Implementing request management in RT: Quest for the shopping cart, part 1

We returned to Best Practical’s Request Tracker (RT) as our service management tool, last year, with a remit to provide 3 processes which, when combined, would give us a workable service management system and allow our processes to expand and mature:

  • Incident Management – raise a ticket to handle an issue and have it dealt with, which is pretty much RT OOTB.
  • Change Management – controlling and standardising changes in the organisation (As recently blogged about by Jon here).
  • Request Management.

I’m defining Request Management in the following manner:

A Request is a repeatable, standardised method for acquiring something, that produces information in a known structured format that can be acted upon and which can have restricted access.

With this definition in mind, and assuming that different requests will have differing requirements (in terms of data captured and who can make the request) we will need to look for something that:

  • For requestors, is easy to find, accessible and can glean the information required from them without causing confusion.
  • For the teams acting on these requests, the data is complete and presented in the team queue within RT in a standard manner.
  • The ability to have some requests available inside RT and some outside of the system, yet still going into the system.

This post details the Loughborough IT Services Request methodology, provides a broad overview of how we went about implementing this in RT, shows off RT’s flexibility and looks at the directions we may be heading in the future

Implementing Requests at Loughborough

Our initial requirements were to produce a method to request two things:

  • Virtual Servers – built on the VMWare virtualisation platform, which can run a number of different operating systems and services. Some of these requests may require different hardware setups from the norm (more RAM, CPUs, storage etc), some could be windows servers which may, or may not then require SQL server or IIS Server or they could be Linux servers with IT Services standard build or built from a users ISO. Some may be for research by an individual, some may run university wide services. All of these options would need to be catered for. This request would go to our Infrastructure team queue.
  • TLS/SSL certificates, which is simply a case of getting a certificate signing request (CSR) and, if the domain name the certificate is for is not local to Loughborough University (i.e. not a lboro.ac.uk domain), a University charge code. This request would go to our Security team queue.

Both of these requests needed to be limited to being available to members of the RT Group “IT Services”

These two initial requests are polar opposites in the information they need, the TLS request requires, at most, three pieces of information whereas the Virtual Server request requires much more and has many bits of information that are dependent on other bits.

In order to collect this information we will need to modify the Create.html page where tickets are initially produced. We would normally do this via RT’s built in Custom Fields. However as all of the requests we will need to cater for are unique (and hence would need some of their own Custom Fields, which would lead to an ever expanding custom field list and tickets that are very hard to read) and have to go to specific queues and potentially move around other queues, Custom Fields would become unwieldy as they would have to exist for all tickets in a team queue. Should the ticket ever need to be moved to another queue, the custom field data could be obscured, unless that queue also has that Custom Field. We therefore decided a number of things

  1. We would create our own bespoke web forms inside RT based on Create.html
  2. We would use RT’s Menu system and RT’s Group system to restrict who can access the forms
  3. All data gathered by these forms would be processed and collated as the initial ticket content

TLS/SSL Requests

Starting with the simpler of the two forms, we created a copy of Create.html in [path/to/RT]/RT4/local/html/Ticket/ called CreateSSLRequest.html.

Figure 1: The TLS/SSL certificate request form.

The TLS/SSL request form is very simple. The only requirements we have are the CSR file which can be attached, as you would for a standard RT ticket and a charge code if you are not requesting the certificate for server with the university domain name. Figure 2 below shows how the form reacts if you change the “Yes” to a “No”. This is controlled by a simple piece of jQuery and CSS, slipped into the new CreateSSLRequest.html page and called as an onChange event.

function showChargeCode () {
  if(jQuery('select[name=\'Domain\']').val() == 'Yes') {
     jQuery('tr.chargeCode').css('display', 'none');
  } else {
     jQuery('tr.chargeCode').css('display', 'table-row');
  }
}
Figure 2: The form reacts to ask for additional information for this request.

