Qmuli's integration with MediaMarkup
About Qmuli
Qmuli specialise in both print and digital Ad production, providing Ad Production, Delivery services and Web Based Applications to Publishers and Agencies that enable both production management and integration with Qmuli’s automated Ad delivery services.
The founders have a long history within the industry with backgrounds in strategic and technical director positions before starting Qmuli over a decade ago. They continue to provide colour, proofing and automation technologies to most of the top London Ad production agencies, with a passion and desire to provide systems and services that deliver real value for efficiency, quality and ease of use.
Qmuli’s flagship products include; Admin+: An enterprise scale Ad production management system for digital, TV, print and large format advertising, and Adfast: Setting the industry standard as one of the top delivery services, delivering press Ads to National and Regional newspaper publications. Qmuli is a partner of the Publishers Advertising Data Network (PADN) and these services are integrated in to both Admin+ and Adfast.
ref: www.qmuli.com , www.padn.co.uk
The Challenge
Qmuli are consistently updating their SaaS based applications and workflows to meet the industry demands and customer needs. Integrating with specialised 3rd party tools and services allows Qmuli to improve and focus on their own productivity applications.
With customers and end users such as Joint, The Gate, Four communications, Stanley’s Post, and Channel 4, who have vast experience using these tools and workflows, our primary challenge has been to cater for their expectations, keep things as simple as possible and transition upgrades seamlessly to using new tools.
The Process
Understanding Qmuli’s requirements across the business, user and development perspectives has been important from the start in validating the product fit and finding the right solution to the various workflows within the Admin+ product.
Direct access to Qmuli’s teams for development and testing, has been very helpful collaborating on the project from the early stages, through the testing and rolling out for each customer upgrade. This has helped further development of the API, opening up flexibility for sequential or phased workflows for different Admin+ job types.
The Outcome
The integration with Qmuli’s Admin+ application has replaced an outdated internal tool that no longer provided the necessary features, the most important being the ability to annotate and approve video using the same tools as the PDF and image workflows. The new contextual based commenting tools have enabled better collaboration, resulting in more informed and efficient decision making.
Qmuli have a distinct approval cycle workflow for each job type within their system, requiring actions by various stakeholders from internal, outsourced and/or client users. Understanding these workflows has allowed Qmuli to integrate successfully, Integration should be driven by one’s own requirements, building for what is required now and not dictated by an API.
We evaluated and selected the MediaMarkup approval tools for ease of integration, absolute API control and the features available, our customers are delighted with the results –Tony Taylor, Qmuli Director
Key Takeaways
Communication is crucial
This is and will always be the case, but simple, effective and useful communication is hard to achieve. Reviewing communication mechanisms must be an on-going process.
More with less
Increasing production output is expected with decreasing time, resource and budgets, reviewing each user workflow to streamline sharing of information and decision making to reach a delivery must be constantly adjusted and simplified.
Recommendations & Next Steps
The above takeaways, on reflection, are great recommendations when integrating 3rd party tools, if you would like to integrate file review and approval within your own applications;
Review your user communications and workflows, simplify everything down to exactly what is needed.
Evaluate products/APIs to make sure you know what exists today and ask about the road-map.
Discuss everything with a prospective integration partner, how flexible are they to deliver what you need.
Choose the right tool for the job, that fits ‘your’ requirements, technology and philosophy.
Again, simplify everything down to exactly what is needed today.
About MediaMarkup
MediaMarkup is a cloud service that provide tools for reviewing and approving creative content. Used by brands, graphic designers, ad agencies and integrated into productivity tools, MediaMarkup streamlines the process of file approval and feedback with versioning, online viewing and mark-up tools focusing on the communication required to make decisions in less time. The application can be used stand-alone for approving PDF, Image, Video and other formats and/or driven via an API for more complex and bespoke integration. For more information, contact details, or to create your own account, please visit www.mediamarkup.com
