Rise Vision is the #1 cloud digital signage software, making it simple to create, customize, and manage engaging content across unlimited screens with 600+ ready-to-use templates. Compatible with virtually any device, it helps schools and businesses save time, cut costs, and deliver powerful communications with ease. Watch a full demo of Rise Vision brought to you by SourceForge.
In this SourceForge Product Demo Showcase, we speak with Jennifer Jennings, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Rise Vision. We explore Rise Vision’s cloud-based digital signage platform, which integrates with tools like Google Workspace and Canva. The discussion highlights Rise Vision’s ease of use, customizable templates, and scheduling features that enhance communication for businesses, schools, and industrial markets. Jennifer emphasizes the platform’s ability to streamline content management and improve organizational communication, while also showcasing its robust security measures and integrations with emergency alert systems.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Rise Vision is an all-in-one platform for digital signage, screen sharing, and emergency alerts.
- The platform offers over 600 customizable templates for various communication needs.
- Users can publish content in less than five clicks, making it easy to manage communications.
- Rise Vision integrates with popular tools like Google Workspace and Canva for seamless content sharing.
- The scheduling feature allows users to automate content management, reducing the time spent on updates.
- Emergency alerts can be set up easily with integrations to common alerting protocol providers.
- User training is supported through live sessions and a comprehensive help center.
- Security measures include single sign-on and customizable user roles to protect content.
- Screen sharing capabilities allow for engaging presentations without the need for additional hardware.
- Success stories demonstrate the effectiveness of Rise Vision in improving communication and safety in organizations.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Rise Vision and Digital Signage
02:19 – Challenges in Organizational Communication
04:35 – Key Features of Rise Vision
07:12 – Exploring the Template Library
13:22 – Scheduling and Automating Messages
21:53 – Integrations with Other Platforms
28:52 – Integrating Emergency Alerts with Rise Vision
30:06 – Setting Up CAP Alerts Easily
32:52 – User-Friendly Training and Support
35:49 – Security Measures in Rise Vision
40:39 – Screen Sharing Features for Enhanced Collaboration
44:58 – Sustainability Through Screen Sharing
47:50 – Lesser-Known Features of Rise Vision
50:50 – Real-World Use Cases of Rise Vision
54:52 – Key Takeaways from the Demo
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:01.016)
Hello, everyone. My name is Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions. In today’s episode of the SourceForge Product Demo Showcase, I’m joined by Jennifer Jennings, senior growth marketing manager at Rise Vision, a familiar face if you’re a longtime subscriber of ours who managed to catch our podcast episode with her and customer success manager Rob Price.
In that discussion, we offered a sort of conceptual look at Rise Vision, just talking about their cloud-based digital signage software and how it makes it easy to create, customize, and manage dynamic content across any screen, which is just a great way to boost engagement and communication for really businesses of all kinds, but organizations and schools in particular. Schools are a big client base for them. We discussed their expansion from the educational sector into industrial markets and just how tightly integrated they are with existing tools like Google Workspace and Canva, as well as just what they’re doing to incorporate customer feedback into the products and services they offer.
So now we’re back, and we’re going hands-on with the platform to see exactly how it works in person here. We’re going to look at that massive library of signage templates and see just how easy it is to get your messages out there. And we’ll even get into some of the specific features, like how you’re able to actually schedule and automate messages for a more hands-off content management approach. So with all that said, let me introduce Jennifer Jennings. Jennifer, welcome to the show. Glad you could join us.
Jennifer Jennings (01:33.708)
Thanks for having me, Beau. I’m excited to be back and excited to be talking about Rise Vision today.
Beau Hamilton (01:38.446)
Yeah, it’s nice to have you back here. So before we get to the demo, I’d love for you just to give us a quick overview of Rise Vision for those who might be unaware of the company. What does your company offer and what are some of the challenges you’re trying to solve?
Jennifer Jennings (01:51.064)
Right, yeah. So, Vision is the all-in-one platform for digital signage, screen sharing, and emergency alerts. So we help you, we help organizations communicate, teach, collaborate, and improve safety affordably with an easy cloud-based digital signage solution, screen sharing, and emergency alerts. So we’ve been around since 1992, so more than 30 years, and we have a 99% customer satisfaction rate and rating with our support. But the reason customers stick with us is really simple, is we make communication easy.
Most organizations struggle to communicate, to engage with their audience, and meet safety requirements. And this is all due to limited resources. They don’t have design staff, or they’re already using complicated tools that make it hard to share timely and engaging messages. So we hear this time and time again that, you know, customers, they don’t have, they have limited resources. There’s no easy way to share those urgent messages like emergency alerts, or they’re using, you know, an ineffective internet that employees don’t log into. We recently had a customer share with us that they were using a popular employee success platform for employment communication, and that less than 10% of their employees had ever logged into the internet.
So, they were looking to replace that with digital signage. And I’ll share a similar story later about a company that was in the same situation, but they’re using digital signage to kind of like funnel employees into that internet because that’s where they store their policies and their open enrollment forms. So they’re using digital signage in combination with that internet to get their employees the information they need.
And then like I said, using other platforms can be really inefficient when you’re trying to share messages and information with workers who are on the shop floor, they’re away in the field, or they don’t have a company email. So it can be really tough to communicate with them. And that’s where Rise Vision comes in. We want you to spend minutes a week and you get amazing digital signage that actually improves your organization’s communication.