Once the form is complete it can be submitted, where it is validated via javascript. This is fired from an onSubmit event (which submits to itself) collects the data and performs some simple tests to check there is something there. At this point you can add in as much validation as you need.

var domain = jQuery('select[name=\'Domain\']').val();
var chargeCode = jQuery('input[name=\'chargeCode\']').val();

if(domain == 'No' && chargeCode == '') {
alert("You must supply a charge code when acquiring a certificate for " +
"a non lboro.ac.uk domain");

return false;
}

Assuming all is well, the form can have all of its data bundled up and submitted as the RT ticket content, like this:

if(everythingIsOK) {
jQuery('input[name=\'Content\']').val('Some text etc etc ' + domain + chargeCode );

return true;
}

This submits the information with the attached CSR as a standard RT ticket into our Security Queue, where it can be worked on as normal.

The above TLS/SSL certificate request form is very simplistic, but should show how forms can be built inside RT without using the Custom Fields.

Virtual Server Request Form

The Virtual Server Request form is a different beast entirely, although as with the TLS/SSL form it starts off with a simple question, in order to check the requestor has performed the due diligence necessary before the request. In this case the first question is along the lines of “Do you have a way to support this server” (see Figure 3)

Figure 3: The initial view of the Virtual Server Request Form. As we are building standard html/jquery forms, we can add lots of things. This one has a tool tip on the element, identified by the orange circle with the “i” inside.

By selecting “Yes”, as with the previous form, new elements are now exposed to the requestor (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: The extended form, offering input and select boxes to control information.

The extended form contains various elements along with tool tips to guide the user. The operating system box makes use of RT’s Groups to decide what server options you can see. This is controlled by a mixture of Perl and html.

% my $groups = RT::Groups->new($session{'CurrentUser'});
% $groups->WithCurrentUser();
% $groups->LimitToUserDefinedGroups();
% while (my $group = $groups->Next()) {
%   if($group->Name eq 'Group A') {
%     $groupA = 1;
%   } elsif($group->Name eq 'Group B') {
%     $groupB = 1;
%   }
% }
%
% if($groupA) {
<option>Networks CentOS 7 template (Managed by requestor)</option>
% }

Once a server option is selected, as with the previous form, additional fields can be exposed to gather more specific data.

Figure 6: By requesting Windows Server 2016, the requestor is now presented with options for IIS and SQL Server.

This ability to hide and show fields in the form is controlled in the same way as the simpler TLS/SSL form and the data gathered is validated, dependencies are checked and the information is collated in the same way and sent to RT as a ticket. The content of the Virtual Server Request form arrives in RT and appears as the first content entry in a structured format. This method can be expanded to forms that don’t exist within RT and they can collate the information into an initial email, which can be posted into the system (of course these wont have the ability to use extra data like RT Groups). The initial information for a Virtual Server ends up in RT like the below:

VM Server Request

Has support contract: Yes
Licencing understood: Yes
Business case: Internal
Business case justification: I really really need it
Proposed server name: Foo
Replaces existing server?: Yes
Name of existing server being replaced: Bar
Server description: FooBar Application Server
Development or Production?: Production
Application services supported: FooBar reporting
Server manager username: dave
Other server contacts: jon,katy
Operating System: Windows Server 2016 (IT Services managed)
IIS Required: No

A future enhancement to this form, will be to use a Custom Field to hold the same data in the ticket in JSON format. This will allow us to access the data in a usable structure via RT’s REST APIs, to aid in the automation of server builds.

Accessing the Request forms

Forms setup in the above manner and placed where they are, are accessible to anyone who is a privileged user in RT. RT is built in such a way that menu options are available to privileged or unprivileged users or both. This is helpful to us as we can control access to which type of user has access to which sort of request. However, we wanted to go a stage further and restrict access to some of the forms, dependent on RT Groups.

We have many groups of users on RT that are privileged (IT Services folk, Printing folk, Financial Services folk etc etc). Only members of the IT Services Group should be able to see the two requests we have created, as we want to make sure we have continuity of support for any server we deploy. For this we can use exactly the same trick that we used on the Virtual Server Request Form to offer restricted access to different server options and present requests on a Group basis.

