Best Practices for Skykit Beam

To make creating and managing content in Beam easier, keep the following best practices in mind. These guidelines can help you make full use of Beam's tools and capabilities—and save you time in the process.

Use a Meaningful Content Naming Structure

Use a naming structure for your content items that makes sense to you and is easy to sort and search.

Let's say you have a group of content items for your Marketing department display. You want to be able to search for those items quickly and easily, so you might name them "Marketing_[descriptive name]." When you type "marketing" in the Search field of the Content menu, you see all the items with names that begin with "Marketing," conveniently grouped together.

Having a naming structure that works for you can be a huge time saver, especially if you have a large number of content items.

Connect to a Cloud Drive

Connecting to Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive can also be a major time saver. In both drives, you can create a folder structure that allows you to keep your content items organized and accessible. When you upload content into Beam, all you have to do is go to the correct folder.

Storing content in a cloud drive also means that other employees can update content items without needing to have access to the Beam environment. You can then pull or re-upload updated content into Beam from the cloud drive.

Size Images Correctly

To use images to their best advantage, make sure you size them properly so they fill out the panes in your program layout. Refer to Sizing Images for Skykit Beam, Sizing PDF Documents for Skykit Beam, and Sizing Slides for Skykit Beam for recommended dimensions for each program layout, both landscape and portrait.

Similarly, if you're creating a program, make sure to use a layout that's suited to your content. For one thing, not all content types are supported by all program layouts (see Web Feeds: Unsupported Program Layouts and Content Ticker: Unsupported Content Layouts to learn more). But some program layouts will be better suited to your content items than others.

Publish Your Changes

This may seem like a no-brainer, but it's easy to get distracted and forget to publish your changes. Fortunately, Beam shows you when a content item, program, or playlist hasn't been published yet or has unpublished changes. Updated content won't show up on your displays until it's published.

Use Tasks to Make Changes

If you want to change the content on several displays at the same time without having to update each display individually, the Change Media task is an easy way to do so. Using the Change Media task, you can select the new content item, playlist, or program that you want to push to your displays and then select which displays should play the new content. When you're ready for the new content to start playing, simply run the task. See Creating a Change Media Task to learn more.

Take Advantage of Beam's Editing Tools

Skykit Beam includes built-in tools you can use to easily edit PDF documents or slideshows.

Re-Uploading PDF, PowerPoint, and Keynote Documents

If you need to update a PDF, PowerPoint, or Keynote file but want to retain the settings you've already configured for it, you can edit the document and then re-upload it from the content manager window. Simply save your updated document to your local folder or shared drive, then select the appropriate upload button in the content manager window. Select Publish to finish the job.

If the document is currently playing on any displays, the changes will appear automatically.

See Managing PDF Documents in Skykit Beam and Managing a Slideshow in Skykit Beam for more information.

Editing and Updating Google Slideshows

If you need to edit a Google slideshow, you can open an editable version of the file right from the Slides content manager window and then update it from the source when you're done. See Editing an Existing Google Slideshow to learn more.

You can also use Auto-Publish to tell Skykit to automatically sync and publish your Google slideshow content overnight.