When a globally-known Midwestern health care provider realized their meeting rooms and lecture halls needed triage, they partnered with ControlWorks for both diagnosis and recovery.
“Save As” evolution — an unfortunate go-to for many programmers — resulted in nearly 400 rooms working 400 different ways with bugs persisting and evolving through branches of code. Even changes as minor as updating the channel number for a single television preset became daunting tasks that could require weeks of labor, touching each room separately, and potentially introducing new bugs to a fragile ecosystem.
ControlWorks partnered with this provider to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their rooms' current features — what should stay, what should go, and what was missing. To bring order to chaos, we deployed our dynamic configuration solution allowing identical code to run in all rooms, both new and existing. This single program – running in more than 400 rooms – allowed features to be added quickly, tested once, and deployed rapidly without fear.
ControlWorks’ dynamic configuration portal allows technicians of virtually any skill level to make room configuration updates in seconds, leading to rapid responses to problems. If a projector fails between lectures, the configuration can be updated so that a new one – even from a completely different manufacturer – is up and running in five clicks.
Meanwhile, a single code base means that spare touchscreens, processors, and other hardware can be pre-loaded and ready on the shelf. When duty calls, it’s a simple matter of linking the configuration to the new device via the portal.