Two further requirements were the option to categorise our Requests and present them in a way that was easy to find and to display them more graphically, rather than in a nested menu structure. To this end, our scaling up plan will combine the usual drop down menus with RT, breaking requests into the various services they are for (e.g. IT Services requests, Printing requests, Library requests etc) and once this level is chosen, the  various requests that can be accessed, are displayed in a tabular format, as seen in Figure 7. 

Figure 7: Various request choices displayed within RT. Icon by Dryicons

Hang on, didn’t you say something about shopping carts??

Did I? Oh yes. If we break down the requirements of a shopping cart (and here I’m simplifying it to just be those items a user can request as hardware), what do we have?

  1. An ability to create forms that can capture the requests users will make – hopefully this blog has demonstrated this to some degree.
  2. An ability to know what we can request – We’ll be looking at this in the Summer when we attempt to integrate our Snipe-IT asset management system with RT. This will give us access to the complete range of hardware options a user could request
  3. A way to store my requests as a draft before I decide to purchase. Jon’s previous blog post about change, showed a change lifecycle with a draft status that works in this manner. Hypothetically we can create a queue with a lifecycle that only has the statuses of “draft”, “cancel”, and “purchase”, setup in such a way that only the owner can see their tickets in this queue. Any change of status away from draft kicks off actions that either move the ticket to a different queue that begins the purchasing process, or wipes it out.
  4. A way to add and take away options whilst in draft – this will require some thought and no doubt a bit of Perl/jQuery hackery, but the TicketSQL query builder has similar functionality in the way it adds and removes parts of the SQL query.
  5. Running totals – again this would depend on how well you’re managing the data for things that can be requested, but if its available it shouldn’t be too much of an issue to add in

A lot of these still need thought, but none would appear implausible and it’s the direction we’ll be heading over the next few months, as we begin to look at adding assets to our RT and what we can do by combining them with requests.

Implementing Change Management in RT

We moved (back) to using the Best Practical Request Tracker (aka ‘RT’) for managing our service desk incident tickets last year. RT is a great open source ticketing system that Best Practical make available for free if you want to support and extend it yourself, or they’ll happily sell you good value support contracts and hosting packages if you’d like them to manage the technical details. Being a bunch of little Perl code monkeys in the MALS team, we went for the “host and support it ourselves” option, especially as one of our number had run RT before so was able to get us up to speed fast.

Once incident ticketing was working successfully, interest within our department turned to using RT to help manage the change request process we have. The previous commercial service desk systems offered some support for change management but it was… erm… “less than friendly” might be a polite way of putting it. It was actively putting people off from submitting change requests. We needed something that IT staff could understand easily, yet would be able to handle our rather complex change workflow.

RT 4.4 comes with an Approvals system built in. This lets you have tickets in queues enter states that need one or more levels of management to approve them. RT also supports custom defined “life cycles” for queues. This means that the states that tickets can have, the transitions between those states and the rights that users and groups have to make those transitions are all capable of being customised, and different queues in the system can have different ticket status life cycles. This is quite flexible and configurable and is often enough for many sites, but from a bit of a play we knew we’d be doing some local modifications to support the complexity of our change process workflow.

This post details the Loughborough IT Services change workflow and provides a broad overview of how we went about implementing this in RT.

The Loughborough Change Workflow

The Figure 1 below shows the workflow we have for change management here at Loughborough. This is the basis of the change life cycle in RT.

Figure 1: Loughborough University IT Services change management workflow

When a new change is created it has a status of draft. It stays in draft until it is either marked as deleted, or submitted for approval. Our changes come in three types: “pre-approved”, “normal” and “emergency” and part of the change request drafting process includes selecting the type (which we keep in one of several custom fields described later). For a “pre-approved” changes (typically changes that happen regularly, have low impact elsewhere and have been well tested), the change request workflow is simple and automated. As soon as the ticket with the request changes state to submitted a scrip changes the status to open so that it can be worked on.

For a “normal” change, we have a two level approval process. Firstly the manager of the team that the person submitting the change is in has to check that the team has sufficient resources and availability to make the change. They have three options open to them. Firstly they can approve the request, in which case the change request ticket is moved to the next phase of change management (see below). If the line manager feels the request is inappropriate, they can turn it down, which moves the change request ticket status to rejected. This is a dead end state – tickets can not be brought back from this and if it is later decided that the change is needed, a new change request will need to be submitted.

