Smart executive boardroom - IntelliCasa has recently designed and installed a Crestron Smart Office system in the main executive boardroom of the brand new flagship Venture X offices at Westfield in West London. The system incorporates three distinctive advantages that are required in today's modern workplace smart spaces: integrated room environmental and AV control, flexibility, and user-friendliness. IntelliCasa achieved all three by delivering a full smart office solution that integrated Crestron Home into the commercial Crestron hardware solutions, making it flexible with the same equipment to use it as one single boardroom or two separate rooms, while offering a unified user interface.
While designing the main executive board room in Venture X’s flagship office space, IntelliCasa had clear targets in sight. These included providing the highest standards of quality and sophistication for the owners and users, maximising customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs and contributing to the client’s CSR policy by saving energy.
Modern office spaces require flexibility according to the users’ daily needs. Therefore, the owner approached IntelliCasa to design an intelligent and automated boardroom, equipped with the latest smart office technology, which can function as one large meeting room as well as being split into two fully independent spaces when the owners need to accommodate for busy schedules.
The challenge for IntelliCasa was combining software and hardware to provide the option of having completely independent room environments when the room splits. IntelliCasa made this possible by assigning all components to act independently when the room needs to be split into two separate meeting rooms. This included touch panels, video conferencing, lighting, roller blinds and AV operating either as one large conference room or two separate and independent rooms.
The two 10" TSS-1070 Crestron touch panels outside have been placed strategically to serve this purpose for booking one or two rooms according to the users’ needs. Likewise, IntelliCasa used Crestron conference room tabletop touch panels TS-1070 with Crestron AirMedia, which provide the users with the simplest and most sophisticated way to cast presentations onto the room’s displays and give the option for use as one or two separate presentation rooms. This is reinforced by the TSW-1070R touch panels on the inside walls used for environmental control such as lighting, climate and roller blinds, which offer flexibility and comfort when one or two separate rooms are needed.
Another unique aspect of IntelliCasa’s solution is that it incorporates Crestron home controls into the corporate scene. This is achieved by saving time from using Crestron Simpl for hard coding "Environmental control functions" in DMPS3 and making configuration easier and faster by using Crestron Home directly interfaced with DMPS3. This gives users the option of controlling the lighting, heating and blinds of the boardroom from the same tabletop TS-1070 that they use for presentations and zoom meetings, whilst switching between environmental and presentation control seamlessly.
More specifically, the users themselves benefit greatly from this integration since they have full control of all hardware in the boardroom from a single Crestron interface without having to move an inch from their seats. This grants the user total management over the environment of the board room, including lighting, music, HVAC and roller blinds, creating total comfort and maximising efficiency and intuitiveness for the users.
Additionally, using Crestron Home is beneficial for the owner of the office, since he already has a fully operating Crestron Home system installed in his house and therefore, integrating Crestron Home into his commercial solution provided a unified user interface, making it easy for him to operate.
User Benefits
• Flexibility: the large executive boardroom of 24 seats is designed to operate as one single conference room or as two separate equally smaller rooms in which AV and environmental control work independently for both rooms as it would for the one larger room.
• Efficiency: By incorporating Crestron Home controls with the DMPS3 processor hard coding time is reduced for Environmental control in DMPS3 and configuration is made easier and faster. Also switching between environmental and presentation control is done seamlessly from the same tabletop.
• Intuitiveness: Having the same graphics of Crestron Home that the owner of the system has in his house makes the system more user-friendly and offers uniformity across different categories of Crestron systems, residential and commercial.
• Sustainability: The system is designed to reduce operating costs for the owner and simultaneously contribute to a more sustainable environment by saving energy. Lighting, HVAC and roller blind control are all integrated to work together most efficiently by taking advantage of natural light when present and reducing cooling loads using blind control when needed.