Digital Campground Map "Sign"

[sholland_rico]

I work for a County in IL that has two campgrounds. One uses Sunrise Reservations for their campground management, but since the second property does not take reservations that system was not going to work there. We demo'd several other cloud based or SaaS solutions, but ultimately decided they were all far too expensive, and we ended up going with Campground Master. One idea that was floated early on, which I loved and really wanted to implement, was replacing an old hand drawn chalkboard that used magnets to show campers which spots were available when they walked into the office - with a screen that would update automatically. With the other systems, this task was easy because they would be integrated into our website and I could simply show the site and set it to auto-refresh every couple of minutes. Unfortunately, CM does not have this ability out of the box.

My solution was to use a PC to run CM, use a small utility called Autosizer to automatically place and size the CM window exactly the same every time the computer is started, set an autologin for CM using an account that only has access to the map (so that's what comes up everytime - otherwise it wants to default to the rack. I also setup a small script that sits on the desktop of the main office computer that staff can run to easily reboot the display PC if there are any issues with it. Sometimes the map will stop updating for whatever reason, so a simple double click on that script, the PC reboots and everything is back to normal again.

I would prefer to have a more "full screen" map (no title bar or menus), but this was a pretty simple solution that I think turned out pretty nice - and staff no longer has to maintain the board manually. I have updated the map to include more park amenities since these were taken, I might go out and get updated pictures at some point.
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[Randy@DCVRV Park]

This sounds like a reasonable work-around! In fact, it gives me an idea that may solve a problem we've been trying to resolve. Thanks for the information and ideas!

[Stewy56]

it sounds like you have a networking lic so that you can run 2 instances of the original database. Is this the case?

[sholland_rico]

it sounds like you have a networking lic so that you can run 2 instances of the original database. Is this the case?

Yes, we have the network license and have it running on 3 computers. The camp office computer hosts the database, a computer for the digital sign and then the park ranger's computer in another building for him to run reports.

[flrver]

We do not assign sites when a reservation is made and the customer pick the site at check in. We just have our screen on a lazy suzy and spin it around for them to see what sites are available. One thing that we added that helps with the sites picked at check in is a hyperlink to a picture of the site. I setup the small round indicator showing the site status on the map and created a hyperlink box around the site number for each site and linked it to the picture of the site. I think this feature is for linking to another map of the park so it was not intended for this function but it works great. The system only supports low res graphics but with a good picture down converted to 256 bmp you can get a good picture of a site for a customer to see before committing to it. I am not sure if there is a limit on the number of links the program supports as we only have around 90 sites. The operator click on the site icon for check in and other right click functions and left clicks on the site number to display a picture of the site, return to go back to the main map.
Just another feature that makes life easier. I hope that this fits in with the theme of your thread.