Beau Hamilton (04:13.538)
Wow, that’s great. I mean, communication is everything, right? It’s, know it’s hugely important in personal relationships, but also of course the, it’s the cornerstone of really any successful business. It seems like now we’re to talk about a lot of different things that cover a of different aspects of the software, but I want to ask you, what are some of the top three, maybe takeaways you’d like viewers to leave with after watching this demo?
Jennifer Jennings (04:35.808)
Yeah, so at Rise Vision, we’re focusing on three things to help our customers achieve their goals. One is one platform, two easy to use, and three the best service. So Rise Vision is combining digital signage, screen sharing, and emergency alerts all into one platform. Everything’s in one place, so it’s less hassle and better results. I know, juggling multiple tools and platforms is time consuming, it’s inefficient, and it can just really feel overwhelming.
So when we have everything in one place, it’s gonna simplify your workflows, it reduces just software clutter and costs, and it enables that timely communication. But overall, it’s improving your message consistency and visibility across locations, across different hallways in your school. We’re just getting more communication out. Being easy to use is one of those things that we’re, we wanna really focus on because Rise Vision is intuitive, it requires minimal training and it works on any hardware. So it’s perfect for even non-technical users. We have all the time customers telling us that they have their admin assistants or students or interns managing the platform because it’s so easy to use.
And then the last is the best service. So we want people to know that they’re never alone and we’re here and we want our customers to succeed. So we have free training, we have guided onboarding, and we have technical support from people who really care. And this just helps you get started quickly and so that you can start improving your communication immediately. But you can really feel confident that help is always there. We answer support tickets within one business hour during the workday.
So if you have a question or you get stuck on something someone is there to answer it and to send you a personalized Response we’re not using you know a chat bot. It’s a real person that’s going to be responding to you
Beau Hamilton (06:46.796)
Wow, that’s cool. Yeah, it can’t be understated just how important having good customer service within one hour. It’s pretty, pretty impressive. All right. So one platform, easy to use, great customer service. I’m excited to validate those claims and just see, see everything that rise vision has to offer. So with that said, Jennifer, let’s have you share your screen and just get started with this product demo showcase.
So when we first log in here, the first thing you’ll notice is the template library. Is that right? Can you?
Jennifer Jennings (07:27.192)
Yeah, so when we first jump into Rise Vision, the first thing you’re going to notice is our template library. So we have over 600 professionally designed templates. I’m going to take you over here. So we’ll start in the ad presentation. And there’s a couple of different ways that you can search for the perfect message. So you can search for anything in the search bar. So we can have something like employee recognition.
We’re going to have some different templates come up. We can have something related to safety. There’s a whole bunch of different templates that come up for that. If you have an announcement, there’s lots of different options for announcements as well. But beyond the search bar, what we also have is we have these upcoming events. these templates get regularly updated based on what’s coming up on the calendar.
It’s like holidays, important dates, you know, that kind of thing. And then over here or down below, sorry, we have our feature templates. So these are ones that are like really popular right now. Then over here, we have kind of a different view, but you can sort by month. And this is just gonna highlight the different, it’s just gonna highlight any upcoming events or upcoming templates that you would need for like an event or a holiday.
So like in October, there’s a ton of events apparently. Yeah. And then we also have the category and content filters. So you can filter from the category. Like I said, we have announcements, we have different campaigns, profile, maybe you’re using portrait mode or a menu board. And then we also have different content. So you can filter by that if you’re looking for a calendar or emergency alerts, social media.
Beau Hamilton (08:57.639)
that’s cool. Yeah. Yeah, that’s handy.
Jennifer Jennings (09:21.068)
Those are great options as well.
Beau Hamilton (09:23.534)
Wow. Yeah. There seems to be a ton of different temps to choose from. I mean, like you said, everything from holiday templates to I saw some, there’s a birthday calendar template. You got achievements and milestones. Um, so you said you had over 600 to choose from. Is that right?
Jennifer Jennings (09:37.642)
Yeah, and we’re always adding more templates as well.
Beau Hamilton (09:40.726)
Yeah. So for some reason, maybe you can’t find the exact template you’re looking for. know you can imagine you can request it. Maybe you’ll build it into the library, but, let’s say you find a template that’s maybe close to what you’re looking for, but maybe needs a few tweaks. How customizable are each of them? Are you able to customize it?
Jennifer Jennings (09:56.574)
Yeah. Yeah. So all of our templates are super customizable. less than five clicks, you can really customize everything and have it on your display. So the example I’m going to go with is this employee recognition template. So this is our employee milestones and achievements. And what I can do here is within the brand settings, once you apply these, these will
Or once you update these, these will apply to all of your templates going forward. So you can put in your logo, you upload that in, you can change your brand colors depending on whatever your brand colors are. And then those are going to apply going forward to all of your templates. But for this one, for example, I mean, once I made those changes, if I put my logo in my color templates, it’s going to change the whole look of the template. But then really all I’m doing here is I’m going to, you know, change the name. So I’m gonna, you know, change my name or change the name here. Though Hamilton, he’s employee of the month. I would add, you know, add my upload my image and then I could change the description for whatever it is. And you can do that where you can have multiple people who are being acknowledged or just one and just makes it super easy. So
Beau Hamilton (11:20.878)
Very cool, yeah.
Jennifer Jennings (11:22.166)
I’m uploading a photo, I’m updating the name. Boom, bam, my brand settings are good. I’m gonna hit publish and that’s it. Less than five clicks and this presentation could be on displays across your office.
Beau Hamilton (11:36.29)
That’s awesome. Yeah. Less than five clicks. I like how there’s like the text dialogue boxes on the side. So you’re not necessarily having to like click into the presentation view and deal with all the kind of, you know, transparent virtual text boxes and that can get a little messy. So I like this layout here.
