About the Client

Name

Stanislaus County Sheriff's Office

Location

Stanislaus County

Industry

Government

Number of Employees

800

Main Outcomes

Easy-to-use video conferencing platform to facilitate multi-site briefings

Solution

WebEx Room Kits

Cisco Expressway

The Problem

Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office provides public safety services for cities and towns within Stanislaus County that do not have their own locally-funded police departments. The Sheriff’s Office has about 10 sites throughout the county to provide local dispatch as needed. Pulling all of the officers and commanders from these sites to one facility for daily briefings would be time-consuming. Over the last several years, the Sheriff’s Office has used audio conferencing to bridge this gap, but even that has been inefficient due to the need to share and review files, photos, and documents.

The Challenge

The initial challenge was having an infrastructure that could support high-definition video feeds from multiple locations. This has recently become less of an issue as bandwidth gets cheaper and metro ethernet solutions are more readily available, allowing for 100meg connections between sites at a reasonable cost. Internet bandwidth was also upgraded making it easier to support a cloud-based solution instead of an on-premise solution.  

The next challenge was finding a solution that would be simple to use. The Sheriff’s Office needed technology that would allow a user to walk into a conference room and already have the screens in the room joined into the meeting without any interaction between users. This would keep training at a minimum, which was crucial with different people using these resources at different sites.  

The Solution

Because the Sheriff’s Office was already standardized on Cisco technology—including data center, networking, security, and voice—we recommended they expand their existing Cisco voice system (which supports 800 phones) to include collaboration features like video conferencing and Webex Meeting rooms. Webex Room Kits were purchased for each site and conference room. These Room Kits worked with existing displays and allowed each conference room to be cloud-connected to a Webex Meeting room. Cisco Expressway software was deployed to bridge the connection between the cloud and on-premise. 

All of this resulted in a solution that enabled all conference rooms to be connected into a Webex cloud meeting room—on-demand or at scheduled times—and allowed the people in these rooms to have interactive conversations and share documents as needed. 

Additional Reading

7 Tips to Keep Your Cisco WebEx Meetings Secure

Case Study: Distance Learning at Patterson Unified School District