Solstice Cloud Categories

Flexibility is core to Mersive’s products, from supporting all devices to providing freedom when arranging content on screen. Solstice Cloud (formerly Kepler) – Mersive’s management and analytics portal – includes several features that allow you to manage your deployments in ways that suit the unique needs of your organization.

In this post, we’ll provide some recommendations and use cases for applying Solstice Cloud’s custom categories feature. By categorizing Solstice Pods in ways that are meaningful, organizations can easily optimize room configurations and scale their deployments. While the idea of creating custom categories may sound intimidating, it’s actually quite simple and will provide significant value for both Pod management and meeting space analytics. We’ve compiled our recommendations to prevent choice paralysis and enable you to achieve the most beneficial results.

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Note: This post will focus on general recommendations and use cases. For easy step-by-step instructions on how to create categories and assign categories to Pods, please see our categories documentation.

Solstice Cloud Categories

Recommendations for creating categories

The Solstice Cloud portal allows you to choose from a list of recommended categories or create your own. Creating a robust category scheme allows you to filter Pods in more ways, helping with deployment management, monitoring, and analytics. Mersive recommends that you follow these guidelines when creating and assigning categories.

Create categories that can be applied to all Pods

  • Category names that include all Pods, such as “Room Type”, are more beneficial than specific category names, such as “Conference Room”.

Start with broad categories then drill down into more specific ones

  • Create separate categories for City, Building, Floor, and Business unit.

Create categories that will be helpful for each use case

  • While reading the use cases below, keep in mind how you would typically want to sort your Pods.

Coming soon: Location-based categories

  • Later this year, we will use coordinates to create a series of automated location-based categories, including Country, City, Neighborhood, and Building. These automated categories will save admins time and be especially beneficial for managing multi-site or global deployments.

Category use cases

As a management, monitoring, and analytics portal, Solstice Cloud includes robust capabilities that are even more valuable when using your custom categories. Keep the following use cases in mind when creating your categories.

Batch configure Pods using templates

Configuration Templates can be assigned to groups of Pods within selected categories. Once you have created a welcome screen template, for example, you can then apply this welcome screen template across specific categories, such as “City” or “Building”. Another example would be applying the same digital signage feed across specific spaces by “Room Type” category – conference room, huddle space, lounge, etc.

Schedule Software Updates

Schedule software updates

Categories can be used to select specific Solstice Pods to schedule software updates. This allows you to schedule software updates for your Pods based on location or department to avoid disruptions. You can also roll out new software updates to test on specific Pods prior to implementing across the entire deployment.

Set Email Alerts

Set email alerts

Real-time email alerts can be scheduled based on categories so that certain admins only receive alerts for the Pods that are in their location or maintenance zone. Other higher priority Pods, such as executive offices or large conference rooms, could also be separated out for alerts to a different email address.

 

View & compare analytics data

Once deployed, de-identified data is continuously collected on Solstice-enabled rooms and provides insights on collaboration spaces. Using Solstice Cloud analytics, you can compare Solstice usage across categories, such as between buildings to see how the technology is being adopted at each location or compare the average meeting duration of bookable vs. non-bookable huddle spaces. For example, knowing what size of meeting space is the most frequently used for example, is a valuable metric in planning for future meeting space needs. It’s a good idea to think about meeting metrics that will be useful to your organization as you set up your categories.

Category ideas

Finally, we’ll leave you with some ideas to get you started in thinking about categories that will be useful for your organization’s needs.

    • Building: Science, Business, Art, History
    • Floor: 1, 2, 3
    • Department: Marketing, Finance, Product, Sales
    • Room Type: Conference Room, Huddle Space, Personal Office
    • Room Size: Small (4 seats), Medium (8 seats), Large (12+ seats)
    • Environment: Production, Field, Testing
    • Furniture: Couches, Office Chairs, High Tops
    • Technology or Equipment
      • Whiteboard: Yes, No
      • Touch Screen: Yes, No

Whether you have two Pods or 200 Pods, creating and using custom categories will help you to monitor, manage, and analyze your deployment, making it easier to implement updates and templates across Pod categories, set appropriate monitoring alerts for specific administrators, and support future space and budgeting decisions.

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