Jennifer Jennings (11:51.576)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So all of our components are on the side. And I’ll show you a little bit towards the end, but you can also add components so you can make changes. You can customize this further by covering up a photo or removing text or doing a bunch of other things as well. You can even change, like you can change the background image. There’s lots of options. And then we do have an integration with Canva as well.
So like you mentioned, if we don’t have one of the templates, you can request it from our team and they’ll either, you can kind of tell them, okay, this is the situation or this is the use case I have. They’ll offer you an alternative or we’ll build a template and then it gets uploaded. But you can also integrate with Canva and you can use literally, they have thousands of designs. So you can use one of the Canva designs and then bring it right into your presentation.
There’s a whole world of templates as well.
Beau Hamilton (12:47.202)
Yeah, I mean, having 600 in-house and then opening the doors for, for like Google workspace and, and canvas is huge. I mean, I feel like there’s, feel like anyone you’re going to be able to find exactly what you’re looking for, create exactly what you, what you have in mind, I think with all the options you have here. now I want to talk about another feature that’s one of my favorites. and it’s how, how you’re able to schedule and actually automate a lot of the messages because we all have so much going on, you know, that you.
Jennifer Jennings (13:06.817)
Absolutely.
Beau Hamilton (13:17.56)
We can’t expect to spend hours of time within the app every day or week just sending out messages at specific times or on specific dates. So how does the scheduling portion work with Rise Vision?
Jennifer Jennings (13:28.69)
Yeah, so that’s a great question. really the basis of how we make everything so easy is you can schedule everything in advance. So, you know, some people would call this like batch content creation. But yeah, you can do this all in at one time. So for example, I’m going to go to one of my, to my schedule. So this is my schedule for this demo. And I can set up my breakfast menus to show in the morning. I can have my lunch menu show in the afternoon. I can have announcements on specific dates.
There is a lot of flexibility there. And then I can also override my content. I could, whatever the content is being shown, I can have that content be overridden by something else, or I can have other content replace what’s currently being shown. So there’s a couple of different nuances, but we’re really just wanting to make digital signage easy and make it so you don’t have to spend hours of time within the app every day or every week. And then you can set the content once and it runs automatically. So there’s no need to go in there every hour, every day and update things.
Beau Hamilton (14:50.988)
Yeah, so you mentioned the lunch menu, which I think would be perfect for something like a school setting cafeteria during lunchtime, obviously. Can you share an example of just how an organization has successfully used this feature?
Jennifer Jennings (15:05.546)
Yeah, so I’m going to let me quickly demo how to do some of these schedules. So for the employee milestones, so this is the one we just talked about. Let’s schedule this. Maybe we’re going to have employee milestones run every Monday. We’re going to celebrate people or the people that are going on that are working in the business. So I’m going to go in. So I’m in my schedule. I’m going to go to my playlist item and I’m going to toggle off show all the time.
And now I can choose when this gets shown. So I can click in here, my start date, I’m gonna have this one go on Monday and I’m gonna have it end on Monday. So I’m just going to be featuring the employees every Monday. And then it’s going to run all day. So that’s going to start first thing on Monday and it’s going to end. So it’ll go from like 12.01 AM to 1159 p.m. Okay, so then I’m gonna press apply and then I can see here that it’s going to be starting on September 8th to September 8th. Then, you know, I mentioned like the breakfast menu. Let’s have our breakfast menu show up just in the morning. So same thing, we’re gonna go to timeline, show all the time. I’m going to have this run every day. So I’m gonna have my start date be today, my end date I’m gonna leave open because this is just gonna run all the time.
I’m toggle off all day and then I’m gonna be able to set my schedule. So I’m gonna have my breakfast menu go from 730 to 930 every day and it’s going to show every, be reoccurring every day and I’m gonna press apply there. So now my breakfast item or my breakfast menu is showing it’s gonna start today and it’s gonna run every day from 730 to 930.
Beau Hamilton (16:52.577)
Easy like that. Okay, that’s very easy. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah.
Jennifer Jennings (17:04.664)
Yeah, just like that. And then same thing with the lunch menu. You know, we’re going in, we’re not going to show it all the time. We’re going to change it. So it’s maybe showing from what time do people have lunch? 1130 to 1 30 p.m. It’s going to show every day. And that’s just a super easy way to make our content show up like that or show up in the time when you don’t have to manage it.
then the other thing that I mentioned or the other scheduling option that I mentioned was override. So this could be great if you want to basically override any of your content that’s currently being shown. So this would be a great option if you had like an important announcement or an emergency alert. You know, we do have an integration with common alerting protocols and that makes it easy to automatically override if there’s an emergency, but you could manually do this for
For example, and I’ve heard this from customers, if you’re in a rural area and there’s a moose on the loose, well, perfect. You could have that presentation and be like, hey, don’t go outside. There’s a moose in the yard. Something like that. Yeah. And then the other one, or my other example is for replace.
Beau Hamilton (18:18.702)
That’s funny, yeah.
Jennifer Jennings (18:29.78)
So let’s say you have a town hall meeting and address from the CEO. It’s gonna be tomorrow and we want to basically replace all of our content that’s being shown. And so this, you know, this is my content. I wanna replace that, but I don’t want to override it. I just wanna have my content show for a certain amount of time and then go back to my regular scheduled content. What I could do in that situation is I’m gonna create a new schedule.
