London Borough of Culture Improves Collaboration and Reduces Maintenance Costs with Mersive
Brent Council is one of 32 borough councils of London, UK, and serves as the local authority for the Borough of Brent. Located northwest of London’s city center, Brent is the second most culturally diverse borough in the UK, crowned The Mayor’s London Borough of Culture 2020. The borough’s long history of ethnic and cultural diversity and respect for equality is at the heart of its community services and actions. Brent is home to landmarks including Wembley Park, Wembley Stadium, The Ace Café, and the Neasden Temple – one of the largest Hindu temples outside India.
Based in Wembley, Brent Council’s main headquarters at the Brent Civic Centre building hosts a number of office and meeting spaces for use by council staff, as well as board rooms, a conference hall, and other event spaces that can be rented by the general public for meetings, weddings, corporate functions, and other events. Brent Council was seeking updated collaboration technology that could be deployed across the many different types of meeting spaces in their facility for many different purposes and be accessed and easily used by many different people – including council staff, outside visitors, and members of the community.
Brent Council was facing a number of pain points with its current meeting room technology and needed a solution that would remove unnecessary hardware, reduce maintenance call-outs, and provide secure and intuitive collaboration that could be easily used by the staff, visitors, and members of the community. To address their challenges, they worked with David Boyd, Director of Unified Consultancy, who had worked with the Council on previous projects.
One of the biggest challenges for Brent Council was the number of issues they had with cables and other hardware, including frequent maintenance call-outs to service missing or broken HDMI/VGA cables, flat keyboards, and other hardware issues. In addition to hardware costs, the issues were very time-consuming.
“As a council, security was also very important to them,” says Boyd. “Brent Council was looking for a solution that could be used by both internal staff members and in rooms used by members of the community, including public meeting spaces, the library, and event spaces.”
Altogether, Brent Council was looking for a collaboration solution that would:
Eliminate cabling and hardware, reducing the time and cost associated with maintenance call-outs for cable replacements and other hardware issues.
Intuitive technology that was easy to use and understand, requiring little to no training for faculty and students.
Support wireless content sharing from any device, allowing both council staff and community members to easily collaborate and share content using their own devices
Enable intuitive collaboration that required little to no training.
Unified Consultancy worked with Brent Council FM Operations Manager Luke Lester to find a solution that would fit the Council’s needs, evaluating several different screen-sharing solutions. Having previously deployed Mersive Solstice at London’s Southwark Council, Boyd suggested taking a look at Mersive since the two councils worked closely together. After seeing Solstice in use, Brent Council members were impressed with its range of capabilities and began their own trial at the Brent Civic Centre.
Brent Council began with a small deployment and found that everyone loved it. Solstice addressed their current challenges while ticking all the boxes of what they were looking for in a collaboration technology.
After the small pilot project, they deployed Solstice throughout the Brent Civic Centre, timing the deployment with a council-wide switch from desktop computers to laptops. The new laptops were preconfigured with the Solstice app so council staff could walk into any room and begin sharing.
The full project included 107 Solstice Pods deployed across all Brent Civic Centre meeting rooms, quiet rooms, huddle spaces, and several offices. Solstice was also deployed in commercial spaces and several community spaces, including a local library and all event spaces within The Drum at Wembley, a large conference and events venue area within the Civic Centre that includes a grand hall, conference hall, board rooms, an atrium, winter garden, and bridge, all of which can be rented by the public for meetings, weddings, corporate events, and other celebrations.
Several capabilities set Mersive Solstice apart from other solutions that were evaluated.
The entire project included 165 Solstice Pods deployed across 28 classrooms, 15 collaboration spaces, 9 conference rooms, 8 huddle spaces, and within additional transitional spaces throughout Horizon Hall. Solstice’s content-sharing capabilities met the challenge of creating seamless collaboration within the building’s collaboration spaces and providing the perfect solution for team-oriented active learning classrooms.
“Behind every display in this building, there is a Solstice Pod” Clemons highlighted, “It’s supporting the teaching and learning here, the meeting rooms and conference rooms, and the informal spaces outside of the classrooms where students and faculty continue their discussions from the classroom.”
Several capabilities set Mersive Solstice apart from other technology solutions that the GMU team had researched.
The shift away from heavy hardware and cabling to a fully wireless collaboration and presentation solution was the most critical need for Brent Council. After constantly replacing damaged and borrowed cables, Solstice’s wireless content sharing solution eliminated maintenance issues with cables and other room hardware. The Council also did not want to have to deal with dongles or other hardware that could easily go missing.
Solstice’s ease of use was also a big factor in implementation and Brent Council was impressed with how intuitive it was to use for both staff and community members. “The screen sharing is very intuitive,” explained Lester, “It’s like an iPad, it doesn’t need an instruction guide. You don’t need an instruction guide with Mersive.” Lester found that even staff members who weren’t very technical had no problems using Solstice.
“The fact that Solstice is agnostic with operating systems, tools, and platforms is huge,” said Boyd, “they’re not trapped into one vendor.” The ability to share from a variety of devices including laptops, tablets, and smartphones is very important to the Council. Multiple wireless sharing options beyond the Solstice app, including AirPlay, Miracast, and browser-based sharing also help to provide easy connection and content sharing for those who can’t or don’t want to download the Solstice app. “Brent Council liked that Solstice could be used by visitors without admin rights,” said Boyd. “They have a lot of other organizations coming in, including other government departments, where the users can’t download a new application to their device to connect, so their ability to connect easily to Solstice without the app is a major requirement.”
The security provided through Solstice’s dual network interface cards was very important to Brent Council’s IT Department, allowing secure, internal connection as well as guest access, separated by a firewall so network traffic cannot be bridged in any way. “If members of the community have a consultation around planning or housing, they can come in and share content from their own personal devices onto the council network and there is still security separating the staff from the guest,” Boyd explained.
“As a government body dealing with potentially sensitive information, the strong security and encryption behind Solstice is of huge importance. Having the knowledge that Solstice is penetration tested regularly was also very good.”
Brent Council has been extremely pleased with their implementation of Solstice. “The Facilities Management team – the AV administrators in particular – they love it,” said Boyd. “They said that previously they’d had dozens of calls, having to go around and replace broken cables, or stolen cables, or keyboards without batteries, and other things like that. Since we installed Solstice, they’ve been able to get rid of all their cables as well as the room keyboard and mouse. Their calls have gone down to pretty much none.”
“The reactive callouts from the team have gone down drastically. The cords don’t disappear. It’s user friendly. And the screen sharing is very intuitive,” said Lester, listing many of their benefits from Solstice.
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