Carousel 7.5 Release and EOL Updates

Hi! I'm John with the Carousel team. This video is a combo platter of product highlights from the latest Carousel 7.5 release and details about the upcoming End of Life for various hardware and software.

First, let's focus on the new stuff! The latest version of Carousel has over 40 enhancements!

Awesome, right!  You will find the details for ALL those features over on our website. Most of these enhancements are small tweaks we've made based on user feedback. However, there two features that I'd like to highlight with you now.

First up, our new Content Accessibility feature. We all know that digital signage, by definition, is a highly visual medium. However, that doesn't mean that we can't make it more inclusive. Content Accessibility in Carousel 7.5 makes your signage content available to audiences who use assistive technologies.

Here's how it works. We've added a publicly-viewable accessibility site that you can enable. This site presents your Carousel signage content in both a visual and text format. Your audience can navigate and consume content on this site using keyboards or other assistive technologies, like VoiceOver on macOS. The Content Accessibility site allows you to present your signage content in the best format for your entire audience.

Next up, if you use BrightSign devices in your Carousel deployment, we've updated the version of the BrightSign firmware that Carousel deploys. BrightSign has recently released version 8.0 of the firmware, now called BrightSign OS. So, Carousel now deploys version 8 of BrightSign OS. Most notably, this version has significantly better HTML rendering performance. But the biggest impact is that BrightSign Series 1 players are not able to run this version of BrightSign OS. In fact BrightSign, has transitioned Series 1 players to "End of Life" status, meaning they no longer eligible for support or updates.

This means, if you are running Series 1 players in your Carousel deployment, an upgrade to Carousel 7.5 isn't in the cards until you upgrade your Series 1 players to newer, supported models. Furthermore, this same End of Life status is also fast approaching for BrightSign Series 2 players. So, if you have either series 1 or 2 players from BrightSign, it's time to think about upgrading! If you have any questions about this, our team would be more than happy to help you with your upgrade plans.

Along these same lines, Microsoft Windows is also approaching some End of Support dates for a few of their operating systems. Windows 7 End of Support is coming January of 2020. This means that there will be no more security updates for computers running Windows 7. If you have any Windows players that are still running Win7 it's time to think about upgrading those as well. We think both BrightSign and Apple TV are excellent replacement choices for dedicated digital signage hardware going forward.

Lastly, Windows Server 2008 is also on track for End of Support. If you have the Carousel Server Software running on a Server 2008 machine it's time to think about migrating too.

Again, if you have any questions or need help with your software or hardware upgrade plans, we'd love to help. Please reach out to our team at any time!

That wraps it up for now. Thank you for watching! And thank you for using Carousel.

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