And I’ve called this override schedule, but you can call it replace or you could call it maybe in this case, it would make more sense if it was like town hall meeting. And I’ve taken this presentation and we’re going to do a countdown to our town hall meeting, which is going to be tomorrow at noon. So what I’m going to do is instead of having a timeline show all the time, I’m going to go in here and I’m going to edit my timeline.
So I’m going to have it start on September 5th and I’m gonna have my start time be just one minute before the town hall starts and I’m gonna have my end time be two minutes after. So from here, I’m gonna click show on all displays and that would push this message to all of your displays within the organization and then the override is set to replace. So it’s gonna replace that content and then basically at noon on Friday, all of my displays will override with this presentation. And instead of this being a beautiful sunset, we would have our town hall meeting being like a live stream, for example. So that’s kind of the different ways that you can schedule content.
Beau Hamilton (20:16.61)
Gotcha. Yeah, I bet I’m sure there’s a million different ways you’ve seen these templates being used and these scheduling features being used. I just love how, yeah, just the more kind of ways you can automate some of these communication messages is just, is great. Cause obviously we have so much going on nowadays that we don’t have time to constantly keep tweaking all the settings, publishing everything. So that’s super powerful.
Jennifer Jennings (20:45.048)
Yeah. Then going back to your question about an example. you know, the lunch menus, I mean, that’s like you said, there’s millions of ways that our customers are using the scheduling feature and the overrides and the replace. But one example that’s super easy that we can shift or that I can talk about is Redwood City Schools in California. So they’ve centralized their school menus so that one location manages all of them across 14 schools using Rise Vision. And so they’re able to use the scheduling feature like I just demonstrated with the breakfast or the lunch menus and schedule those out on the displays at 14 different schools from like one ladies desk. But then they’re also so they’re sharing their lunch menus or they’re sharing their breakfast menus during you know certain times of the day, but then they’re also scheduling in different content like upcoming events or important announcements. So, yeah, just kind of like one really easy example of the scheduling feature being put into practice.
Beau Hamilton (21:48.546)
Yeah, that’s great. I want to pivot slightly to talk about some of the integrations you have here. So I mentioned, you mentioned obviously Canva and Google Workspace. What kind of integrations, what are the integrations portion of this platform? What does it look like?
Jennifer Jennings (22:02.956)
Yes, so we have a lot of integrations and having these integrations is important because we wanna make it really easy for you and your organization to share content that you already have. you have the ability to reuse that content instead of having to completely create something new. And we also want people to be able to use tools that they’re already familiar with. So I’m gonna show you from this template. So this is just a basic zone invent zone embedded template and it has this blank playlist item.
So you can go in here and this, you know, this lists all of our components for this template and we have this playlist and you press add and then you can choose from like any of these integrations to have this content show up. But this isn’t like just all of our integrations. isn’t, you know, it doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s just giving you the option to put any of these, anything you want to make it personal into this playlist section. So, like I said, or like we mentioned with the Google integrations, you can put in Google Slides, Sheets, you can connect your calendar. So, you know, if you have a really great, we talk to a lot of customers who are really happy with using Google, creating content in Google Slides, but they want to have a better way to share that. So they can share like a Google Slide deck. So this would be a great example or great spot to put your Google Slides. So we would go in here and you would put the URL for your Google Slides presentation, and then it’s gonna show up in that middle section. We also have, you can pull data from like a Google Sheet into a list component.
So we’ll go into here and then, yeah, you could, or not in this template, sorry, but if we went into one of the templates that had a list component, you can connect that with a Google Sheet. And then you can also sync with your Google Calendar to automatically display upcoming events. So in one of our templates that has a calendar feature. So we’ll go in here and let’s search for events. So this is a great example. So this template is going to show upcoming events for the days. You can go in here and you can connect your calendar and it’s gonna pull the dates, the times, the location, and then it’s going to also drop off events that have already happened. So you can toggle on hide today’s completed events and things that have already happened are gonna disappear.
And then you can also customize the date range. So how far in advance do you want to be showing those events?
Beau Hamilton (25:10.86)
I love that. I love the Google calendar integration there because I use Google calendar for everything. That’s super powerful. Yeah.
Jennifer Jennings (25:13.344)
Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And then mean, within Google Calendar, can have, like, you don’t have to be showing your entire personal calendar. Like, that’s a lot of stuff that people aren’t going to care about. But you could have a calendar that, you know, you can have all these classes, or you can have all the events that are coming up. So that’s a great, great option as well. And then
Beau Hamilton (25:33.954)
Yeah, I saw a Power BI was another method, which brings you back to my data science days. But I mean, the use cases seem natural there when you’re dealing with data and visual graphs and whatnot. That’s pretty powerful to just incorporate some of the data points you’ve been working on.
Jennifer Jennings (25:46.805)
Yeah, and again, it’s content that you already have. You probably already have a Power BI dashboard or report. Just embed that into a template. Or, I mean, we do have a full screen Power BI template as well. But yeah, you can just go in here. So you would log into your Power BI or connect your Power BI account. You choose your workspace, you choose your report, and then your refresh rate. So this is just connecting for a minute, loading the data.
And then this component pops up and you’re just gonna stretch to fit the space. Yeah, so Power BI is super simple. Like I shared with Canva, like that’s a great component that people are a great integration that people love. You can launch Canva from Rise Vision. like I was showing, go in here to components, choose Canva.
Beau Hamilton (26:22.988)
Yeah, there you go. Nice.
