Artwork powered by Chromebooks at the Polaroid Fotobar

Posted by George Garcia, CIO, TWS Partnership

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is TWS Partnership’s Chief Information Officer, George Garcia, who deployed Chromeboxes at Polaroid Fotobar stores. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At the Polaroid Fotobar in Delray Beach, Florida, we help visitors create beautiful physical artwork from their digital pictures. When customers visit the store, they can use our Chromebox kiosks and web-based photo editor to add effects and print their photos on lucite, metal, acrylic, bamboo, or other creative materials.

We just opened our second store at Union Station in Washington, D.C., and are opening several other locations this year. For our photo kiosks, we wanted technology that delivers both a great customer experience and was simple to manage, so we could grow quickly.

Customers like using Chromebox kiosks - they resume instantly, are lightning-fast at handling web apps and basically crash-free. Our business colleagues are happy because the Chromebox is a fraction of the cost of other options we considered. And, as the tech team that has to make everything work, we’re thrilled with how the Chromebox is performing.

We’re using the managed public sessions feature, available in the Chrome Management Console, to create a custom Fotobar kiosk experience for customers, including setting a branded home screen, adding photo editing apps and photo sources, and blocking sites we don’t want customers visiting. The public sessions feature also wipes any customer data at the end of each browsing session, so each user is starting fresh.

Since all the operating system updates are automatic and the devices have built-in virus protection, we can spend less time maintaining devices and more time on our expansion plans. We look forward to bringing the fun of our Polaroid Fotobar service to more people around the world soon.