A Space CE system template is the blueprint for a fleet of rooms. It defines the standard configuration — devices, AV sources and destinations, user interface behaviour, automation, and more — from which individual rooms are created.
Why Templates?
Templates exist to make a room fleet consistent, standardised, and manageable:
- Consistency: every room created from a template starts from the same known-good configuration, so rooms of the same design behave identically for users and support staff alike.
- Standardisation: organisational standards — approved devices, source naming, user interface behaviour, support contacts — are defined once at the template and applied to every room built from it.
- Manageability: fleet-wide changes are made in one place. Whether it is renaming a source, changing a support phone number, or swapping the display vendor across an entire fleet, the change is made at the template rather than room by room. Troubleshooting is also simpler when rooms are known to share an identical baseline.
Templates and Rooms
Rooms inherit the configuration defined at their template, then extend it with the room-specific values that make each deployment unique — IP addresses, hostnames, device identifiers, and other per-room details.
Where a room genuinely needs to differ from the standard, its configuration can also be overridden. Administrators control how much of the template is open to room-level change:
- The template’s Room Options section selects which configuration items are editable at the room level. Users deploying or editing rooms only see the items selected there — particularly useful for enforcing standards when external contractors or non-administrator users are deploying rooms.
- For full access, a room’s Show All Options action unlocks the complete configuration. Settings changed this way become the room’s own and no longer update automatically from the template.
Space CE rooms are deliberately decoupled from their template: updating a template does not automatically change rooms already created from it. Rooms keep running exactly as deployed until an administrator chooses to bring updates to them.
Keeping Rooms Up to Date
As new features and capabilities become available — through template changes or new software versions — template configuration can be brought into rooms where required:
- Push updates from the template out to its rooms, distributing a change across the fleet.
- Pull the latest template configuration into an individual room. A preview of the merged result is shown first, and nothing is applied until it is explicitly deployed.
This gives administrators control over when and where changes land, rather than having every template edit ripple through the fleet immediately.
Configuration Sections
Template configuration is organised into sections corresponding to the system configuration schema. Properties, Devices, AV Sources, and AV Destinations are required in every template; the remaining sections — room modes, audio, cameras, lighting, conferencing, automation, and more — are optional and appear based on the room’s equipment and the software version in use.
Detailed guidance for each section is in the Space CE Configuration category.