As some of you know from your experience so far, the Barco ClickShare technology is a smash hit. It not only delivers in easily solving wiring challenges in conference room settings, but most importantly, it greatly enhances the overall collaboration experience.
I thought I would take this opportunity to share with you my experience and highlight a few key universal best practices when deploying a ClickShare system.
- First and foremost, know your environment!
Yes it’s true that the ClickShare technology does not touch a corporate or facility’s LAN/WAN. However it does utilize encrypted WiFi to allow for the buttons to communicate to their assigned base station. This means there is the possibility of channel sharing with an existing wireless network in a given facility. Because of this, it is absolutely essential that you perform a WiFi sweep of the location on both the 2.4 and 5Ghz spectrums to determine where you may run into channel traffic collision and/or throughput issues. This can be done easily with a WiFi analyzer such as this www.inssider.com Once you’ve performed this operation, you will simply select the frequency and channel with the least amount of traffic on it in the setup utility of the ClickShare base station. This will ensure the best performance for not only reliable connectivity but will also provide the highest audio/visual playback and content sharing experience for the customer. - Always run the latest Firmware Revision
Be 100% certain you are installing a ClickShare system running the latest firmware. The iOS and Android apps do not like it when they are trying to connect to a ClickShare base station running old firmware. More importantly, you will want to take full advantage of new feature sets as they become available. Plus it has been my experience that Barco does an excellent job of not breaking more things then they fix when releasing a new firmware rev. I wish I could say that about other companies! - On larger deployments be sure to stagger your units.
In addition to what I describe in #2, if you have a project where you will be installing more than just a few units, say 4 or more, do not leave all the units running on the same frequency and/or channel. As an example, the CSM-1 by default comes out of the box on the 5Ghz frequency/channel 36. You would not want all your units running as such. Stagger them between frequencies and channels ensuring maximum throughput. The ClickShare system does not channel hop. It will only deviate to a different channel or frequency by someone physically making the change to it in the setup utility.
Please post your take on what your experience has been so for and if you can further expand on what I wrote above. We’d love to hear from you.
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