For the Innomesh Room Manager Overview, see Room Manager Overview.
The creation of a template allows users to easily deploy standardised rooms with reduced workload per room. A template can be created with a projector, room controller, sources, endpoints, lighting, and more all defined. When deploying a room, you simply select the template on which to base the room, then change the configurations specific to the room, such as the room name, device IP addresses or hostnames, etc.
The benefits of using templates include reduced overheads for configuring each room, the ability to replicate a known working system at scale, and increased speed of deployment. This brings a task previously limited to specialised audiovisual programmers into the hands of IT professionals, system commissioning engineers, integrators, and AV support staff.
Other benefits include changing shared room behaviour at the template level, which will affect all rooms using that template. Consider the following tasks:
- Changing the names or order of sources.
- Changing the auto-shutdown time of all rooms.
- Adding a hot plug route so that connecting a laptop automatically routes it to the room’s displays.
Each of the above tasks can be accomplished at the template level. If there are 5 or 50 standardised rooms on a single template, then a great deal of time can be saved and overheads reduced.
What is Defined at a Template Level vs. a Room Level?
Template Level
The template level is where the bulk of the room control behaviour of the specific room type is defined. Room modes, sources, destinations, and routing configurations are the sections most likely to be defined at the template level.
Room Level
Once the template has been defined, room-specific configurations are made at the room level. This includes the room name and device specifics such as IP addresses, IPIDs, and hostnames, as well as other room-specific requirements such as lighting and blinds, and potentially macros for custom behaviour definitions.
What is defined at the template level versus the room level is customisable on a template-by-template basis. See Template and Room Configuration Guiding Principles for best practice recommendations.
Templates and Rooms Across Subscription Tiers
While the concept of templates and rooms remains the same across all Innomesh subscription tiers, their behaviour differs between tiers. Both Space products have template software versions. These versions can introduce device driver changes, as well as minor and major bug fixes. The key differences between templates and rooms in each product are described below.
Space CE Templates and Rooms
Space CE templates and rooms are loosely coupled. Changes can be made to the template software without affecting the rooms’ functionality, and each room’s software can be adjusted independently, even while sitting under the same template. By virtue of the template and room association, template changes can still be pushed to rooms at any point. This differs from Space VC, where the coupling between templates and rooms is much tighter (see the next section).
- Creating a Space CE Template
- Creating a Space CE Room
- Updating Space CE Template Software
- Updating Space CE Room Software
Space VC Templates and Rooms
Unlike Space CE, Space VC rooms are tightly coupled to their templates. Changes to a template, including configuration updates as well as software updates, are immediately pushed to all rooms that are created from it, causing a temporary restart of those rooms while Innomesh re-provisions them in VC-4. For this reason, template updates should be scheduled within a suitable window when room usage is low, with users notified of the outage.
Sight Templates and Rooms
A Sight template is used as a blueprint to create rooms from. Once a room has been created, the template can be updated without affecting the room. Unlike Space CE, Sight template changes cannot be pushed back to existing rooms.
Unlike the Space products, Sight does not require the user to select a software version. The Sight software version is abstracted from the user and automatically updated by Innomate as part of the ongoing upkeep of the Innomesh SaaS platform. New Sight drivers and bug fixes to existing drivers are delivered behind the scenes, with backwards compatibility always maintained.
Pulse Templates and Rooms
Like Sight, a Pulse template is used as a blueprint to create rooms from. Once a room has been created, the template can be updated without affecting the room, and template changes cannot be pushed back to existing rooms.
Unlike the Space products, Pulse does not require the user to select a software version. The Pulse software version is abstracted from the user and automatically updated by Innomate as part of the ongoing upkeep of the Innomesh SaaS platform.
A Note on Ops
Innomesh Ops works in the background for any device on the Sight tier or above. It does not require any template or room configuration to function. Once Ops is enabled for your tenancy, its capabilities (remote actions, firmware updates, bulk operations) are automatically available for all supported devices.