This is a post in a series exploring the use of Android tablets and the iPad as kiosks. The kick-off post can be found here.
Let’s say that you’ve chosen the use cases that make the most sense for your customers and your business. You also have the right enclosures for your devices. You have developed the customer experience as well, and you’re going to use MokiTouch to manage that experience. You’re almost ready to roll your kiosks out.
But there is more to a kiosk than just the content, use case and an app. If you take a look at the complete anatomy of a tablet kiosk, there are multiple layers of a kiosk and each must be managed remotely.
You are likely to deploy multiple kiosks, maybe hundreds, or even thousands. All of your kiosks need to be reliable. The system needs to scale. And you need to know when something has gone wrong. To make sure all of your kiosks are working, and providing the desired user experience, you need a management system that takes the following into account:
- Managing the kiosk settings and content
- Managing device settings and configurations
- Monitoring kiosk performance, connectivity and uptime
The management system should be secure, but trivial to deploy and easy to use. A good kiosk management system shouldn’t require any new server deployments on your company premises. In fact, it shouldn’t place any new demands on your IT team or the infrastructure they manage. It also should allow you to manage your kiosks from a single location, and help you to automate the work. The management system should also provide you with the flexibility to choose the right tablet for your particular use case and deployment, even allowing for multiple types of tablets across your entire fleet of kiosks.
MokiManage is designed to enable remote management for all aspects of a tablet kiosk, including kiosk settings, managing the device and monitoring performance. Because MokiManage runs on the cloud, there’s no need to deploy servers, disrupt the company IT fabric, or bother your IT team. In fact, you don’t have to worry about servers at all — you can focus on managing your tablet kiosks and creating a compelling experience.
The management system lets you manage devices, installed apps, kiosk settings and content. There’s a dashboard to provide a summary of how the whole system is doing and alerts to help you respond quickly when something is not working right.
The core capability of the system is to deliver a great user experience: a familiar tablet, with content using Web pages, video, and images, delivered in a local application, MokiTouch. This is experience delivered for every kiosk your business has deployed. To make sure all of your kiosks are working properly, there’s device management to take care of networking, app distribution and security. Finally, to help you respond quickly when something is amiss, you can configure alerts to let you know when there are problems with the wifi, battery or the app itself.
MokiManage is key to making tablet solutions feasible, by providing a way to centralize and automate management of the whole system: the user experience, the devices, and the apps.
In the next posts we’ll go into more detail into the different aspects of kiosk management.
