Belgium’s PresentationPoint Adds Cloud-based Version Of Digital Signage Software

September 27, 2019 by Dave Haynes

The Belgian company PresentationPoint, which marries PowerPoint-based presentations to a digital signage platform, has released a new cloud-based service called SignageTube.

Like the 20-year-old mother ship company, the software lets users design presentations and integrate dynamic data with the hyper-popular Office presentation software, and then have it converted to a signage presentation format.

The primary distinction is that PresentationPoint is for on-premise use-cases, and SignageTube is cloud-driven software as a service.

Subscription comes with more than 100 presentation templates, or users can develop their own PowerPoint presentations and import them into the platform. SignageTube also handles rendered videos that are unrelated to PowerPoint.

The company has been around for two decades and has a pile of big name corporate clients who wanted something simple and familiar to work with (most companies used presentation software), but also robust. It gets used for signage applications, but also as a means in many companies of having presentation decks available on network drives that always have updated data.

Often, these kinds of dead-easy signage applications are friendly at the front-end, but don’t have much else behind them. I asked CEO Kurt Dupont if there is, for example, much in the way of device management. It does, and more capabilities are being added.

There is some understandable horror, still, at the notion of PowerPoint presentations being used for content on digital signage systems. But the horror is often misdirected at the application, and not the content. The software tends to be solid, and the problem with using presentation software is that users start thinking they’re good at creative.

It’s the garbage in, garbage out thing. We’ve all seen awful PPT decks, so it should surprise no one that those “creators” aren’t going to be any better designing versions for large screens.

Making pre-designed templates available goes a long way to resolving that, and if none of the templates are suitable, the smart move is getting a graphic designer involved to make what’s on a screen look compelling and tidy.

I did a podcast with Dupont back in Oct. 2016 in which he talks about the company’s roots and value proposition …

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