Now approving and rejecting are normal RT Approvals options. Where things get interesting is that we have a third option for manager approval: requesting some reworking. This effectively says that the manager thinks the change request is worthwhile, but some aspect of the request needs redrafting before it can be approved. When the manager does this, the change request ticket status is changed to rework_requested and it is passed back to the requestor/owner to make edits on. When this is done, they can alter the change request ticket status to submitted again, and the approval process is restarted. It is possible to go round this loop several times if needs be.

This requires some local modification to /opt/rt4/local/html/Approvals/index.html which cancels the pending approval ticket(s) and then resets the change request ticket’s status to rework_requested. In this file we also take any comments from the manager that go into the approval ticket and copy them into the change request ticket that it is linked to, so that management comments are visible directly to the change requestor/owner. There are also scrips in place that email out these comments from approvers, so that requestors/owners are aware of any conditions or instructions being provided.

Once the line manager has approved a change request ticket, it is moved to our Change Advisory Board (CAB) queue where the Change Manager can review it. This might involve them handling the change request decision themselves, or scheduling it on the weekly CAB meeting agenda for more in depth debate and decision making. As with the line manager, the Change Manager can opt to approve, reject or request rework on the change request, with approval meaning that the change request ticket status changes to open so that it can be worked on. If they request reworking, the change request ticket status is changed to rework_requested and it goes back to the start of this procedure, so once re-submitted it will go to the line manager for a new approval. The reasoning here is that the Change Manager may know that it clashes with other changes, business events, etc, but they don’t necessarily know what resourcing the line manager has in the team at any point in time, so the line manager has to OK the altered change request again.

The last type of change request is the “emergency” change. This are things that need to be done quickly, so there isn’t time to get line manager and CAB/Change Manager approval. An “emergency” change looks like a “normal” change but it goes straight to our Senior Leadership Team’s group for an approval. Typically this is done outside of the system via face to face meetings, texts or phone calls, and the change management system is just recording that the decision has been made, so although the SLT group can theoretically reject or ask for reworking, some “emergency” changes will have already happened (or at least be underway) by the time the change request ticket is submitted.

No matter which of the three change request types are chosen, once the change request ticket has the open status it can be worked on. We have a scrip on the CAB queue that detects the status change and emails the requestor/owner of the change request ticket to let them know this. Work might not take place immediately, as all changes have a “change window” which is recorded in the RT Starts and Due times. Some large, multipart change requests may also be moved to the status of stalled whilst they wait for other things to happen (such as other inter-related changes taking place, or feedback from users on the result of the change). In fact the change request ticket status is free to bounce back and forth between open and stalled as required. The people working on the change can also interact with the ticket as normal at this point, adding comments, etc.

The last phase of any change is its completion. We have four statuses that a change request ticket can take at this point. Firstly it could be closed_complete which means that the change has been successfully made and everything worked. If some bits of the change didn’t work out, but other parts did and a partial result is deemed acceptable, the status can be set to closed_incomplete. If things went seriously wrong and the change had to be rolled back to its previous position and then abandoned, the status is set to closed_rolled_back. Lastly some change requests are obsoleted by other events before they can be undertaken, so these can be abandoned by setting the status of the change request ticket to cancelled.

Change queues and supporting groups

In our department we have a large number of teams, each with a team manager or leader. Many of these teams may be submitting changes, so we made a new change related queue for each team, using the change life cycle described above. The change request tickets only live in these queues whilst being drafted, reworked or awaiting line manager approval. Once a line manager has approved a “normal” change, it is moved by a scrip to the CAB queue for change manager approval. “Pre-approved” and “emergency” change request tickets are immediately moved to the CAB queue once they change status to submitted.

The team change queues are relatively private – only team members and the Change Manager can see the details in them whilst drafting. However once a change request ticket is moved to the CAB queue it is more widely visible to all staff in the department. This lets “more eyes” look at the changes being requested and worked upon, which is helpful in pointing out issues and avoiding clashes.

