Set up a lobby screen for visitors
Build a reception board, connect the screen that shows it, and give that screen a location — which is what decides whose visitors it greets and where a walk-in registers.
A screen in a reception area does two jobs at once: it greets the people who have arrived, and it registers the ones who turned up unannounced. Both come from the same board, and both depend on one field that is easy to walk past.
Putting the device on a floor plan is what tells it where it is — and everything on the board that depends on a place works itself out from that spot.
A board is the design: the welcome screen, the visitor list, the walk-in QR code. It belongs to no building and no floor. A device is the hardware in the lobby, and it is the device that holds the Location. Every location-aware part of the board is set to Follow device location out of the box, so a device with no location falls back to all buildings — the screen greets everyone’s visitors, and a walk-in registers into nothing in particular. Nothing errors. It just quietly gets the wrong answer.
That is why step 4 below is a step and not a footnote.
1. Create the board
Go to Signage › Content, choose Add, and pick Reception & lobby.
Open SignageThat purpose seeds the board with a visitor welcome screen, self-service buttons and a walk-in QR code already in place, which is most of this article done in one click. Answer the screen questions that follow — size, shape, orientation and Touch screen — and choose Create.
Be honest about Touch screen. On a screen nobody can touch, the self-service buttons are replaced by the walk-in QR code, because there is no point offering a button nobody can press.
The rest of the wizard, and everything about the editor it opens, is in Build a signage board and put it on a screen.
2. Set up what visitors see
The editor shows a live preview on the left and its settings on the right, and everything is reached by clicking the thing you want to change in the preview.
Start with the page it opens on: give the board a Name, set its Appearance to light or dark, and choose the Display language.
The welcome screen. Click the large area of the preview to open the Visitor welcome settings. The one to think about is Show — checked-in visitors, or upcoming ones. A screen behind the reception desk usually shows who has arrived; a screen at the door usually shows who is expected. Below it, Greet decides whether the screen welcomes every arrival in its buildings or only the people who checked in at this screen.
The walk-in code. Click a tile slot and pick Visitor registration QR code from the Visitor category. Four settings matter here:
- QR action — whether scanning registers the visitor only, or registers and checks them in.
- Check in directly — skips the confirmation the visitor would otherwise tap through. This one is refused unless the code carries a valid access key, so it is not independent of the next setting.
- Access key type — how often the code behind the QR is replaced: daily, hourly, or every three minutes. A code on a public wall should rotate fast; a code behind a reception desk need not.
- Location — leave it on Follow device location. This is the setting the diagram is about.
Add Visitor self-service buttons and Guest Wi-Fi in the same way if the screen is touchable. Then Save.
3. Connect the screen to the device
The board still shows nowhere. Nothing you did in step 2 touched hardware — board and device are joined in the Devices section, and only there.
Go to Devices › Signage › Devices › Add, choose this board as the Content, choose the Brand of hardware you are installing, and type the six-character code the screen is showing into the Connect step. The full walkthrough is in Build a signage board and put it on a screen.
Open Signage devicesThe moment the code is accepted the screen stops showing it and starts showing the board. A device carries exactly one board.
4. Set the device’s location
The wizard creates the device without a location, so the screen you just lit is currently in the fall-through state from the diagram. Fix it now, while you are still standing next to it.
The Done step of the wizard ends with a Set location button. Take it. If you have already closed the wizard, open the device from Devices › Signage › Devices — the panel on the right has a Location row you can edit straight from there, and Edit › Basic has the same field. All three open the same picker.
Location on a signage device, in the field that decides whose visitors it shows.
There are two ways to answer it, and they are not the same:
Tap a room on the floor plan. The screen is bound to that room, and inherits the room’s identity as well as its floor — the right answer for a screen inside or beside a meeting room.
Drop a point on the floor. The screen gets a floor and a position on the plan, and no room. This is the right answer for a lobby, where the screen belongs to the entrance rather than to any one space.
Either way the device now resolves to a building, and every widget set to Follow device location narrows to it. In the device list, the Location column should read the floor and building. If it reads No location in amber, the picker did not save — the product flags it that way because an unlocated screen is a screen showing the wrong thing.
5. Check it worked
Go to Devices › Screen monitoring for a live picture of what the screen is actually displaying. It is the fastest way to confirm the board landed, without walking back to the lobby.
Then test the path a real visitor takes: scan the QR code on the screen, register, and check that the visitor appears on the welcome screen — and, in the visitor list in the console, against the building you placed the device in rather than some other one. That last detail is the whole point of step 4, and it is the only check that proves it.
What this does not cover
The board built here shows one screen all the time. Playing several in turn, scheduling different content by time of day, and interrupting everything with an announcement are all set up in the same editor, on the same stage — see Put content on a board. Changing the board’s shape, rather than what is in it, is Change a board’s layout.
The badge a visitor is given when they check in is designed elsewhere and is company-wide — see Change the visitor badge design.