Angela D Cook and her team at the University of Maine manage over 500 classrooms and other audio-visual spaces in the beautiful campus in Orono, Maine. One of the biggest challenges for Angela was that all of their AV design and documentation work was scattered and highly unorganized due to the need to use multiple software and tools. With the adoption of XTEN-AV, the management of design, quoting, tracking and collaboration of AV projects has become a lot more efficient and organized resulting in enormous increase in productivity

“We were losing track of a lot of information like drawings, quotes, pricing, as all of that information was scattered in different folders and files on our computers and a lot of the time it was difficult to find out the right information as the number of drawings and designs were too many,” says Angela, who found XTEN-AV a perfect solution for the above challenges due to its inbuilt projects design and documentation framework which makes it a lot easier to create, search, locate and replicate information in a lighting quick way.

“Lot of our rooms are pretty standard like a straight projection and stuff, so every time we had to build a new room, we had to start from scratch or copy-paste which was highly time consuming and inefficient and also sometimes resulted in inaccuracies,” adds Angela.

Before using XTEN-AV, Angela and team were using multiple software for creating AV drawings such as Google Draw, Visio, Autocad, Adobe Illustrator, etc.

“So, it just was all over the map in terms of our drawings as well. X-DRAW gives us enough functionality to be able to do all our drawings on one platform and not have to try and figure out multiple different ways to do this” adds Angela.

X-DRAW (part of XTEN-AV subscription) is a cloud-based online diagramming tool with rich AV-specific features set such as a library of 1M AV products, automatic cable labeling and styling, AI-powered personalized product search via “search sense” and a lot more. Learn about X-DRAW here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVwKgF_EyWA

X-DRAW was successfully able to replace all of the other drawing tools which Angela and the team were using with a massive advantage of all the drawings now being centralized and have the ability to be viewed, shared and edited by any or all of the team members on the same cloud-based platform.

“One of the best things, I liked about XTEN-AV is the ease of use and how intuitive it is, there is hardly any need of training as everything is pretty self-explanatory”

As per Angela, the return on investment is worth it as it replaces multiple other expensive software. “Earlier we were trying to do all of this by various means and the tough part for us was, I think, that we were failing our customers because it was taking us so long to get everything done. Now what we do is we pull it in, we send the list of materials to our vendor, get that quote pretty quick and then, send it off to our customer. So, it’s been a real godsend,” said Angela.