Having smart boards, smart signage, and smart projectors at school is incredibly helpful with lessons, as they allow both teachers and students to utilise many interactive tools and features. But since these displays are often permanent classroom fixtures, anyone can easily walk into a room and use them freely. This now brings up an essential security-related question: How much authority should you grant each user?

The answer really depends on your school’s security strategy. If your school is small enough, and it’s easy to keep tabs on how your students use the display, then just having usage guidelines should suffice. But if your smart displays are in environments where guests can come in at any time, then you may be opening up your school to potential data security risks.

Fortunately for schools, BenQ smart displays come with security features that allow you to enforce stricter access controls.

The BenQ Account Management System (AMS) is mostly for teachers. AMS is an online platform that they can use to log in to their smart displays, personalize their home screens, bookmark webpages, and most importantly, link their cloud storage account for easy access to their lesson files.

Next up is the BenQ Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform, which is designed for IT administrators. IAM is a cloud-based management console that allows admins to enforce access controls for their BenQ smart displays. They can easily add and remove authorized users (either manually or by syncing with their school’s directory service) as well as assign them specific roles.

Last but not least is BenQ Device Management Solution, which IT admins can use to remotely manage and monitor all their BenQ Boards, smart signage, and smart projectors from a power web console. It also allows IT to create, edit, and push policies and automations.

Below is the list of different user roles. But before we get to that, we must first discuss three settings that affect the level of access these users have on BenQ smart displays.

When setting up their displays, IT administrators have the option to either enable or disable the AMS service for their BenQ Board, smart signage, or smart projector. Without AMS, everyone will have the same level of user privileges and access as an administrator. This can work for very small schools with only a handful of BenQ displays, where teachers can easily enforce usage guidelines and monitor who can access their displays at any given time. But for larger schools, we highly recommend enabling AMS service for better control and security.

Authentication mode is a special setting that administrators can find on DMS. When activated, it will enable AMS service and lock the control panel buttons. What this means is that only users that admins invite can log in to the BenQ smart display and access its features.

IT administrators can go to their school’s IAM console and assign a special role to an individual user or user groups. When someone becomes a restricted user, they will only be able to modify the most basic BenQ smart display settings, such as display brightness and volume controls. They won’t be able to tamper with critical device settings, which are normally reserved for those assigned the administrator role.

Here’s the summary of all the user roles:

Earlier we noted that there are three different settings that affect user access on BenQ smart displays:

• Is AMS service enabled?

• Is Authentication mode enabled?

• What roles are assigned to each user?

How you configure all three affect the types of users who can access the smart display, and subsequently, the level of security that comes with the level of access they have. The diagram and table below explain what each combination of settings entails.

In short, while smart boards, smart signage, and projectors can greatly enhance learning, they also introduce new considerations around user access. The key is aligning your user permissions with your school’s security needs. Whether that means setting clear usage guidelines or enforcing stricter access controls, BenQ smart displays offer built-in features to help you strike the right balance between accessibility and protection.

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