Terminal 2 at Dublin Airport

“We identified a need to extend the reach of our employee communications,” explains Neil Hayes, Editor, Company Publications, DAA.  “With a large proportion of our 1800 Dublin-based staff on shift, we wanted to establish a more accessible communications channel for them.  We also felt that digital media represented a far more dynamic way of getting our message across.  The solution proposed by Complete Telecom achieved all of those objectives in a cost-effective manner.”

Complete Telecom understood what we wanted to achieve and had a degree of patience in terms of helping us to realise our vision.  The project has been very successful in meeting the challenges of delivering more accessible and more dynamic employee communications. – Neil Hayes, editor, Company Publications, DAA

A Branded Hierarchy of Communications
The DAA has a branded hierarchy of employee communications.   iConnect is the company Intranet where employees can access a comprehensive repository of information from any desktop or handheld device.  ConnectTV represents the digital media channel, which distributes video content to 12 digital screens positioned at strategic locations throughout the Dublin airport campus.

Each Monday morning a new piece of video is released.  Running for 3 ½ minutes in length, it covers a variety of different topics designed to keep employees up to date on developments in this fast-moving environment.  “We have a dedicated in-house team of two people responsible for creating digital content,” explains Neil Hayes.  “Regular editorial meetings drive the content for this footage and many of the recent pieces have focused on different aspects of Terminal 2’s development and construction.  Once we record the footage, we use the system’s web-based interface to upload, program and schedule the broadcast.   The solution gives us a dynamic and flexible level of communications, that we didn’t have previously.”

Leveraging Existing IT Investment
“Cisco Digital Media Manager leverages the investment already made by the DAA in its own IP network infrastructure,” explains Ray Hill, Commercial  Director with Complete Telecom.   “The system uses the reliability of the underlying network to distribute video content to digital media boxes connected to each screen, without impacting application response times for business-critical services.   The solution delivers crisp, clear, content-rich images and high quality sound,” he adds.

No Capital Expenditure Required
“We looked at a number of potential suppliers when evaluating the various options open to us,” says Neil Hayes.  “The availability of creative financing options available to us through Complete Telecom and Cisco Capital Financing really sealed the deal for us.  It negated the need for capital expenditure and with financing spread over 3 years, it provided us with the flexibility of managing our budgets and achieving immediate benefits from the solution provided.”

Embracing the Power of Digital Media

“The reaction of employees to the new system has been extremely positive and it has certainly raised the profile of our work internally,” says Neil Hayes.  “This solution has also paved the way for a new digital media strategy for the DAA.  Having gone through a steep learning curve, we now have the in-house capability to create our own digital media packages and are looking at new media channels such as YouTube as part of an integrated launch for Terminal 2.”

“Complete Telecom understood what we wanted to achieve and had a degree of patience in terms of helping us to realise our vision,” adds Hayes.  “The project has been very successful in meeting the challenges of delivering more accessible and more dynamic employee communications.”

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Solution Spotlight

Cisco Digital Media Manager
With the Cisco Digital Media Manager, a web-based media management application, content owners can manage, schedule, and publish compelling digital media to digital signage displays. It provides flexible tools for users to manage content and approval flows, schedule instant and future content playback, create playlists, and remotely control digital displays. It supports the ability to customise signage screen layouts and populate content with an easy drag-and-drop format.

Features

• Flexible and integrated, making it simple for IT to install and nontechnical users to operate
• Appliance-based, using the reliability and security of the underlying network as a platform.
• Ability to offer instant updates across groups of or individual displays, and content playback changes across the course of a day (planned or in real-time as changing conditions dictate)
• Support both live unicast and multicast streaming services.
• Provide on-demand access to video and audio files cached locally for viewing at LAN speeds.
• Reduce video bandwidth to minimize impact on network traffic.
• Prioritise, secure, and separate video traffic over the network to help ensure optimised viewing.
• Efficiently distribute video to a large and dispersed user base.

Download the full PDF document here.