Opened by The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the RT Hon Alistair Darling MP on 29th November 2007, the Academy is led by a regional board of major employers including Norwich Union, Marsh and Virgin Money, and major organisations including the East of England Development Agency, the Learning and Skills Centre, and the University of East Anglia. Dick Palmer, Principal of City College Norwich said: "The facilities we have here are superb and it is an exciting, state-of-the-art learning environment. We already have hundreds of students learning here and employers are using it too both for professional development of their staff and as a business centre for conferencing and networking."
A high standard of communication within the Academy is paramount. Palmer and John Pollitt, the college's IT Manger established the strict criteria:
- Provide high quality graphics for high definition Plasma Display Panel (PDP) Walls
- Deliver multiple ‘channels' of content
- Facilitate remote management
- Enable text to be updated (via browser) by the local receptionist
Toby Wise, Managing Director of Snelling Business Systems was contracted to supply and install the Audio Visual (AV) infrastructure to demanding requirements incorporating Plasma Screens, Holoscreen projection, PSCo PDP Wall, AMX Endeleo Matrix, AMX Control, Exterity IPTV gateways and 4 x ONELAN Net-Top-Box (NTB) 3305 units.
Since 2001, ONELAN has focused on the development and manufacture of networked Digital Signage media players. The company has developed leading edge hardware appliances and software products that deliver ease of use, manageability, network security and scalability to the world of Digital Signage. ONELAN's core product is a Digital Signage media player called the Net-Top-Box (NTB). The innovative NTB is able to schedule, distribute and display a wide variety of media to create engaging, high resolution signage systems.
The St Andrews installation uses four NTB3305 units providing dynamic output to nine display services assigned via the Endeleo CAT5 Matrix. Live financial information is displayed using ‘ticker tape' style satellite feeds, re-broadcast via the IPTV system. The content displayed is remotely managed and updated by the City College Norwich IT department, with a sector of the on-screen area allocated for local content such as weather, room allocation and site news.
The displays are all branded with a section of the screen identifying City College Norwich, and the system has the ability to reproduce a live financial feed whilst delivering different, dynamic content to any display configuration, including the selection of 4 x 1, or 2 x 2 separate channels on the PDP Wall. The system has a remote on/off facility for the displays.
Snelling Business Systems delivered the St Andrews Digital Signage installation on schedule, and it has now been operating successfully since September 2007. The system can be expanded as the City College Norwich grows with remote sites being linked using the NTB scalability (up to 1000 screens can be linked) - all while retaining the local content update capability. Additional NTB units have since been installed into the main campus with a view to standardise on the use of the ONELAN system at all locations.
John Pollitt is very pleased with the installation: "Toby Wise and the Snelling team have met every objective set. The important, dynamic display capability with multiple channel applications has been implemented using ONELAN equipment: it delivers all the flexibility we requested, with both remote and local content update capability being key considerations. The integrity of the system demanded that we use only equipment with a known high reliability factor: again ONELAN NTBs have been seen to perform well, interfacing with equipment from other manufacturers."
Toby Wise added: "Installing equipment from multiple manufacturers requires confidence in both the product and the design. ONELAN, along with AMX, PSCo and Panasonic, all have a strong reputation within systems integration companies. At Snelling we have quality of service at the top of our list of requirements, and by using the ONELAN NTB products in Digital Signage; we know we will meet our needs, and those of our customers."
"We have already shown what a 21st century learning environment can be like with our newly opened National Skills Academy for Financial Skills at St Andrews House," concluded Dick Palmer. "Now we want to make those standards of resources and facilities available to all our students. We want to create a world class campus, one that inspires and motivates our students, one that the local community can look on with pride - a flagship for Norwich and Norfolk."