The team queues usually have at least two groups associated with them (some have more!) which are the team members and their line manager(s). The scrip attached to all the team change queues that watches for change request ticket status changes knows to look for a particular management group based on the change queue that the ticket was created in. This group is used to generate the first line approvals.

We also have groups for our Senior Leadership Team, to whom the Emergency change requests are sent for approval, and the Change Manager, so that we can cover change approval processes during holidays, etc.

Change request user interface

To make the process easier for staff to submit change requests, we produced a set of custom user interfaces and a new menu in RT (see Figure 2). The menu provides staff with links to a simple interface to draft/revise change requests before submission and also see what change requests they have in various stages of drafting, approval, revision and active at the moment. It also has links to another web site that hosts the documentation for both the change request process and the “quick guide” for handling changes in our RT setup.

Figure 2: the change request menu and “My Changes” page

The change drafting/revision user interface helps the user fill in all the custom fields that are required for the particular type of change they are creating. Technically these change requests are just RT tickets, so they are still free to use the existing RT ticket creation/editing tools even at this stage, but the custom user interface makes it clearer that certain fields are required for certain change types. This results in less to-and-fro movement of change requests that are not completed satisfactorily for approvals by line or change management.

The “normal” and “emergency” change request types look very similar (Figure 3), as they require the same basic information and just differ in the approval flows. They require a change subject (which is the RT ticket subject) and a change window start/end date/time (which becomes the RT ticket’s Starts and Due dates). Whilst drafting the rest of the fields are optional, but before submission the custom fields for risk level, change description, risk description, user impact, communications plan, change plan, change testing, backout plan and resource plan must be filled in. Optionally the submitted change can also have attachments added and/or links made to other tickets in our system (including other change requests, which means that larger programmes of work can have overarching change requests for the whole programme across teams, with individual change requests for particular aspects, all linked together).

Figure 3: The “normal” change request drafting user interface. The “emergency” change request user interface is identical to this.

The “pre-approved” change user interface looks slightly simpler (Figure 4). It still requires a change subject, start and end dates and a change plan, but the rest of the custom fields detailed above are placed by a drop down selecting an article that details the required process. These articles are normal RT articles in a separate category that the Change Manager can create and edit when “pre-approved” change processes are decided upon or revised.

Figure 4: The Pre-Approved change request user interface.

Auto-reminders for change due dates

Once a change request is approved, a scrip automatically sets a reminder up for the change owner based on the due date for the change window in the request. This not only reminds people of changes they need to work on soon (as some changes are approved some weeks or months in advance) but also reminds them to close the change request appropriately once the work as been done.

When a change is completed or cancelled, we have a scrip that also removes any pending reminders automatically. This stops people being reminded about tickets that have been completed and closed.

Linking to an Office 365 change calendar

We had a pre-existing Microsoft Office 365 shared calendar which was intended to record change requests, so that people could easily see visually how they related to each other and other work, meetings, etc they were involved with. This was not being utilised before we moved the change requests to RT, and the Change Manager asked if we could get RT to create and manage the events in this calendar automatically.

To do this, we made a new custom action called RT::Action::ChangeCalendar and an extension called RT::Extension::Office365::Calendars. The custom action just makes it easier to create scrips that use this action when change request tickets are updated. It makes use of the extension to do the actual work, which in turns uses the Microsoft GraphAPI to talk to the Office 365 system.

The RT::Extension::Office365::Calendars extension offers the following methods:

  • CreateEventForTicket – creates a new Office 365 calendar for an event
  • UpdateEventForTicket – updates an existing Office 365 calendar event for a given ticket
  • DeleteEvent – remove an event from the Office 65 calendar
  • FindEvents – get a list of events in an Office 365 calendar
  • CalendarExists – check if a named Office 365 calendar exists for a given Office 365 user Id
  • FindUserId – find the Office 365 User Id for a given user principle name.
  • GetAccessToken – gets the GraphAPI access token to use the API.

The Office 365 tenant UUID, client Id and client secret used to gain access to the GraphAPI are held in our RT_SiteConfig setup so they are easy to alter without adjusting the code. This separation between action and extension also means we can reuse the extension for other Office 365 calendar access in the future (for example putting RT reminders into an individual’s default calendar).

