Sept. 14, 2021 - We’re seeing an increased demand for dedicated collaboration devices for home offices, such as our Crestron Flex Phones. But we’re not seeing a corresponding increase in IT people to manage them. So, how do you make sure you can provision, monitor, and manage devices across your entire enterprise, home offices included?

Let’s say your organization is moving forward and operating on a hybrid work schedule. What if, instead of expecting your remote workers to keep placing the burden on their laptops for collaboration, your company offers them a dedicated collaboration device that’s always enabled and ready and allows them to always see their calendar and join meetings with one touch – even while working at home. One such device is Crestron Flex Phones. But how do you track and make sure that these devices assigned to employees are working and up to date? It’s simple, following these three steps, using Crestron Flex Phones as an example!

1. Start by adding (i.e., claiming) the Crestron Flex Phone via your XiO Cloud® IoT-based provisioning and management service. Collect the MAC address and serial number of the Crestron Flex Phone assigned to the employee. Optionally, if your company assigns the asset tag, you’ll have this recorded before sending the device to the employee.

2. Ship the Crestron Flex Phone to the employee. Once the employee plugs it in to their home network, it automatically connects to your XiO Cloud environment and receives configuration instructions and any pending firmware updates.

3. From then on, use XiO Cloud as a single pane of glass to manage your employees’ Crestron Flex Phones in their homes. If anything goes wrong, you can receive alerts and easily update settings remotely.

From this point forward, you can use XiO Cloud to do what it’s best at: facilitating daily management and monitoring of every device across the enterprise and at homes through a single dashboard with comprehensive reporting and logging, live status viewing and alerts, performance metrics and analytics, scheduled actions and updates, and more. As requirements grow and evolve, new features and functionality can be added easily to one or many devices at any time without ever going on site. The addition of remote desktop capability empowers you to provide better and faster support.

Crestron XiO Cloud provides you with a powerful centralized tool that enables you to deploy and manage thousands of devices in the same amount of time as it would for just one. Using simple drag and drop functionality, devices can be named, configured, and organized by groups and subgroups. Settings and firmware updates can be securely and silently pushed to one or all devices at home and in the office. With live status and full monitoring of thousands of connected devices, from anywhere at any time, the help desk can quickly know about any change on a device within seconds, and then resolve events remotely to maximize uptime. No extra configuration tools are required.

Working remotely on a hybrid work schedule is the norm in many companies during this time. So, what are employees supposed to do when working from home and experiencing a technology malfunction? Try to figure it out themselves? This only causes frustration and wastes their time. Having the ability to have their device from work, such as a Crestron Flex Phone, connect to XiO Cloud means all technology issues will be immediately reported so you can resolve the issue with no hassle.

By Stijn Ooms