BrightSign in Los Gatos offers their solid state digital signage appliances, displays, and content distribution and management software platform BrightAuthor for designing the content to be displayed, with optional templates.
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Robin
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Robin helps companies simplify workplace management with software for desk and room booking, in-office scheduling, visitor management and analytics to support decision making.
$15,000
per year
Scala
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Scala in Malvern, PA offers their digital signage software which provides Designer for content design, Content Manager for content organization and control, and Player for content viewing. Notably the software supports a wide array of digital signage including touchscreen kiosks and service for direct customer engagement and interaction.
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Pricing
BrightSign
Robin
Scala
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BrightSign
Robin
Scala
Free Trial
No
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Primary solution (Desk and Room Booking) includes 25 user licenses. Additional user licenses and add-ons are available for purchase. Add-ons: Visitor Management, Advanced Analytics, Priority Support, and Advanced Authentication and Security Integrations.
Well suited to get content out to employees quickly and easily. Images and videos are the best. It might not work well for stagnant PDF and PPT content.
There is an option in our office to use a tablet outside of a meeting room to book a room (which is red when booked, green when not), and not sure if this is a Robin integration, but it would be great if there was a yellow for when there is 5 minutes left of a meeting. That being said, while this is super helpful, I see coworkers running around the office looking for a "green" room; and recommend they just use the Robin web app to avoid all the running around since they can view and book almost instantly!
If you are in the data science world, Scala is the best language to work with Spark, the defacto data science data store. I think that is really the main likely reason I would ever recommend Scala. Another reason is if you already have a team of programmers familiar with functional programming, e.g. they all have years of Haskell experience. In that case, I definitely think Scala is a superior and faster-growing language than Haskell and that picking up Scala after Haskell should be quick.
The integration to GSuite calendars is fantastic. Very simple and straightforward.
The ability to customize the interface a very nice feature to have in Robin, as it offers you to allow the UI to reflect the vibe/brand of your company, and not force its own brand on you.
The built-in compiler, scalac, is sssssssssslllllooooowwwwww. I mean like, if you thought the Java compiler was slow, try Scala! The default compiler on my 12k line codebase takes 4 minutes to compile from scratch on my i7 quad-core machine. This can be mitigated through the paid solution of Hydra which compiles your code in parallel. Unfortunately, it's quite expensive and your legal department or finance department may not approve of it. But if they do, for me, it reduced my compile time down to 80 seconds, much more manageable.
Scala is not going anywhere and support for it is slowly dying. This is the main reason I would not choose Scala for my next company or project. Important Scala libraries such as secure social (which is used for OAuth, a major requirement of every web app) are hardly maintained. Another library that suffers from lack of updates is Slick, the database mapper. There aren't enough engineers working on it to even provide support for the new features that came out in Postgres 9.0 (e.g. JSONb). There is simply not enough of a community to drive Scala forward and keep 3rd party libraries up to date as Java world does it.
As a corollary of a stagnant community, hiring Scala developers is hard as well. Of the 30 backend engineers we've hired, only 3 came in already knowing Scala. And as I will mention below, this is a BIG problem because learning Scala is really tough.
The learning curve for Scala is very, very steep. Anecdotally, I came into my current company with strong Java experience. Java is the closest language to Scala but it took me 6 months before I stopped needing to pair program on easy tickets. It doesn't help that Scala has some weird syntax like Map[A, +B] and that it forces you to do functional programming.
Robin's UI is very well designed and modern which makes it a pleasure to use. Personally this a big factor for me enjoying a product and so I'm always happy to use Robin - moreover as a relatively new user the UI was quite quick to pick-up, whether that be using the online system or the Display app for rooms around the office.
Ease of use and convenience of getting content to employees. I would give it a 10 if there were video tutorials for first-time users and live chat support.
Envoy support has always been a joy to work it, whether you're going through the dashboard chat, or through your rep. I feel that they always have your success as their priority and it makes me confident that they'd be able to help overcome any obstacles.
The customer service team is very responsive and usually returns calls or emails within a couple of hours of placing a request or inquiry. Just about every rep I've spoken to has been very thorough and helpful, walking me through each problem and explaining the solutions in a way that's easy to understand.
I haven't used any software like Robin. Other places I worked required an archaic way of doing things...like using pen and paper and a calendar book. Robin is sooo much better. I don't know how large companies make do reserving spaces without it. I would recommend Robin to anyone.
Negative: slow engineer onboarding. As I mentioned before, it took me 6 months to get up-to-speed on Scala and didn't need to bother more senior Scala engineers anymore for help with every ticket. That's hundreds of hours I wasted of myself and other engineer's time.
Positive: thread safety, no concurrency bug. The ROI on this one is really hard to calculate, but I do believe Scala has saved me hundreds of hours over the past few years by allowing me to never have to worry about deadlocks or race conditions. Scala is simply so safe we've never had race conditions within the JVM before.
Negative: third-party libraries aren't maintained so we have to fork and update them ourselves. As I mentioned before, we use Securesocial but it stopped receiving updates and there is simply no alternative to it. So, we forked it and put an engineer on it for a month to get it back up-to-date. What a waste of his time!
