Reliability is one of those things you don’t know you need until it’s missing. When AV equipment gets a hiccup, meetings get derailed. In the aftermath of years getting used to easily joining or running meetings through laptops, running a hybrid meeting with some people in the office and some remote adds complexity. Complexity generally means more points of potential failure.  

If employees returning to the office find the conference room experience to be worse than the laptop Brady Bunch-ified world we’ve been living in, that’s going to be a major problem. Organizations that want to re-gain the benefits of the office space in a hybrid environment would be wise to set up video conferencing spaces for success. That’s where dependability comes in. 

No matter how flexible or equitable the system, you need reliable AV solutions that work every time to optimize the experience.  

How AV Can Solve for Reliability in Video Conferencing 

Adding remote monitoring and management tools allows tech support teams to discover and address potential issues before they derail a meeting. Middle Atlantic’s RackLink Remote Power Management, the Vaddio Deployment Tool and Luxul’s ProWatch App all help to provide AV support where you need it.  

At a basic level, remote power management will solve many client equipment problems without having to go to the site in person. Rebooting the problematic device through a specific outlet without having to reboot everything will save time and, hopefully, presentations.  

Remote power management goes beyond reacting to problems. You can be proactive to protect sensitive AV equipment from power fluctuations, overheating, and dropped network connections. You can also schedule downtime with RackLink to turn systems off at night and back on in the morning, and you can sequence the order of these operations to make sure the right equipment turns on/off at the right time. We wrote a whole blog about this topic if you want to take a look.  

Likewise, Vaddio has made sure to simplify installation and servicing all compatible products across a deployment from one screen. The Vaddio Deployment Tool is a free software application that lets technicians select devices from the network, reboot, unmute audio, or update firmware. You can even update firmware on hundreds of devices all at once. The tool automatically highlights device status and offers in-depth device info to help you resolve issues quickly.  

Setting aside the remote management aspect, Vaddio solutions themselves are designed to be backwards compatible and use drivers already in the computer, so nothing ever needs to be installed or updated when you plug in. Vaddio products are plug-and-play compatible with your favorite conferencing software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and more. There's no having to get into the room 15 minutes early to get everything up and running for important presentations. That’s the power of having USB products that simply work.  

Luxul ProWatch helps monitor and manage every device on the network to proactively respond to issues that arise from switches, PDUs, access points, and wired and wireless routers. Select Luxul switches also feature PoE Self-Healing that perform auto-recovery to reboot PoE-connected devices that fall offline or become unresponsive. PoE Self-Healing also includes power-scheduling to trigger switches to PoE-connected devices on or off by your schedule. Set devices to power down overnight or on the weekend to save energy. Multiply those savings across an enterprise and over a year. Yeah, we know.  

There are so many more aspects of reliability we could speak to: solutions designed for easier servicing such as Chief projector mounts that enable quick connect/disconnect for lamp and filter access while maintaining registration, testing every C2G Performance Series HDMI cable before it goes out the door to make sure it meets our standards, better port retention on cables to reduce accidental disconnects, projection surfaces that can handle different levels of ambient light. It goes on.  

At Legrand | AV, a big part of the design behind every solution is to ensure reliability through remote management, ease of servicing, ease of use, problem prevention features, and more. With a view toward protecting and optimizing AV technology, we create opportunities for team collaboration that’s productive every time.  

Learn more about all the trends in the hybrid conferencing workspace.