Conference Room Display

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone had worked on this already, or if some folks would like to team up to help create this...

The concept is to have a small LCD panel outside each conference room door with a display that has the conference room name at the top. In the middle of the screen it would either have the name of the scheduled meeting and its scheduled start and end times, then in the bottom right, it would list the "next meeting" title and start/end times.

The key, of course, is to have this information auto-fed from Zimbra.

Ideas? Thoughts?

--Eriks

There are products out there that do this (Room Wizard by Steelcase). I'm not sure if these devices work with Zimbra specifically or not. If you are looking to make your own using a simple LCD monitor and a web page, it wouldn't be too difficult to get room information from the Zimbra API.

I've seen several solutions like the Steelcase one, but the costs are just too high. I can buy a refurbished PC and monitor for under $85 per conference room, so the $1700+ pricetag on solutions like Steelcase's just are practical.

I'm an advocate of open source software specifically because it offers a better value proposition, etc., etc.

So, is there someone in this forum who would like to collaborate to help build an open source solution to this? I think it would be a great boon to the Zimbra community as well--since it would be Zimbra specific, and not built for Mediocresoft.

Hmm, take a cheap tablet pc and write a little program that queries the Zimbra
via SOAP API or maybe even caldav and displays the information for that room.

How many of those device to you require ?

HP Touchpad would have been great for this at the $99 price-point if you'd managed to snag one while they still had them. Modern android devices can speak CalDAV beautifully to Zimbra for a couple dollars add-on sync connector. I'd actually been toying with this at home as something to hang on the wall in my kitchen just with the family calendar on it, but haven't been able to justify the price tag for home use yet. :) "aCalendar" is a nice full-screen calendar display that'll show the current day or current week. The trick is getting the screen to not go to sleep (and of course you'd have to leave it plugged in).