Jennifer Jennings (26:46.998)
And then you can choose your presentation size if you or the orientation, we’ll just do a regular presentation because that’s going to fit the best and then hit design with Canva and it’s going to pop open Canva right within Rise. So then, you you choose your template, you or your content, you create that, press save and it’s going to automatically load into Rise Vision
Beau Hamilton (26:56.725)
Nice, yeah, that’s great.
Jennifer Jennings (27:09.974)
So let’s just do that. Let it update.
And there it is. So it pops up as like kind of a little thing. And then you expand and boom, now you have your Canva, your Canva content. And then the last one or the last integration that I want to mention, I mean, we do have quite a few, but the last one that is kind of new and is really exciting is Rise of a Chain has an integration with Meta. So that’s Facebook and Instagram. And so this is a great way to extend your social presence and keep your community updated. And again,
Beau Hamilton (27:19.598)
Here you go.
Jennifer Jennings (27:48.552)
reusing the content you already have. So you can go into components and then there’s social media posts or social media followers. So you can, you know, connect, you can have your waterfall. So that’s going to show all of your posts or you can have a single post. And yeah, same kind of thing. You’re just going to expand that. And you know, that could be the feature of this template.
Beau Hamilton (28:15.246)
Nice. Yeah, again, it’s like all about just bringing the content you already have over, making it super easy. Because you don’t have to spend, again, hours on this platform working on generating new content. If you already have it, just bring it on over super easily. That’s great. Yeah, I saw the YouTube integration too. mean, in the future, could just, once this episode goes live, we can plug this demo into one of the templates.
Jennifer Jennings (28:30.924)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Jennings (28:40.298)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, we have the text and image video. So if you had like a video on your desktop, you can put that in there. You can even put like a whole bunch of images and videos into a folder and just have those circulate through the YouTube like, yeah, that one’s really cool. A web page so you can share, you know, content from a live website, which is really neat. PowerPoint, HTML embed. So that’s, you know,
We do have more, if the website isn’t public, I think you can use the HTML embed or if you wanted to do a little bit more stuff there, power via the social media, then we also have a new one for the video streaming. So we do have, if you’re streaming, like for example, that town hall, you’d be able to use that component as well or that creation.
Beau Hamilton (29:33.262)
Well, yeah, that’s interesting. So you have pretty much all your bases covered. I’m sure more integrations will be added as time goes on. But I mean, the fact that you have Canva and PowerPoint, Power BI, I think that you, Google, yeah, you cover pretty much all the main content sources already out there.
Jennifer Jennings (29:44.854)
Yeah, Google really covers.
Jennifer Jennings (29:51.606)
Yeah, exactly.
Beau Hamilton (29:53.326)
Now I want to talk about and ask you about some of the most common questions prospects bring up and how you address them. Many organizations in the education and industrial sectors rely on the common alerting protocol, CAP, which is the international standard format for emergency alerting and public warning. Can you walk us through how easy it is to actually set up CAP alerts and get that going inside of Rise Visions platform?
Jennifer Jennings (30:22.462)
Yeah, so Rise Vision can be configured to automatically override your scheduled content and show emergency alerts. We have integrations with, I think, about a dozen common alerting protocol providers. So that would be like Single Wire, Centrix, Crisis Go, Rave. So whatever kind of platform is really popular with schools, we already integrate with. And then if there’s somebody that’s not on our list, but they use the common alerting protocol, it’s super easy to set up an integration with them.
But the cap alerts are really easy to set up. I know that is one of the things that people or prospects do mention and they’re a little bit skeptical, but it is simple. And so you go in here to the left-hand menu and you’re gonna pick cap alerts. And then from here, up at the top, you would click or toggle on to enable them, right? There’s some terms and conditions that you, just you accept. then basically from within your cap alert provider, you’re going to get this information.
So the authentication name gets copy and pasted and then the password gets copy and pasted. And then from here, you can choose your templates. And, you know, again, there is some customization. There’s a little bit less with the cap alerts because, you know, they are intended for urgent or like emergency messaging but you can choose between one of the three templates and then, you know, customize some of that and then the distribution. So you can have those show on all of your displays. You could have it show on some of the displays. There is a lot of flexibility in setting that up. And then also you can choose when that alert will expire.
So, you know, if there’s an ongoing and emergent emergency, it’s not going to drop off until the emergency alert platform, you know, tells it to, but we do have that default expiry as well. And you could set that for, you know, five, 10, however long. Yeah, so it is, it is quite simple to set up. And we do integrate with a lot of the popular emergency alert providers, especially for K-12 schools.
Beau Hamilton (32:42.424)
Cool. Yeah, I like how there’s a separate tab for it too. I, you don’t have to go digging through a separate display tab. It’s just right there, up front and center, and you get everything you need. So you touched on just how easy it is, obviously, to get your messages out there. But what’s the overall learning curve, would you say, for the platform as a whole? In other words, what’s the easiest way to train new users just to get them up to speed with how the platform works?
Jennifer Jennings (32:51.458)
Yeah, exactly.
Jennifer Jennings (33:08.984)
That’s a great question. The biggest feedback we get from customers is how easy Rise Vision is to use and that it’s super easy for non-technical users to get in there and create content and to push that content to their displays. it’s really one of those reasons that people continue to choose Rise Vision is because it’s built for everyone, not just IT or technical people.
But in terms of training, I mean, we do make it super easy to use and intuitive, but we also have, you know, when you sign up with Rise Vision, we have a dedicated customer support team and, you know, they’re gonna help you with their onboarding. And then we also have regular online training sessions. So every week there is a live training session with our support team and they go through all of the basics, everything to get started.
