Franz Hintermayr, CEO of Stinova Ltd. recently introduced Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 as digital signage authoring tool to visitors at the ScreenMedia Expo, Earls Court, London.
Stinova, a German based manufacturer of Digital Signage software solutions now offers an Add-In for Microsoft PowerPoint to enable users to edit and publish their content within PowerPoint and to create dynamic templates. This allows the media players to render dynamic content and display it directly on the screens. Content sources include the industry standard XML data format which is produced by almost all productivity tools and the iCAL format which is used by Google Calendar and many other planning and scheduling applications.
Stinova offers its own fully-integrated browser-based authoring tool called ‘Composer’ and while it is easy to use it is not as well known or feature rich as PowerPoint 2010. PowerPoint 2010 provides a vast number of tools such as text, table, diagram, image and video editing capabilities to create projects and adds a large selection of filter, effects, animations and transitions. A prerequisite to designing the add-in was that it should be fully integrated into the digital signage work-flow and provide seamless integration and operation with the Stinova DMS server. This integration has been fully realized allowing content developers to modify layouts within PowerPoint and have them auto-published by the server.
The add-in makes it easy to create menu-boards for Quick Serve Restaurants – using a PowerPoint template it is easy to update dynamic content such as prices or product descriptions using Microsoft Excel as a front-end. Using Google Calendar as a front-end, the system is perfect for managing door signage in conference centers, corporate HQs or hotels. The add-in is also well suited to way-finding and other interactive touch-screen kiosk applications which are easy to make using PowerPoint templates. PowerPoint presentations can easily be embedded in ‘frames’ or ‘zones’ when mixed with other content in a playlist, they can also be run full-screen for a bold , dramatic statement. Even video-walls benefit from the PowerPoint add-in making it simple to create alluring content for multi-screen product promotion.
“Our add-in for PowerPoint 2010 offers our customers a fully integrated, versatile environment for easy feature rich content authoring ”, said Franz Hintermayr, CEO of Stinova. “PowerPoint is the most popular presentation software and is a standard component of Microsoft Office, it has been in use for decades. In combination with our add-in, PowerPoint offers a resilient content authoring tool which requires no special training thereby saving costs, increasing productivity and ensuring content continuity“
Stinova‘s CMS Add-In is immediately available for DMX and DMS 5.3 server software release.
About Stinova
Stinova Ltd. is a leading software manufacturer of Digital Signage software platforms. Stinova offers the most intuitive CMS software technologies that power the worlds Digital Signage networks. These core technologies address all aspects of Digital Signage delivery from stand-alone systems to dynamic Digital Signage Networks. With evotion.com Stinova offers a unique content channel service up to full HD video quality. (Corporate Website: http://www.stinova.com/)