The RT::Action::ChangeCalendar and associated scrips do allow change requests that are being drafted/reworked/in the approval process to be shown in Office 365 as “tentative” events, whilst approved change requests are shown as “busy” status. This gives staff a quick way to check if other people are working on changes that might impinge on their own work or planned changes.

Change reporting

The Change Manager and the Senior Leadership Team were keen on having some reporting to show how well the new RT based change system was working. Luckily RT’s existing SearchBuilder functionality makes most of this reporting quite easy to set up. To start with we set up a dashboard called “Change Reporting” to which we attached graphs based on searches. These included total changes per month, break down of changes types by month (to allow seasonal trends to be spotted), the change closure statuses and currently active change requests broken down by requestor. See Figure 5 for an example of part of this dashboard. These may be expanded upon over time, but these initial reports give the department’s management an nice “heads up” on how the change request process is being utilised.

Figure 5: Change reporting graphs

Timetables

Here at Middleware Towers, we were asked to look into providing students with access to their timetable, in a variety of methods. We have already blogged about inputting the data into google calendars, but for a variety of other applications we wanted a method that was lightweight and portable. We wanted to avoid being too heavily tied into the University’s systems, so we could give the methodology away without having to worry about bespoke parts.

JSON

Readers of our blog (you must be out there somewhere) will know we like JSON, we like it a lot, here’s why:

(JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight format based on the ECMA-262 standard. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate and uses conventions that programmers using the “C” family of languages will be comfortable with. These properties combined with its universal data structures. make it an ideal data-interchange language.

Taking the module calendars we are already creating for our students google calendars, it was relatively trivial to also create JSON files of the same data (one per module, created by a script, controlled via Cron). These files would be in the following format:

[
   {
      "ROOMID_STR" : Harry Palmer 101,
      "MODULEID_STR" : "ABC001",
      "MODULENAME_STR" : "Advanced Converter Cars",
      "SLOTID" : "721",
      "STARTTIME" : "11:00",
      "ENDTIME" : "13:00",
      "LECTURER_STR" : "Professor Pat Pending",
      "DATECHANGED" : "201402140944",
      "MAPDATE" : "20-MAR-15"
   }
]

A further file per module would also be created, which would list those students registered on it. It takes the following format:

   {
      "j.bloggs@student." : [
      "ABC001",
      "ABC001 (B)"
   ]
}

The (B) indicates a cohort of the module, this is common practice if the module membership is large, it splits the students into smaller groups for such things as tutorials. We wanted our timetables to be fully personalised, so we also created JSON files for any cohorts a module may have.

Now we had the data in a format we could access and manipulate, we needed to find something which could present it to our students in a manner they were familiar with.

Fullcalendar

Fullcalendar is a jQuery plugin from MIT (who seem to produce an almost unending supply of these sorts of thing), It provides a well documented, AJAX based google calendar like environment. Its API is rich and it is easy to personalise the output. Some simple jQuery settings will allow you to control the default view and the type and position of controls and information:

header: {
        left: 'prev,next today',
	center: 'title',
	right: 'month,agendaWeek,agendaDay'
	},
editable: false,
firstDay: '1',
defaultView: 'agendaWeek',

This places the “<”, “>” and “today” buttons on the left, the month week and day button on the right and the title in the middle. It also makes it read only, sets the first day to monday and by default shows a week view (see fig 1)

fullcalendar
fig 1: Fullcalendar configured as above.

Provide the plugin with correctly formatted JSON, as below and you will get google calendar like output as seen in fig 2.

[
   {
      "title":"ABC001 Advanced Converter Cars with Prof Pat Pending in Harry Palmer 101",
      "end":"2015-03-20 13:00:00",
      "start":"2015-03-20 11:00:00”
   }
]

event

fig 2: Event output from JSON in Fullcalendar

Keen eyed readers will notice that the JSON required by Fullcalendar, doesn’t match the JSON we have in our module files. This would require some, on the fly, programatic manipulation via Perl (the one true language), to stitch together the lecturer, room, id and module name to form the “title” element. The datetime elements are formatted using perl’s localtime, split and join functions.