We also have a help center that’s full of articles with videos to get going. And then like I mentioned before, if you still have a question, we have email support and we get back to you within one business hour. So it’s really easy for people to get going because there’s just so many layers to that support beyond it being just a simple platform to use.
Beau Hamilton (34:32.056)
Yeah, the, again, the response of response time of one business hour, I think is gotta be the quickest I think I’ve ever heard a customer feedback team give back to clients. That’s great. Yeah. I think, and like, I bring this up all the time, but I’ve had some experience with, you know, app reviews, just reviewing all the various applications, new applications that come to the, you know, Google or iOS app stores. And I’m always like critiquing the user interface for how usable, how intuitive it is.
This just, I mean, makes me reflect on that because it’s, it’s just seems everything you’ve walked through thus far just seems very straightforward, simple. There’s not too many like confusing, you know, design layouts or menus or anything. Everything just is right there. Everything you need. And then just the fact that like, Hey, if you do get stuck for whatever reason, just email the team and you’ll get back to them pretty quickly.
Jennifer Jennings (35:30.038)
Yeah. And I mean, obviously, like with this account or with the account that I’m showing you, like this is, you know, right, we’re in here all the time. But when you’re a new user, we have like an onboarding workflow. So like when you first sign in, we’re going to guide you how to do the basics and provide, you know, little just little helpful things to guide you around. So you’re not coming into this blind. There are, you know, there is information out there and we do have processes in place to help you succeed and make the most of what’s going on.
Beau Hamilton (36:05.966)
So another concern, just a concern that I just thought of that has pops up when you’re thinking about an organization using these communication methods, especially for a school, maybe it’s like a high school or college where there’s a robust security, IT group of kids who maybe like to tamper with things or test their hacking skills. I’m curious like what your security standpoint is with Rise Vision, what kind of steps are you taking to just bolster your security in general within the application here?
Jennifer Jennings (36:42.304)
Yeah, so I think Rob touched on security a lot when we did our other podcast interview, yeah, the people trying to hack into the displays, it’s so common, we hear it all the time. So security is very important to us and we do have single sign-on. So that lets users sign into Rise Vision using their existing identity provider credentials using your favorite security.
assertion markup language. Is that SAML? Anyways, so this, having single sign-on simplifies user access and management. And we work with Microsoft Entra, Google Workspace and ClassLink. And then you can also set up the SSO for sub-companies. So within your organization, and this is especially prevalent for like school districts or universities, they’ll have like their main company and then they have sub companies or like little branches from within that for like their arts department, for their business department, for engineering, whatever it is. But you can set that up so that even your sub companies have SSO. doesn’t set up automatically. You would need to set it up manually when you join Rise Vision, then you’re able to really keep all of your sub-companies and companies secure.
Beau Hamilton (38:18.392)
Gotcha. OK, well, that’s great that you’re prioritizing security, obviously, because I just see all the potential for things to possibly go wrong here and people to hack into these communication displays. Do you have any… Is that ever much of a problem that comes up or an issue raised? has the SSO been pretty effective at keeping the right messages going to the right screens?
Jennifer Jennings (38:44.406)
Yeah, so SSO is really important and it’s really important for a lot of our users, but you know, we have other again, layers of security in place. So we have our SOC 2, type 2 attestation. And so that’s a really rigorous independent audit that verifies the effectiveness of our IT and our information security. We also, you know, have the option for, you can add as many users as you want, but you, there’s also user roles.
So you can customize, what people are able to access. you know, we have something like we obviously have like our admin or super admin, but then you can have people who are limited to only creating content or only creating content for a certain sub company. So you’re able to delegate that content control and management while still kind of maintaining control over the whole system because they’re not able to go in and like monkey around with your cap alert settings.
So the account hierarchy again makes it super simple. yeah, just the, yeah, I think with the SSO and then kind of that account hierarchy and control, you know, it really does keep the content secure. We also work, or you can have it on, you know, your own personal network. or we have actually quite a few users who share, like a Power BI dashboard or an internal website onto their signage, but it’s shared only on their network. So if you’re not logged into that network, you can’t see that content. So there are different security measures and layers that we have.
Beau Hamilton (40:28.61)
That’s good. Yeah. The more guardrails, the better, you know, and just also at the same time having, you know, not compromising the features of being able to like have one admin control and send out a message to 14 displays, for example, like you, I think you mentioned earlier, and like a school setting. Obviously you want to preserve that feature because that’s really handy and useful. I want to transition to the screen sharing component because I think that is one of the coolest things about the platform.
Essentially just allowing you to turn any display into a wireless presentation hub, again, which would be perfect for a classroom setting, teaching environment. Can you walk us through how the screen sharing actually works and what makes it so intuitive to use?
Jennifer Jennings (41:11.486)
Yeah, for sure. So same thing. Going, you know, we had said that Rise Vision were the all-in-one platform for signage, screen sharing, and cap alerts. So, you know, up here is your digital signage, and then we have the emergency alerts and then screen sharing. So we’ll go in here. And you go into here, we have a couple of different modes. So we have moderator mode and the code connect. So with moderator mode, you’re able to choose which participants are able to present. And you can also like kick people off from presenting. And then we also then we have like our basic or the pin connect mode where you would have your you would have your display and it shows a pin and then you’d have to log into that pin to be able to connect. I can’t demo it as well as I would like to because I don’t have a display here to show you. But basically, yeah, you just go in and you would choose your displays and then you’re able to connect those for the screen sharing. Yeah.
