An office lobby or team noticeboard screen is a TV that shows the guest wifi with a code to join it, the time in your other offices, the week's calendar and the notices people would otherwise miss. Put a board on the screen you already have, and it changes itself through the day without anybody opening a laptop.
A reception, a studio kitchen, the wall by the elevator. These rooms usually already have a screen on them showing nothing, or a slideshow somebody made years ago. A board is a cheaper answer than digital signage software and a more useful one than a poster.
Guest wifi, without the ritual
Every visitor asks, and somebody at a desk answers. Put the guest network on the board with its QR code and the question stops being asked — a visitor scans it from the sofa while they wait. When the guest password rotates, you change it in one place and the screen follows within a minute.
Clocks that match your colleagues
One clock holds up to six cities. Find each one by name and the clock looks up its time zone, then shows its time beside how far ahead or behind yours it is, with a note when it is already tomorrow there, so the room knows at a glance whether Lagos is still at their desks. Rather have hands than digits? The same clock can show every city as a face. It is a small thing that quietly saves a lot of "is it too late to call?".
A screen turned on its side
Plenty of lobby screens and spare monitors are mounted in portrait, and a layout built for a widescreen TV looks wrong stretched down one. So a board has a shape.
Pick the shape when you make the board and it starts with a layout built for it — a tall board stacks, with the things people want first at the top. You can change an existing board's shape too; the widgets are carried across and rearranged to fit, nothing is deleted, and you can tidy up afterward.
A noticeboard for the team
For a wall the team walks past every day, by the kitchen or the elevator, pick "Office noticeboard" when you make the board. Your logo, the time, the weather and a code for the link people keep asking for (the room booking page, say) run across the top, and underneath sit the week's calendar, your notices and the headlines. The calendar follows the private link your calendar app already gives you, Google Calendar's secret address or a published Outlook or iCloud calendar, so there is no account to connect, and the headlines come from a news or blog feed you choose. On a screen turned on its side the calendar sits under the logo and the clock, and the headlines run along the bottom. The calendar and the headlines are part of Pro. On the free plan the board starts with a schedule you type in and a second notice in their places, which still makes a good noticeboard.
Three more widgets were made for a room like this:
- Slides. A Google Slides deck published to the web, or a Canva design, across a tile. The deck the team already keeps plays on the wall by itself, and an edit shows up the same day.
- Celebrations. Birthdays, work anniversaries and new starters, today's or this week's, from one list you type once. A name shows as a first name and an initial, and a birthday never needs the year.
- Numbers. Up to four big numbers the team watches, each with a label and a note. Type them in, or point each one at a cell of a Google Sheet so it changes when the sheet does.
Slides and Celebrations, and numbers read from a sheet, are part of Pro and the Event Pass; typed numbers are on the free plan.
Pages that change with the day
A board can carry rules. The lunch menu only between eleven and two. A different look for the week of an event. The video loop off after six so the room is calm in the evening. Each rule says when it applies and what it changes, and the board follows them without anyone opening a laptop.
On Pro and the Event Pass a board holds up to four pages that take turns on the same TV, each for as long as you say: the noticeboard, then the week's numbers, then the slides. A whole page can come and go by rule, so a Lunch page with the café's menu shows on weekdays from half past eleven and leaves at two, with nothing to remember. A tile you want everywhere, the clock or the guest wifi, is pinned to every page once and stays exactly where it is while the pages turn around it.
Rules are also how you handle a seasonal look — a theme that arrives in December and leaves in January by itself, rather than a date hardcoded into the board that somebody has to remember to undo.
When everyone needs to know now
"Fire drill at three." "The elevator is out, use the stairs by reception." Put up an alert from your phone and it runs across the bottom of the board, or over the whole of it, for 15 minutes, an hour or until you take it down. Somebody who runs several boards can send one alert to every screen at once, and take it off again in one tap.
Who can change it
The person who owns the account is not usually the person who updates the notice. Invite people and give them exactly what they need: run everything, edit one board and nothing else, or only look. Read-only viewers are free and never count toward your seats, so a whole team can watch a board without anyone paying more.
Pro is $9 a month with 2 live boards and 3 seats included, then $2 per extra board and $2 per extra seat, per month.
Left on all day
The board drifts a fraction of a percent every few minutes so nothing burns into a panel that shows the same layout for a year. Set the hours it runs and it goes black out of them, which on an OLED is genuinely off. And if a widget fails — the weather service having a bad morning, say — that one tile shows its last good answer or a quiet placeholder, and the rest of the board carries on. A screen in a lobby should never be a browser error.
A board worth copying
For the wall by the front desk, pick "Reception" when you make the board. In portrait: your logo at the top, the guest wifi and its code under it where it is read standing up, one clock with the time in each of your offices, and an announcement along the bottom. On a wide TV the logo sits above the clock at the left, the wifi takes the rest of the top, and the announcement runs the whole width underneath. That is four tiles. Add your other offices to the clock and write the announcement, and it is done.
Two more layouts in the same picker are for rooms like these. "Waiting room" is for a room people sit in: a calm video to rest their eyes on, your logo, a few notices, the time and the weather, and a code to check in with rather than lining up at the desk (more on the waiting room). "Menu board" is for a counter: your menu across half the screen, big enough to read from the door, and your logo, the customer wifi and a code for your website sharing the rest (more on the menu board).
The layouts guide draws every starting point for both shapes, and the setup guide covers pairing the screen and fitting it to the edges.