Putting it all together gives us a students personalised timetable in a portable format, that could be used for any of our applications (VLE, portal, student support systems etc) without any bespoke tie in to other systems.

A special thanks go to our IT support assistants (both past and present), for being willing guinea pigs and especially to Tom for remaining positive and optimistic, whilst we were destroying his google calendar setup on an almost daily basis.

Digital Signage

Seminar Room 1As part of the recent refurbishment of the University Library, six digital signs were developed and installed to display room/resource bookings and the availability of computers in computer labs.  The underlying technologies behind these signs are Raspberry Pi’s running Screenly OSE, an open source distribution.  The content displayed is a HTML5 webpage that regularly updates its content with data retrieved from the Library’s room booking API’s and University labs usage API’s.

Cost comparison of Raspberry Pi and other units for driving digital signs

Cost comparison of Raspberry Pi and other units for driving digital signs

Raspberry Pi’s provide a significant cost saving when compared to traditional digital signage systems.  The initial cost of the hardware (approximately £50) is an obvious benefit, with other digital signage computers costing between £200 and £500.  There is a supplementary ongoing saving due to the power requirements of a Raspberry Pi being far lower than traditional units.  In fact a potential saving of over £70 per unit per year is shown when compared to the iBase SI-08 digital signage system.  Taking this a step further we can compare the units based upon their ongoing impact on the environment, where the Raspberry Pi’s low energy requirements again shows it produces far less KgCO2e (kg carbon dioxide equivalent) than the other units it was compared against.

Approx Cost Watts Kwh/year Ongoing Cost per unit per year (15p/Kwh) KgCO2e per year
Raspberry Pi £50 5 43.8 £6.57 19.51
Acer Aspire Revo £300 29 254.04 £38.11 113.17
SI-08 (Digital Signage System) £400 60 525.6 £78.84 234.14

Scaling the solution

While the initial digital signs were a big success there were still a number of issues that needed to be tackled before the technology could be adopted on a larger scale.  The key areas that needed to be tackled were:

  • Ease of installation and configuration of new units – Ideally the units should simply need plugging in to their screens, network and power and then be available.
  • Devolved administration – It would be essential that individuals can administer their own units and not those owned by others.
  • Ease of administration of each unit – Due to a lack of security options on the open source version of Screenly, the original units were secured by requiring an administrator to use ssh to connect to the unit before they could access the administration web interface.

To meet these requirements a new SD card image was created (based on the open source Screenly image).  This image was enhanced to communicate with a new back-end system, that was developed, to manage the administration of the units.  To avoid having to manually configure the network settings on each unit they use DHCP to pick up local network settings and a valid IP Address.  Every time a unit is issued with a new IP Address, or renews one it has already been issued with, it checks in with the back-end system.

pcAvailability

Each time it checks it in it passes the back-end system its current IP address and its MAC address.  If the system hasn’t seen the MAC address before it creates a new unit record and populates it with the units details, if a record already exists for the unit then it’s updated with the new information.

When system administrators access the back-end system they are presented with list of any units that haven’t been assigned to a group.  They can then assign the unit a name and a group.  They can also add users to groups and create new groups if required.

Users can be added as either a standard user or a group administrator.  Currently the only difference between the two is that a group administrator can add new users to their group and remove existing users from their groups.  Each user in a group can access the administration interface of any unit assigned to that group.

In the unit’s administration interface users can add and order a number of assets to be displayed.  Each asset has a name, a type (either image, webpage or video), times and dates that it is valid between and a duration of how long the asset should be displayed for.  The ordering that active assets are displayed in can be adjusted by dragging an asset about the list.

One final thing to consider when scaling the solution is that the savings discussed earlier also scale.  For example the six Raspberry Pi’s running in the Library have, all together, over the last five months used £16 worth of energy or to put it another way they have used £78 less energy than six Acer Aspire Revo’s would have and £180 less than six iBase SI-08 units.

We are currently testing the system with the intention of digital signs being deployed outside of University computer labs ready of the start of the new academic year.