The Brief

Invest NI is Northern Ireland's regional economic development agency, responsible for supporting local businesses to start, grow and compete internationally. Its Belfast headquarters relies on a wide range of meeting and training spaces, from large multi purpose training suites to a circular boardroom, and the existing AV equipment across these rooms was ageing, inconsistent between rooms and no longer covered by manufacturer warranty.

Invest NI wanted every room brought onto a single, consistent platform built around Microsoft Teams, so that staff would have the same experience wherever they were meeting and would not need IT support to run a call or a presentation. The specification covered nine distinct room types across the building, ranging from a fifty person training room and a large conference suite that needed to divide into three separate spaces, to a circular boardroom seating twenty six delegates around a round table. The boardroom presented a particular challenge, since a conventional front mounted camera would leave much of the room facing away from the lens, and the building's raised access flooring ruled out a standard induction loop for assisted listening.

The Solution

Fluid AV replaced the equipment across every room with a Microsoft Teams Room platform, so that every space, from the smallest meeting room to the largest training suite, is booked, joined and used in exactly the same way. The two training rooms, IT01 and IT02, each combine a large NEC display, ninety eight inches and seventy five inches respectively, with dual PTZ cameras, one covering the tutor or presenter at the front and one covering the wider room, along with a wireless lapel microphone and a beamforming ceiling microphone so both formal training and hybrid meetings can run from the same room.

The remaining six meeting room specifications, covering twelve individual rooms across the building and ranging from six to twelve seats, were fitted with NEC displays from fifty five to seventy five inches paired with Yealink Teams Room cameras and soundbars. Every one of these rooms has the same one touch meeting join, wireless presentation and automatic room booking panel with an occupancy sensor outside the door, so staff never have to relearn the system from room to room.

The largest space, the Conference Suite, can be used as a single hundred person room or divided by partition into three independent rooms. Sensors on each partition detect which configuration is in use and automatically combine or separate the displays and audio zones, and staff select tutor, presenter and audience, or meeting mode from a wall mounted touch panel to change how the cameras and microphones behave for that session, all without calling for AV support.

The boardroom required the most bespoke engineering. Because delegates sit facing inward around a circular table, a standard front facing camera would have left several people looking away from the lens for the whole call. Fluid AV designed a custom bracket at the centre of the table holding three fifty five inch displays angled in three directions, so every delegate has a clear sightline regardless of where they are seated, matched to a front facing eighty six inch display and three PTZ cameras positioned around the room with speaker tracking so the camera follows whoever is talking. A Bosch delegate system with twenty six individual microphones and speakers gives every seat its own controlled input, and an infrared assisted listening system was fitted in place of a conventional induction loop, since the room's metal rich raised access floor would have interfered with loop performance.

The Impact

Invest NI's Belfast headquarters completed its Phase 1 rollout in April 2023, giving every meeting space in the building the same familiar Microsoft Teams experience. Staff can walk into any room, from a small huddle space to the boardroom, join a call with a single button press, connect wirelessly without hunting for a cable, and trust that the room will show as available again automatically if a booking goes unused.

The custom designed boardroom solution solved a problem a standard installation could not, giving every delegate around the table equal visibility of both the call and each other, while the flexible Conference Suite lets Invest NI run anything from a private meeting to a hundred person event without reconfiguring a single piece of equipment. An ongoing service level agreement keeps the whole estate supported.

The strength of the Belfast rollout has since led Invest NI to extend the same Microsoft Teams Room platform into further rooms at its Belfast headquarters and to its regional offices in Omagh, Derry and Newry, giving staff and visitors the same consistent, familiar experience wherever in Northern Ireland they are meeting.