Beau Hamilton (42:26.67)
Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. That’s, I mean, just the conceptual overview of the different users is helpful. I mean, I might not to name drop other software or anything, but just this, this recording software we’re using here has three different modes you can choose from, know, it’s like audience, producer or guest. And you can have the different kinds of settings and features to, to pair with whoever you have running the show or on a guest, like you’re, you’re my guest today. So you’re not going to have a lot of the controls for behind the scenes that I have. But having the moderator mode, the code connect and cross network user settings, also just helps keep things more secure, I imagine, too. So you’re not letting anyone connect. Not everyone has access to certain features, data they want to share, right?
Jennifer Jennings (43:16.99)
Yes, you can like lock down your screen sharing so that only people on a network or like your network are only people who are connected to your network able to share. So that would prevent people from, you know, around the world just being able to connect and take over your screen. You know, the code connect, you have to enter a code that’s the screen code to be able to share. And that really just keeps people connecting, to the correct display and not again taking over another display. And then the moderator mode, again, you can choose who’s participating. You can kick people off if they’re sharing something that you don’t wanna share, all those kind of good things.
But the biggest thing with our screen sharing feature is we wanted to make it really easy to use. So again, it’s not super complicated to get that going once you’re in there. And there’s no adapters, there’s no dongles, there’s no proprietary hardware. So you can share from your tablet, your phone, your laptop to any device that’s already running Rise Vision. So that could be, you know, in a meeting room, that could be the display at the front of the meeting room. It could be your IFP in a classroom. It really just makes it super easy to use.
Beau Hamilton (44:43.66)
Yeah. Can you, yeah, expand on that? Like the, some of the hardware capabilities, you have to allow you to connect to all these displays. Cause I think from there’s like the sustainability aspect, you know, and how screen sharing is takes those old displays we have, we can find pretty easily and like even goodwill or something. And it gives them a new life, essentially. Right. You don’t have to shell out a bunch of money for a fancy new display, but how does that actually work? Like what kind of, you know, software or hardware is required to actually get these screen sharing features working.
Jennifer Jennings (45:16.81)
Yeah, so we have found that a lot of our schools find screen sharing as a great way to give their old displays or old interactive displays new life. So what we’ve found and what we’ve heard is that, you know, schools have 25, maybe they have 25 classrooms and each classroom has an IFP that’s been in there for five or 10 years. Well, those are getting dated.
And teachers aren’t necessarily using all of those features, but they’re still using them. You know, maybe they have their laptop and they have a dongle and an HDMI cable going to their IFP and now they’re sharing from their laptop to that IFP at the front of the classroom. Okay, that’s great, but that teacher is really tethered to the front of the class. They can’t go anywhere because their laptop is, you know, connected to an HDMI. So if you’re already a school that’s using Rise Vision, and you have Rise Vision connected, you know, have an unlimited license and you have those displays connected because you’re sharing morning announcements and, you know, digital signage sharing like non-teaching hours, you can just enable screen sharing on that display and it gives that IFP brand like a new life. You’re using it for, you know, another five years instead of replacing it.
And now the teacher can connect from their laptop and they can be at the back of the classroom or they can have Sally connect and share what she’s learning or what she’s doing and they can have John connect. So it just allows everything to be way more engaging and just reusing that technology that they already have that is still serving a purpose but could be better.
Beau Hamilton (47:09.314)
Yeah, that’s great. think you have hardware offerings, but you don’t necessarily need them if you just have a display of your own, right?
Jennifer Jennings (47:16.6)
Yeah, it kind of depends. I mean, getting into the hardware and stuff, it kind of depends on the situation. You know, if you have a TV that you’re using at the front of the classroom, like you can certainly add screen sharing to it, but you would need a media player to do that. But you know, if you have an IFP and Rise Vision is already downloaded on it, you’re already using it for digital signage and emergency alerts, like putting or adding screen sharing is super easy to do. you know, it just, yeah, it gives it more life and makes it useful.
Beau Hamilton (47:52.098)
Now, so at this point, we’ve obviously covered a lot of the features, the best features that Rise Vision has to offer. And as we come down to the end of the demo, are there any just lesser known features you’d like prospective customers to know about that we haven’t mentioned yet?
Jennifer Jennings (48:09.036)
Yeah, so there’s a couple of things that I didn’t mention. So I’m just gonna go back into one of my presentations and I’ll be able to show you this. So one of the lesser known features that I think is pretty cool is we have a stock library. So you can choose from millions of photos, from videos, and you can add those directly into your presentations. But we also have unlimited storage. So you can add as many files and images and videos as you want to the storage as well. But we’re enabling or we just launched folders for the storage. So that’s very exciting and was something that a lot of people requested.
So now you can go in and you can create your folder and you can really organize all of your content, which is great. And then another feature that I’ll mention is if you’re in a presentation and you have, let’s say you have your presentation, you have a video, you can now upload subtitles for that video.
So that, you know, if you don’t have the sound on, people are still able to engage with that video and see those subtitles, which is, you know, is great for if you don’t have sound, but it’s also great because people, not everybody can, not everybody, you know, people have hearing impairments, people are like, I’m, I need the subtitles on to watch any kind of video, right? Like I can’t hear the video unless there’s Do know what I mean? So..
Beau Hamilton (49:40.354)
Very cool, yeah.
Beau Hamilton (49:55.468)
Yeah, I’ve got to that point too. Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Jennings (49:59.992)
That’s a cool new feature as well is that you’re able to add subtitles.
