31 Google Meet Rooms Across Two Floors of an Austin HQ

The situation

RigUp started in Austin in 2014 to modernize how field workers connect with energy jobs, and by the time we got involved it had grown into a technology platform and staffing agency helping energy companies manage their workforce and vendor operations.

We had already built rooms for this client on three other floors of the same tower — the original 2018 buildout, the 6th floor in 2019, a speaker addition in the 9th-floor all-hands space, and a boardroom display upgrade in January 2020.

When they took floors 12 and 13, they came back and asked us to do the AV design and integration as part of the tenant improvement, working under Novo Construction with IA Interior Architects.

The company was adding roughly a floor a year. Every floor built by a different team is a floor the IT group has to learn separately — different controller on the table, different way to start a meeting, different spare parts on the shelf. The brief for 12 and 13 was one standard, repeated, that matched what already existed downstairs.

What made this floor hard to build?

The project ran straight through the first months of COVID-19. First day of business was tentatively 22 June 2020 and moved to 16 July because of pandemic impacts. Architectural punch slid from 30 June to 14 July, then 21 July, then 28 July. Millwork hardware coming from overseas never arrived on schedule, and temporary pulls went in so inspections could happen.

It was also a live multi-tenant tower under Cousins Properties, which meant landlord punch walks and building-engineer coordination on top of the tenant schedule.

Twenty-nine weekly owner-architect-contractor meetings ran from late March to late July with Novo Construction, IA Interior Architects, TMDA, MEJ Associates on mechanical and electrical, Telco Data on structured cabling, Kastle Systems on access control, and SKG on furniture. Every device location we drew had to survive somebody else's ceiling, wall, or millwork.

The projection screen in the all-hands space stayed an open design-team item into June. Infrastructure pricing was approved on 30 June and the install went in after that.

How we designed it

One room standard, repeated. Google Meet on an Asus Chromebox3-N7041U in every meeting room, with a Google Chrome for Meetings license per room. Same platform, same touch controller, same start-a-meeting motion in a 55-inch four-person room and an 82-inch boardroom.

Rooms scale in three steps rather than three different systems.

Small and medium rooms

The 55, 65 and 75-inch rooms use the Chromebox kit as delivered — bundled Huddly camera, speakerphone and touch controller — with a StarTech ST4300USBM industrial USB 3.0 hub and a 30-foot StarTech active USB cable, so the table run is one supported length instead of a chain of extenders. The speakerphone in the kit carries the room at that volume, so there is no ceiling work, no amplifier and no DSP to maintain across nineteen rooms.

Large rooms

Large rooms move up to a Logitech Rally camera, Rally mic pods and a Logitech Tap on the table, with a Samsung UN75RU7100FXZA on a Chief XSM1U mount. The 12th-floor large rooms add JBL Control 26CT ceiling speakers on a Lab.gruppen LUCIA 240/1-70 amplifier where the room needed more even coverage than a speaker bar gives.

Boardrooms and the all-hands space

The four boardrooms run dual displays — Samsung UN75RU7100FXZA on 12, UN82RU8000FXZA on 13 — with JBL ceiling speakers and Rally mic pods on the table. Microphones stay on the table rather than going into the ceiling, which keeps them in front of the people talking and keeps a failed pod a five-minute swap instead of a lift and a ceiling tile.

The 13th-floor boardrooms and the all-hands space needed two platforms. We put an owner-furnished Mac mini for Zoom alongside the Chromebox and used an Extron SW2 USB two-input USB switcher so the camera and microphones follow whichever computer is selected. A Crestron TSW-1060-B-S touch panel drives the selection. In the all-hands space, selecting Zoom or Chrome also powers the NEC projector, lowers the Da-Lite screen and routes the cameras — one button, either platform.

Equipment by room type

What did the AV actually need from the network?

Telco Data pulled the structured cabling to our drawings: one Cat6 to every AV device height, one Cat6 to every room scheduler location, Cat6 to wall plates, furniture plates and floor devices, and Cat6A to each wireless access point. Pathways were laid out by their lead tech with the general contractor's approval before rough-in, which kept AV out of conflict with mechanical in the ceilings.

AV got its own switching. An Extreme Networks 220-24p-10GE2 — 24 ports of PoE+ with two 10-gigabit SFP+ uplinks — sits in the 13th-floor IDF and feeds the Crestron touch panels, the CEN-IO control modules, the Crestron DM-NVX endpoints, and the Dante side of the Biamp Tesira, the Audinate ADP-USB-AU adapters and the Shure MXWAPT2 wireless access point. Room compute — Chromeboxes and Mac minis — lands on the client LAN.

The 41 scheduling panels run on PoE. Each iPad mini is powered from a Wi-Fi Texas T241 PoE splitter with a Lightning tail, so there is no wall wart and no power drop at 41 locations.

Access control set the sequencing. Kastle Systems could not finish programming until the client network was live, which landed in mid-July 2020, so we scheduled AV commissioning around the same dependency.

The rollout

Design ran January to May 2020: cabling coordination drawings on 21 January, first bulletin narrative that same week, bill of materials on 24 February, front-wall elevations through February and March, 75 percent construction documents on 18 March, 90 percent on 2 April, check sets on 6 April and 15 May, room matrix reviews on 8 and 12 May, and AV functional diagrams issued 19 May.

Install and commissioning ran through the summer alongside the rest of the tenant improvement, with the projection screen infrastructure added after approval on 30 June. Field verification photography ran 29 September to 2 October, and we issued the 29-sheet as-built set on 9 October 2020, along with quick reference guides for the boardrooms and the café and all-hands space.

Support from here

The install is where the relationship starts, not where it ends. Ongoing support on a room estate this size means monitoring device health rather than waiting for a phone call, owning firmware and certificate updates on the Chromeboxes, Crestron processors and touch panels, Biamp DSP and the AV switch, holding spares for the parts that fail, and reviewing uptime and room usage on a schedule so the data feeds the next budget. That is what our Clarity Remote Monitoring program covers.

The closeout package matters more than it looks. A full as-built set, functional diagrams and rack elevations are what make remote diagnosis possible years later instead of sending someone to trace cable.

Rooms drift. Display inputs get relabeled, a Chromebox misses an update, a touch panel loses its processor after a switch change, someone unplugs a mic pod to charge a laptop. None of that shows up in a report unless something is watching the rooms and someone is reading it.

Technology partners on this project

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