EXTENSIVE AV COMPLEMENTS NAR'S "GREEN" HQ

EXTENSIVE AV COMPLEMENTS NAR'S "GREEN" HQ - Page 4

New AV Room Advantages

Terry Richards, managing director, IT services of NAR’s DC office, noted that, before the new building was constructed, the previous location had only one area set up for videoconferencing because the group was renting space. Presently, he said that 90% between the Chicago and Washington DC offices. “In the past two months, we’ve tried to expand that out for streaming video. Usually, people would have to fly from different parts of the country to our Chicago office, where they’d meet with some of the key leadership people with our Chicago and DC offices. We would talk about strategic goals for the year. This way, we eliminated a whole lot of traveling by our members, which they appreciated. It turned out very well. They can log onto a certain website and we can actually stream video out via the internet for meetings.”

Richards explained that the rooms have multipurpose uses in addition to AV. “We can hold large meetings, which can be set up for presentations. They’re used for social gatherings. The nice things about the rooms are their connectivity. For instance, in the event room, we can move or connect laptops in different areas because we have Extron connectivity via the floor boxes.”

Help Desk

IT manager Richards pointed out, “One of the advantages we have here that we didn’t have previously is the ability to support all our major rooms from downstairs in our data center [help desk]. So, instead of me having to go upstairs, I can go to my data center where all the rooms are controlled by a central system in my computer room. I can actually take control of the room and monitor what’s going on. Nine times out of 10, I can fix whatever issues they’re having, instead of me or someone else going upstairs.”

The four major AV rooms are the boardroom and event room on the 12th floor, plus the 9th floor VTC room and the PC training room on the second floor. The rooms’ Crestron control systems are available via a web address on the client’s LAN down at a help desk in the data center/IT server room, which also has a direct camera feed to the four major AV rooms.

For example, in the boardroom and the VTC room, the camera is used for both surveillance and videoconferencing. The camera routes to the second floor server room and to the videoconferencing codec. In addition, there’s a hanging microphone in each room, which allows people at the help desk to monitor the particular AV room. The camera and mic audio links to the help desk were done over fiber.

The Crestron touchscreen has a “need help” button that triggers an audible beep from the help desk’s touchscreen. And the touchscreen blinks as well, showing the room location. The help desk has remote control of the camera pan/tilt/zoom and can talk back to the room, as well. “[People manning] the help desk can fully assist without having to actually go the room,” Apter pointed out. “It speeds up the response time and allows for a more seamless setup. If [someone in] the room requires help in a non-crisis mode, the help desk can have someone ‘talk them through’ what to do. Or, people at the help desk can do it for them.”

Projector lamp life can be monitored via the server room, as well. “There’s a system that monitors the actual service hours of the projectors so that, when it comes close to the end cycle of that bulb, it will send an email saying the bulb is getting close to where it may burn out,” said NAR’s Richards. “So it provides adequate maintenance time and lead time to repair any potential problems before I hear someone saying, ‘it doesn’t work.’ That’s a very nice aspect that’s included in the package.”

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