Submitted by Peter Hass, Manager, IS+T Collaboration Services.
In 2014, meetings across Teck were becoming increasingly complex. We had multiple audio conference calling providers, multiple in-room technologies and multiple ways to share data with each other. We had too many options and none of them were particularly easy to use or reliable. As a result, meetings would either start late or be interrupted because of technical issues and, ultimately, interfere with the productivity of our people.
Because we knew that the complexity of our meetings would continue to increase, we knew we had to bring an efficient, single meeting platform to Teck… and we had to do it fast.
The first thing we did was assign Valerie Pike, Desktop Technician and A/V Support, to large meetings taking place across multiple sites and offices to ensure these received the right support at the right time, a move that led to big improvements almost immediately.
This not only meant that these meetings were running more smoothly, it also meant that IS+T had a lot less to worry about, which freed up time and resources to focus on finding a way to run our meetings more efficiently.
In 2015, we knew that, with travel budgets greatly reduced, people would be relying more and more on video conference to communicate with each other. Unfortunately, video conferencing was our biggest challenge. (In IS+T, video conferences were jokingly referred to as ‘shuttle launches’ given the massive coordination effort each one took.) At a time when we could only handle about five video conferences a day, due to the effort it took to plan and operate them, demand was on the rise.
So, the next thing we did was create a new team called Collaboration Services, which included subject matter experts on various technologies in use at Teck with the vision of joining them all together to create truly unified communications.
Chief Information Officer Kal Ruberg and David Hood, Director, IS+T Infrastructure, helped articulate our goal for 2015: make it easier for people to communicate with each other from anywhere, clearly, cheaply and effectively enough to avoid travel. With this, we set off to research individual technologies and combinations of technologies to find a solution that would provide an easy way—ideally with one button—to organize and start a meeting.
That research led us to a platform that used Microsoft Skype for Business and Polycom RealConnect—Skype for Business because it integrated with other Microsoft applications while also giving us the ability to run on many desktop and mobile platforms, and Polycom RealConnect because of its flexible connectivity and ability to create a seamless bridge to Skype for Business. Crestron room automation was the third and final component of the solution, with a table scheduling panel that gave us the ‘one button’ option we had been looking for.
With support from Kal Ruberg and David Hood, along with assistance from many of our IS+T colleagues, we implemented the Microsoft Skype for Business and Polycom RealConnect platform in late 2015 with additional meeting support from Desktop Support Technician Edgar Baguma and Project Managers Annie Wang and Cristian Sanchez.
The outcomes from this project have been fantastic. Today, we have the easy-to-use single meeting platform we wanted, regardless of how complex the scenario is. Whether it’s audio only, video conference, remote participants, remote presentations, every meeting can be quickly and easily set up as a Skype for Business calendar event
in Outlook.
The capacity and reliability of our Skype for Business and Polycom RealConnect platform means we can also provide support to many different types of meetings at Teck, like our quarterly investor conference calls, investor days and Let’s Talk sessions, to help further reduce costs.
But we’re not done yet! The Collaboration Services team is continuing to improve the meeting experiences of Teck employees and we are always researching new technologies to help us better collaborate.
Stay tuned for more good things to come…
Collaboration Services Team
- Peter Hass, Manager, IS+T Collaboration Services
- Valerie Pike, Audio/video support
- Matt Stanford, Meeting room and audio/video design
- Tyson Villeneuve, Cisco Telephony and Networking
- Bruce Hewer, Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business
- Tim Jordan, Microsoft Exchange E-mail and process automation
- Elissa Wang, Change Management
