As everyone knows, the pandemic of the last many years created a new work-from-home revolution as companies faced office shutdowns and work went remote. Practically overnight, most employees became proficient with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, and cloud-based collaboration platforms for a new way of communicating, meeting, and collaborating. 

But was it really a revolution? Or did the pandemic shoot a giant dose of adrenaline into the arm of a long-term trend? The truth is, remote work and workers were already a thing before anyone could spell COVID. Companies large and small had already discovered the benefits of a virtually connected organization. Using the aforementioned tools from Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco and many other companies, organizations discovered the benefits of not having a physical location – in terms of costs, employee satisfaction, hiring flexibility, and other areas. If your organization is completely virtual, perhaps you can stop reading here – you might not care about meeting rooms or hybrid work. 

However, we know that most organizations still need and rely on physical worker interaction and collaboration. It may be due to the business model, product or services, supply chain, or other business factors. And many companies are struggling to define just how hybrid work will work for their organization, which leads us to the meeting room. After all, if all your staff had to do is sit in front of a computer doing their work all day long in a cubicle or open office space, you don't need them back in the office. But if they benefit from and need in-person collaboration, your current meeting room design may not work for a model where some are in the office and others are remote. 

Let’s explore the issues with current meeting room design and how you can reimagine your spaces for a hybrid work model below.

Buying a car can be challenging due to all the decisions that are required. You have to make the big decisions: size, type, electric, hybrid, or gas-fueled. Then there are the medium decisions: manufacturer, model, color. Then, there are the seemingly endless minor decisions: keyless entry, remote start, heated seats, entertainment system, all which impact your experience as a driver or passenger. You can take the family down to Disney in the family truckster but having that entertainment system for the kids makes the ride so much more tolerable for everyone. Many people geek out on those little details. Although, they don’t impact how well the car drives, fuel efficiency, or safety, but they are still very important facets of the car. You certainly wouldn’t ignore them when buying a car or leave it up to the car dealer to pick which ones are included with your car. They are a minor, but still very significant, aspect of the purchase.

AUSTIN, TX (PRWEB) SEPTEMBER 21, 2022

Today Trustgrid and Level 3 Audiovisual announce a technology partnership to deliver next-gen commercial audiovisual systems that enable the AV industry to embrace the next generation of AV technology.

Trustgrid, a leader in networking and edge computing solutions has formed a partnership with Level 3 Audiovisual to deliver and support advanced AV software to its clients across corporate America, higher education, healthcare, government, and hospitality.

If your friend still used paper maps to navigate while driving—pulling over to find the right exit— you’d want to help them, right? You’d likely say, “Hey, you should try this thing called GPS. It’s so much easier.”

We feel similarly towards businesses and their approach to digital signage. We still frequently encounter companies that manually deploy digital signage players on computers. To update the display’s software, they need to walk to every single computer, climb up on a ladder, and plug into the device.

Does that sound like your company? If your organization has several or hundreds of digital signage to manage, that’s a hefty task for an IT department that has other concerns. And if you don’t catch issues quickly enough, there could be Windows update notifications or error screens being broadcasted for days or weeks.

Luckily, there’s a better approach. With managed AV services, Level 3 Audiovisual can remotely update software across all your displays from one platform. Read on to learn how managed services eliminate the headache of updating your company’s digital signage!

If there ever was a time for business as usual, it isn’t now in 2022. The pandemic, high inflation, supply chain shortages, and unrest in certain parts of the world have conspired to make these extraordinary times. What does this have to do with commercial AV? Undoubtedly you understand the effects of today’s business environment on your world. But we’d like to focus on three areas you may want to think about as you consider your AV investments and how they support your business. 

What do supply chains, Microsoft's new Front Row features for videoconferencing, and conference room acoustics have in common? More than you might think – or at least we think so. So dive in with us below, because these three things are representative of issues in commercial AV right now.

The first step towards proper AV monitoring is admitting The Problem: the tools are simply not there. Admit it. You are flying blind. You don’t even know what you have. Answering the simple questions of, “What is our total number of conference rooms? And how many are working right now?” in a larger organization is blurry at best. This is not an easy problem to solve, due to the isolated AV ecosystems and vendor allegiances.

And even if you can solve it, you may not yet be able to implement it, because your solution is not scalable. Or not manageable, or both. For now, your best solution is to include multiple windows to monitor the siloes. Human eyes have to jump from window to window or screen to screen, trying to piece together the data in real-time, which often leads to information overflow for the human mind.

Monitoring is a fundamental step that gathers the telemetry data from AV devices, automatically. This level of automation requires some level of programming skills to implement. It also assumes that the data you need is readily available, and that you can somehow check the data for integrity.  

At Level 3 Audiovisual, we are taking a more standardized, templated approach, more cattle, less pets.

If your organization uses tens, hundreds, or thousands of AV devices, that’s much too many to manage manually. For instance, if an LED display in one of your lobbies is showing a blank screen, when will your IT department hear about it? Even if a staff member walks by the screen, they might not tell anyone or know who to notify. It could be days or weeks before anyone repairs the unresponsive display. 

Whether you’re in healthcare, education, hospitality, or another industry, you rely on technology to help your customers and share essential information. Is it time to improve the way you manage your business’s technology? It may be time to invest in AV device monitoring.

If you’re evaluating how to better support your business’s AV devices, here’s what you should consider.

I loved playing with Nerf guns as a kid. Scratch that... I love playing with Nerf guns. Period. They are fun as heck, and they continue to get more creative, novel, and innovative. They get the kids outside, make them run around and have fun. It’s awesome. Back in the day, one of my friends had a traumatic experience with a Nerf gun, where one of the foam bullets caught him right in the eye. He had fuzzy vision and his eye puffed up for days. His trauma obviously had an effect on me as well, but the fix was obvious: just wear glasses when you play with Nerf guns. Easy! You can still run around like a maniac, still come up with all sorts of crazy games, and look super tough in some sporty, “operator” sunglasses. Oh, and not shoot your eye out! It’s a win-win. My friend, however, did not get the memo. Not two weeks after his swelling went away, he got shot in the eye AGAIN by one of the sharp shooters on the other team. The protective-eyewear-fix only lasted two outings and then was put to the wayside. New habits are tough to form.