Colonial School District serves the Conshohocken Borough and
Plymouth and Whitemarsh Townships of northwest suburban
Philadelphia. Two schools within the district,
Plymouth Whitemarsh High School and
Colonial Middle School, have used
Synergy as their solution for Media Retrieval and Campus
Automation since the mid 1990's. The need for improved
performance and reliability, and the need to integrate new
media sources and to improve the user interface, led to an
upgrade to Phoenix in August of 2004.
The Right Solution for Common Needs
Much like any large campus, these two schools of Colonial
School District had need of a comprehensive media management
system, which led to the initial installation of Synergy.
While Synergy met this need for years, the lack of
development and support left Colonial School District
"stranded" with no upgrade path that was a true replacement
of the Synergy system. Also, the district hoped to maximize
the investment that they had made in hardware already. By
upgrading to Phoenix, almost all of the existing AXcess
hardware remained in place. Only the AXcess "brain" was
replaced with a NetLinx Central Controller. Thus, Colonial
School District was able to implement an affordable upgrade
of their existing systems instead of starting over from
scratch.
The Right Solution for Custom Needs
In addition to the feature set provided by the standard
Phoenix application, which includes comprehensive media
management and scheduling, whole campus automation,
campus-wide video paging, and intuitive user interfaces,
Colonial School District had need of some custom control
features. Computer input selection at the click of a button
was one such need. Realm Control Corp. met their site-specific needs
by providing concise buttons on the web client and
duplicating the input selection capabilities via handheld
remote that were in place within their customized Synergy
system.
260 vs. 3
Another impetus for the upgrade to Phoenix was to improve
response time. Whereas Synergy response to user commands was
sluggish, especially in times of high use, Phoenix response
time is virtually instantaneous. This is primarily due to
the 260 Million Instruction Per Second (MIPS) NetLinx
processor that Phoenix utilizes, as opposed to the 3 MIPS
processor that Synergy utilized. The greatly improved
response time was embraced enthusiastically by the staff
during testing.
The Upgrade
Plymouth Whitemarsh High School and Colonial Middle School
were upgraded as a joint effort of
Video Corporation of
America
and Realm Control Corp. (then known as Xolutionz) over a three day period. Building
access and testing assistance was provided by the staff of
the Colonial School District CITV Department. The entire
upgrade was completed without incident and the system
performed as expected. Realm Control Corp. extends sincere gratitude
to John Quinn and the entire staff of Colonial School
District for choosing Realm Control Corp. as their upgrade path.
Special thanks go out to Jack Stein and Chip Moody of Video
Corporation of America for facilitating the upgrade with
great competence and professionalism.
