The YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities is currently building an Internet of Things driven state of the art downtown facility. As part of this project, we are assisting them in developing an omni channel system for managing content that includes both marketing material and data from third party systems across digital signage, web, and mobile experiences. In this session, we will focus upon the web-integrated digital signage system for displaying content on room entry screens. In this system, we are using the Open Y Drupal distribution to serve as a proxy between resources that provide data about scheduled activities and to manage that content as well as to supplement it with both marketing content and time and location sensitive messaging.

In this session, we will cover a number of use cases that we foresee this framework supporting, as well as speculate about how similar frameworks could be extended to support additional applications in the Internet of Things.

Our integration uses the following 3rd party services:

GroupEx Pro - a private, web-based communication portal for group fitness programs

ScreenCloud - an online platform which allows us to manage content on screens easily.

We will discuss

Business goals and Use Cases - The YMCA is an evolving organization with a wide variety of needs, from member services, to marketing, to wellness promotion. With a new facility and new capabilities, we can only predict a portion of the messaging needs that the Y will have in-branch. We will discuss how we analyze their needs and develop a response that it as adaptable as possible.

Architecture - Because of the fundamental lack of control we have over third party services, a strong, flexible architecture that can cover a wide variety of use cases and adapt to changes in data format and service availability is necessary.

Implementation - We will demonstrate how everything comes together and show what you need to implement it, add your own features, and adapt it to new use cases.