Navori Labs Does “Near-Complete” Rework Of UX For Its Digital Signage CMS Platform

March 28, 2022 by Dave Haynes

The Swiss CMS software firm Navori Labs has revealed details of a major update of its long-running platform, including a “near-complete” reworking of the user experience and an on-premise “lite” version aimed at the entry-level, modest needs market.

The new QL 2.7 release also has expanded player functionality, rewritten  players for proprietary smart displays and Brightsign boxes, and done direct integration to Navori’s homegrown Aquaji marketing analytics software.

“Our goal was to amplify the visualization and accessibility of media that our customers manage in the interface, and appeal to a more expansive community of digital signage users,” says Jeffrey Weitzman, Managing Director of Navori Labs, IN PR announcing the new code. “Like any professional software platform, continuous modernization is necessary to evolve with and grow your customer base. The content library is now fully modernized with native PowerPoint and PDF file uploading, and we have added a series of new buttons that visualize the content management process, accelerate playlist creation, and just overall makes QL faster and easier to use as a communication vehicle.”

Says the PR:

The QL 2.7 software release continues Navori’s ongoing mission of improving the user experience across all digital signage business verticals without limiting software feature innovation. This is immediately made clear through a completely redesigned user interface for QL Content Manager, which supports an expanded range of content types while making it easier for users to navigate content creation, scheduling, and other management tasks.

The QL 2.7 UI specifically puts the focus on content, beginning with much larger media thumbnails that include live video preview functionality. The broader spectrum of content supported in the UI includes native PowerPoint and PDF file uploads, which will especially appeal to corporate, education and government verticals. QL 2.7 also integrates Microsoft Power BI dashboards for business analytics, which helps business leaders easily share sales data and performance analytics in manufacturing, warehousing, and retail environments for example.

The software integrates new tools to filter live data based on user-created rules. In the case of Power BI, a user could create rules for QL templates that ensure only the desired data from large data sets are presented on digital signage displays.

The new software release also fully integrates QL digital signage software with Aquaji, the marketing analytics software introduced to retail and physical businesses in 2021. The direct integration offers many business benefits for users, including the automatic personalization of digital signage content in real-time based on the profile of the live audience.

“Navori Labs is the only true CMS supplier that also creates, writes and owns its own computer vision analytics platform,” said Weitzman. “QL 2.7 introduces the formal link between the two products. In addition to receiving real-tie data feeds from Aquaji to QL Player, users can now create logic statements inside the UI and tell the content when it should play. By applying that logic and preloading media, Aquaji makes in-the-moment decisions and directs QL serve to appropriate media to the appropriate person. The integrated solution is effectively curating the playlist, which is a far more elegant approach than abruptly changing content manually on the fly.”

The Aquaji experience is also now well-entrenched in QL’s user interface. Users can now pull Aquaji-related data and reports directly from the UI that provide specific and detailed information on content playback. The analytics will include what media played for how long and on what screens, for example. “If the media was part of a QL template, users can even analyze what zone ads played in, the size of the zone, and all other details relevant to the event,” added Weitzman. “These are the exact business benefits that customers should expect from enterprise-level content management software.”

The announcement references the business deal done last fall that saw Navori acquiring the digital signage software side of the French tech firm Innes.

Navori Labs has both rewritten and expanded the functionality of its QL Player software to improve performance on existing QL-supported media player platforms, and enable QL Player on new platforms. A latter example is the immediate availability of QL Player software for Innes PlugNCast media players. This new development from Navori Labs, which acquired the Innes PlugNCast business last year, allows PlugNCast to remotely update their players and seamlessly migrate their content libraries to QL. 

“Our acquisition adds more than 25,000 live endpoints to QL-powered digital signage networks,” said Jerome Moeri, CEO, Navori Labs. “By adding QL Player functionality to PlugNCast media players, we can streamline the process of moving these users from a legacy system to a more modern software environment.”

One interesting new cost-cutting feature on the playout side is the introduction of HDMI passthrough to BrightSign and Innes PlugNCast media players. This is especially useful for QL users that play broadcast content over their signage networks. Direct HDMI passthrough effectively eliminates the encode and decode stage and need to transport content over IP, which means no external processing and networking equipment is required. 

Navori Labs has also rewritten its QL Player software for LG WebOS and Samsung Tizen SoC displays, as well as for BrightSign media players, ensuring improved performance over built-in players software sold by these same manufacturers.

It’s quite a lengthy news release. You can read the whole shot here …

The company will have stands at both ISE in Barcelona in May and InfoComm in Vegas in June.