Air Canada has had its newly relocated System Operation Control (SOC) Center in Toronto equipped with a comprehensive presentation and communications set up courtesy of Canadian integrator Advanced.
“Air Canada wanted to provide its employees with modern technological tools that would enhance productivity, simplify staff education, and accelerate collaboration,” said David Weatherhead, co-president at Advanced. “We worked with Thor Hoff, the IT Project Manager of the SOC relocation, to design professional AV systems for 13 rooms that are now being used for meetings, conferences, collaboration and training. By making it easy for staff members to share ideas, make presentations and manipulate digital files on SMART Boards, these rooms are a marked improvement over a standard meeting or conference room.”
The team at Advanced designed 13 rooms are made up of two large conference rooms, four medium sized meeting rooms, as well as two open concept collaboration spaces, two large training rooms and three small training rooms. Each space has been equipped with a SMART Board and slim PC to offer users quick, simple presentation access. All of the rooms aside from the collaboration spaces have audio systems while the large conference rooms and large training rooms have control systems and projectors to facilitate large group presentations.
To simplify the way staff connected their laptops to the system, Advanced installed wall-mounted AV outlets that connect directly to the SMART Boards through VGA or HDMI. The goal of the project was to deliver the latest conference room technologies, so when a new version of the SMART Board was released just prior to installation Advanced made modifications to the site drawings and installed the brand new models instead.
“Companies large and small are moving toward integrated presentation and learning tools for their conference and training rooms,” said Weatherhead. “And they are allowing employees to be more productive and creative through digital collaboration. Air Canada has taken a great step forward to making this a reality with their new SOC.”
