes a Digital Signage channel.

Getting Started

Admin opens the Apps Marketplace, finds Digital Signage, and clicks Enable.
Open Settings and review the content-source toggles, the require-approval setting, default theme, and refresh interval.
Optionally click Load Sample Data so the dashboard isn’t empty while you learn.
Go to Screens → Register screen, name it, and (optionally) bind it to a location.
Open the screen’s display URL on a TV / Fire TV / tablet browser — it boots straight into the kiosk page.
Upload your first asset under Media, schedule it, and (if approval is on) have an admin approve it.
Tune per-screen content rules so the lobby and the floor show the right mix.

For deeper how-tos, see the related articles linked above.

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Article ID: digital_signage_app_overview

Digital Signage App Overview