Collaboration is on the Agenda for Contra Costa County thanks to Avocor

The impressive Contra Costa County Administration building sits on the edge of downtown Martinez, California. The elegant looking building is home to a variety of county departments including a large assembly chamber, offices, conference rooms, work stations and support spaces. The building has been awarded LEED Gold certification in line with its sustainable construction, while the executive offices and conference rooms feature a range of display and interactive video conferencing solutions from Avocor.

The original building was razed to the ground and in its place is a stunning four storey structure with an exterior glass ‘wave’ that comes alive at night. The state of the art feel extends to the interior, in particular the new chamber room as well as the associated offices and conference rooms. The driving ambition for the design of the new audiovisual system was how to make the system efficient and easy to use, and ensure uptake amongst the County staff based at the building. To achieve this Wayne Tilley, Deputy Director of IT at Contra Costa County, knew that it would be important to integrate remote working functionality as well as the growing number of software programs that enable seamless collaboration including Teams, Zoom and Google Meet:

“We worked with IDS, a company that specialises in exactly the sort of technology ‘refresh’ we were looking for,” he says. “Between us we came up with a solution that integrated all the functions we had identified as desirable – in particular, being platform agnostic and having the ability to switch between programs such as Teams, Zoom or Whiteboard-type tasks – without switching devices. The Avocor display devices we chose are platform agnostic so ideally suited to our requirements. Not only that, with their ability to integrate seamlessly with our Crestron control system ensured we had full utility across our audiovisual system.”

The project began in January 2020 and the timing, just before the global pandemic, turned out to be fortuitous as the County were able to fully utilize the system in ways that had not been envisaged during the design phase.

Matthew Rhodes, Director of Sales for North America for IDS worked on the audiovisual design for the project and is pleased with how Contra Costa have embraced its capabilities:

“We designed the system to be extremely flexible and during the pandemic the client was able to move to a hybrid approach that allowed people to both tune in remotely to council sessions as well as be present in person, socially distanced, of course,” he says. The County are able to stream content from the chamber into our conference rooms via the Avocor displays so that the general public can be present in real time at council sessions. In short, the Avocor solution allowed us to move to a video-based content delivery in a seamless fashion.”

The solution at Contra Costa County features two products from the Avocor’s F Series range, the AVF-6550 and AVF-8650. The Avocor F series is completely platform agnostic, working seamlessly with Unified Communications tools and devices to create a collaborative environment that is perfect for the executive meeting space, conference room and lecture hall.