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Metro Washington Airports Authority wanted to bring their in-airport information kiosks at Dulles and Reagan National Airports up to date with the latest technologies. They wanted the kiosks to be attractive, provide the information that travelers want quickly and effectively, and above all be stable and up-to-date. However, the sensitive environments of these kiosks prohibited a conventional internet kiosk solution, as the bandwidth usage and access rights of the kiosks needed to be very tightly managed. The Magazine Group (publishers of Washington Flyer Magazine) and Redmon Group teamed up to provide an effective and innovative solution to kiosk-level information distribution.
In order to effectively manage updates, kiosk status and uptime, reporting, and to do so with limited bandwidth, Redmon utilized an in-house-designed server-based multi-tier distribution and management system. Using a friendly and powerful Web-based content management system, participants (such as hotels and car rental agencies) can make adjustments to their content and preview the results; content managers can review, approve, and publish updates; and system administrators can confirm the updates have been sent to the kiosks and view the status of the update on all stations.
To preserve available bandwidth, specific individual kiosks are identified as master stations, and they perform the task of downloading the updated content. The other kiosks then gather the update from the designated master. To make sure the system does not fail when a master is unavailable, the system dynamically designates the "master" kiosks on the fly.
The entire content structure of the kiosk systems is designed to be as dynamic as possible. All screens are template-driven, but new templates can be designed
