Situation

AV Managers within a large university in the Eastern part of the US had dozens of conference rooms across campus where the set up was simple screen sharing equipment and low-cost webcams for videoconferencing. They had no way to know if people were using the video or audio in the rooms or if there were issues with the AV equipment. They started exploring monitoring solutions and were distraught by the expensive service agreements that would be required to get the data and remote access they wanted. University managers were unable to reach a manufacturer when they had questions on the low-cost, consumer-grade cameras in place. With hybrid learning mandates just a few short months away, they knew they needed a professional AV Integrator to walk them through their options.

Solution

Howard Technologies came into the project and recommended the Vaddio videoconferencing solutions because of the remote management capabilities built into the products and the ability to see all conference rooms from the free, simple-to-navigate Vaddio Deployment Tool.

After the conversation of the remote management, they discussed the ability to tailor the AV equipment to the room needs. A One-size-fits-all solution was not going to work for their lecture halls, conference rooms, and innovative spaces. The campus is now planning a combination of RoboSHOT PTZ cameras, ConferenceSHOT AV PTZ cameras with CeilingMIC microphones, and HuddleSHOT devices for the smaller spaces.

“The most popular design is using the Vaddio CeilingMIC microphones because they are out of the way, no one has to touch them.” Said Wade Johnston, AV Sales Engineer with Howard Technology Solutions. “The instructors, understandably, don’t want to share lapel microphones moving forward so the easy solution was installing two microphones at the front of every room. No one has to think about it. They also don’t have to worry about batteries anymore or worry about someone walking off with it or breaking it.”

“The new designs built on the EasyIP platform are where we see the biggest growth.” Johnston continued. “The ability to scale up from one to four cameras and with one to four Dante sources AND with analog audio is such a huge gain to improving the overall experience in the classroom and for the students learning remotely.”

The plan with nearly every learning space on campus is to allow for hybrid learning in the fall. Having Vaddio equipment allows the instructors to have a uniform experience regardless of the space and the AV managers now can remote manage streaming orientation events as well as gain real-time, valuable insights into equipment usage.

Equipment List

ConferenceSHOT AV CeilingMIC 2 Bundle

HuddleSHOT

RoboSHOT 40 UHD with OneLINK Bridge