ComQi Debuts Highly Tweakable Local Digital Signage Messaging Manager

May 29, 2014 by Dave Haynes

Providing browser access to local managers to fill in web forms or fiddle with a pre-baked template is pretty standard fare in the digital signage industry these days, but ComQi has announced a new version of its own set of tools for that task, and it’s beefier than what else I’ve seen demo’d here, there and everywhere.

I had a demo the other day and got walked through what’s all in OnSite Manager. Where a lot of the ones I’ve seen have some basic web form fields that can be filled in, and some lightweight tools for design, this one had a lot of configurable settings that let the master user assign who can do what, where and when, and who controls who has to approve things before they go live.

(If you beg to differ and yours is bigger, better, prettier, whatever, used the Comments section below)

“There was a lot of effort put into this release to respond to the diverse needs of our customers, who represent everything from grocery retailing to health care management,” says CTO Max Stevens-Guille in a release today. “We made it configurable to a lot of different workflows, because we wanted to deliver a product that customers could use the way they wanted to, as opposed to how we might say it had to be used.”

“It’s very powerful when you can tell a customer a system is designed to be readily tailored to their needs and how they work, so that they don’t have to make compromises,” adds Stuart Armstrong, ComQi’s Chief Revenue Officer. “Local messaging tools in digital signage are common, but we’re not aware of any competitive products that approach OSM’s depth of capability.”

The OSM system works in parallel with ComQi’s CMS, which is called EnGage. You opt in to OSM.

“The great thing about EnGage OnSite Manager is its unique access levels to maintain brand integrity with local customization capabilities,” adds Bryant Little, Director of Motion Graphics at PlayNetwork, a ComQi customer. “We’ve previously been challenged with managing local content, but OnSite Manager gives us the flexibility and ease of use to create branded templates and still give our consumers control of the final output.”

I also liked the depth and set-up of real-time data integration – you can pull data or get it pushed – and a help system that can be customized down to the user level. So if a limited rights user logs in and stumbles, the help button gets them to specific information based on what they are doing, instead of a library of stuff they don’t give a crap abut.