Presently, our visitor welcome and information board is one of those old-fashioned sponge type boards with large gold-embossed push on letters.

I’ve been looking into ways of improving this method as it can be quite time consuming changing the names and information on the board,especially if a number of visitors are due on the same day.

One way would be to replace the board with an electronic version of the same kind of thing but these have always been quoted as being quite costly (in excess of 1000 pounds) which is never going to fly with the board.

A recent idea has been to extend the display of an existing thin-client terminal onto a large screen into reception and have a rolling Powerpoint or HTML/Flash presentation running upon it.

This would need:

• Decent size screen (24″ screens are currently in the low hundreds of pounds)
• Wall mount for the screen
• Video splitter (about 20 pounds)
• Long cable (30m currently around 60 pounds) to run from the existing thin client to the display in reception.

There are a number of things to consider though:

• Will a 24″ Screen be large enough?
• Could the screen on/off be controlled remotely?
• Can the front panel buttons be disabled?
• Can the monitor actually be wall mounted?