Room occupancy and environmental data: Now in VQ Conference Manager Analytics 

Can’t use Cisco Collaboration Control Hub to access sensor data from your Cisco devices? There’s now an enterprise-class alternative to help you understand exactly how your buildings are being used. 

With many workers splitting their time between offices and other locations, providing environments truly conducive to in-person and remote collaboration is essential for modern organizations. A vital part are your physical meeting spaces – from individual privacy pods through to larger conference rooms and collaboration spaces. 

By offering appropriate spaces, you’ll create an environment that encourages people into the office, and empowers them to do their best work. To get this right, your facilities or workplace management teams must understand how people use your buildings, and how they experience them. This means answering questions such as: 

• Which spaces are popular, and which aren’t? 

• How are different spaces being used? 

• Do we have the right mix of spaces? 

• Are environmental conditions within safe and comfortable levels? 

Are there any problematic links between occupancy levels and environmental conditions? 

Unlocking more value from your Cisco video devices 

Your Cisco in-room devices do more than enable videoconferencing. The current range of products all include sensors to collect data about occupancy levels, temperature, noise, and more. This information would normally be accessed via Cisco Collaboration Control Hub. However, Control Hub can’t be used in self-hosted or air-gapped settings due to its cloud connectivity requirements. It’s also not authorized for use in certain sovereign cloud environments, including by US government organizations who run Cisco endpoints in Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) mode as part of a Microsoft 365 GCC High or DoD deployment. 

Historically, if you’ve not been able to use Control Hub, you’ve not had an enterprise-grade option for accessing rich sensor analytics. 

VQ Conference Manager 4.9 changes this, offering real-time and historical insights without the need for Collaboration Control Hub. The information you get depends on what Cisco devices you have, but can include: 

• Room occupancy (binary occupied/unoccupied) 

• Anonymous person count 

• Temperature 

• Sound levels 

• Ambient noise 

• Humidity 

• Air quality 

• Lighting 

Let’s explore how these insights could help you maintain a healthy and productive workforce today, and shape your workspaces of tomorrow. 

Occupancy insights to drive intelligent building optimization  

Your room booking system will already tell you if a space is – or has been – booked out. But how is the room really being used? How many people are physically in the space during each meeting, compared to the room capacity? Are large rooms regularly used for small meetings? Are smaller rooms frequently over-capacity? Are people regularly not turning up for their bookings? 

By truly understanding actual occupancy levels, you can proactively identify building improvements to better support your workforce, or respond more appropriately to requests from staff. For example, if the complaint is ‘the meeting rooms are always fully booked, we need more’, do you need additional floor space, or could you divide larger rooms into smaller ones? The occupancy insights in VQ Conference Manager will guide you in the right direction. 

Environmental insights for more comfortable and safer workspaces  

Offering the right mix of meeting space is one part of the productivity puzzle. Your rooms must also be comfortable. We’ve all been in meetings where everyone starts to flag because the space gets too hot, sapping people’s energy.  

Using VQ Conference Manager, your workplace managers can access environmental data from your Cisco devices. Visualizations show where issues may be arising, and alerts notify them if safe thresholds are about to be exceeded.  

Moreover, we’ve built visualizations showing the relationship between occupancy levels and environmental factors, so you can see whether there are correlations between the two that require attention. These insights can drive building management and maintenance decisions, such as adjustments or upgrades to the air conditioning. 

Elsewhere, occupancy data may show certain rooms seeing very little use compared to others. Combining this knowledge with environmental data might explain why: perhaps a room is always cold, or becomes unbearably hot when the sun is that side of the building. Armed with this intelligence, your workplace managers can take appropriate action to make the rooms more appealing. 

Flexible ways to access sensor insights 

VQ Conference Manager 4.9 gives you choice over how you consume all these insights. There are ready-made sensor data visualizations and reports directly within our Analytics. But workplace management teams may not want or be allowed access to this platform. For these folks, you can use any of the Elastic integrations to blend the Cisco device data with information in your workplace managers’ existing analytics tools, adding new depth to the way they optimize your buildings.   

Enhance your workplace experience – starting today 

The quality and quantity of your in-office collaboration spaces can have a direct impact on staff productivity and satisfaction. In your Cisco in-room devices, you’ve likely already got the capability to measure occupancy and environmental factors. VQ Conference Manager enables you to act on this goldmine of data in environments where Collaboration Control Hub can’t be used, empowering your workplace managers to continually optimize the employee experience. 

To see how it could work for your organization, book a call now with our team, who can show you the new workplace analytics in action.