Beau Hamilton (50:05.294)
Yeah, or if you’re like in a classroom setting, have bilingual students, maybe you’re teaching a foreign language or something, you want to have kind of both languages to help kids learn better. I don’t know, there’s a lot of possibilities for it, but that’s nice new feature. Has that been around for a while or was that kind of a newer addition?
Jennifer Jennings (50:21.986)
But that’s like brand new. I think it’s like a, yeah, I think it was like last week. Yeah, brand new. Yeah.
Beau Hamilton (50:26.127)
Wow, very cool.
Well, I love the unlimited storage aspect and then the kind of stock images. That’s super, super helpful. A of cool things to include here. Yeah, that’s great. Thanks for showing all these different little features and bells and whistles here. Now, again, I want to just bring up if you have any maybe additional success stories to help continue to paint a visual picture of just how organizations are using Rise Vision for their needs. I always just love hearing kind of how the actual tangible use cases. Are there any other ones you can think of that you haven’t shared yet?
Jennifer Jennings (51:08.884)
Yeah, there’s a couple. the one that I had mentioned or that I teased at the beginning was, so TACO, they are a valve manufacturer and they’re using Rise Vision for their employee communication. So really focused on those deskless workers or those workers who aren’t necessarily tied to an email and communicating with them. But they’re using Rise Vision to get people the information they need and then if they are like to share information but then funnel them to their intranet so that they can get open enrollment forms or forms for their benefits and stuff like that.
So it’s a great way to have these messages and then if people need more information, you know, have that QR code that takes them to the intranet or they’re able to get more, the form or whatever it is they need. it can be used, it doesn’t have to necessarily replace that internet, but it’s a great way to supplement that. And again, just be sharing that content you already have. So really great things that Takeo is doing. One of the other, I two other examples. So Crown Cork, they are a plastic manufacturer and they’ve been using Rise Vision to really enhance their workplace safety, but just in general, their workplace culture.
So they use Rise Vision to, they have like their safety champion and they share different safety messages on their digital signage. And then once a month they have their safety meeting and they do like kind of like a little pop quiz and you know, whoever is the most knowledgeable, that’s the safety champion. There’s, you know, they have like this really cool like WWE belt, like the safety champion belt and like there’s a photo that goes up on the display and they get to walk around with the belt and all this kind of great stuff. you know, they’re wrapping that up into while they’re promoting safety, but they’re also really fostering this workplace culture, which is great. And then, you know, the one example that I think is so powerful for schools, especially in the US with everything that’s so crazy going on.
Beau Hamilton (53:07.406)
Nice.
Jennifer Jennings (53:33.1)
De Sida schools in Wisconsin, they use Rise Vision and a cap alert provider and they were able to reduce their time to lock down their campus by 50%. So they can have their entire campus shut down and everybody in a classroom in under 30 seconds. And that’s in combination with their digital signage and that emergency alerts because now when an emergency alert gets pushed out, and again, this doesn’t always, this isn’t, it doesn’t have to be for an active shooter. But in the case of if a student’s having a medical emergency and you don’t need kids wandering the halls, they can push that emergency alert. It goes to all of their displays, all the displays in the hallways, their IFPs in the classroom. I think they have a connection with, they have like fancy clocks as well in their hallways. And that can push that lockdown message.
And yeah, they’ll have their entire campus locked down in under 30 seconds. So yeah, really, yeah, really, really great examples of just how people are using it from education to, you know, manufacturing and all that kind of good stuff.
Beau Hamilton (54:33.41)
Wow. That’s amazing. Yeah. I haven’t heard that use case before. That’s cool.
Beau Hamilton (54:47.97)
Yeah, I mean, there’s just like a lot of the use cases. think of the naturally in the school setting, but hearing about the employee communication aspect and then the safety aspect in an industrial, you know, workplace environment. that’s very, that’s great. That’s a, sure. there’s a million more other little, use cases you can probably come up with as well. So we’ve obviously, so we’ve covered a lot obviously. But I want you, if you could summarize and condense maybe everything we went over today into again, the three big takeaways. What would they be? What would you hope viewers remember from this demo?
Jennifer Jennings (55:25.812)
I hope that if people are gonna, the things that they take away is, you know, we have a library with over 600 customizable and professionally designed templates. There’s something for everything or for every situation. And they’re always, we’re always adding new templates. You know, there’s a huge resource for you there. Rise Vision is super easy to use. You can publish content in less than five clicks. Like we, it’s super easy. I want it to be quick.
We want it to be easy. And our scheduling and automation makes it so that you can have hands-off content management. I don’t want people to think, adding it’s another platform and communication is going to take up a lot of our time. There are so many ways that we can automate it and streamline it and have this really great, super valuable communication going out to people without it being a huge time suck or just another thing that you have to do. It’s easy to use.
Beau Hamilton (56:30.594)
That’s great. Yeah, five clicks or less to get you set up and running and big libraries to use, automation features. That’s awesome. For viewers interested in exploring Rise Visions platform, maybe interested in starting a free trial, where should they go?
Jennifer Jennings (56:47.82)
Definitely head over to the website, www.RiseVision.com and then right up at the top, there’s the start the trial button. You click on that, you get 14 days free. There’s no credit card required. And you can get started in five clicks and have content going out. So.
Beau Hamilton (57:06.85)
Awesome. All right, RiseVision.com. If you’re interested in learning more and checking out for yourself. Jennifer, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for all the insights and just walking us through this platform.
Jennifer Jennings (57:17.644)
Thanks Beau, thanks for having me.
Beau Hamilton (57:19.694)
Thank you everyone for watching the SourceForge Product Demo Showcase. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts and demos. I will talk to you in the next one.