Maintenance, security and operations

This is the objection we meet most, and it can be answered with numbers.

The Operations & Maintenance Best Practices guide prepared for the US Department of Energy’s FEMP programme reports:

• Preventive maintenance saves an average of 12-18% against a reactive approach that waits for failure
• Predictive maintenance adds a further 8-12% on top of preventive
• From independent surveys the guide cites, predictive maintenance eliminates 70-75% of failures, cuts maintenance costs by 25-30% and downtime by 35-45%

The scope of those figures matters. The guide dates from 2002 and the values are industrial plant averages — they are not AV-specific. The 70-75% figure is also for predictive rather than routine preventive maintenance. We apply the approach to AV systems, but we do not present the number as our own promise.

What it means on the AV side: a meaningful share of failures is visible in advance. A clogging projector filter, a power supply running hot, a controller on stale firmware — all are detectable while the system still works, and fixable without stopping it. The fault discovered after the meeting has started is always the expensive one.

In most organisations the answer is not clear, and that is itself the problem.

IDC describes the meeting room as now managed like an endpoint on the corporate network: IT operates it on behalf of HR, legal and security, and each of those has different concerns about the data the room collects.

AVIXA describes what is usually true on the ground: AV systems are generally run by facilities rather than information security. The networked microphones, cameras and control panels belong to a team that is not responsible for network security.

What follows from divided ownership is predictable: when something breaks, nobody is sure who to call; firmware updates are nobody’s job; and the room quietly degrades.

What we do here is be the single point of contact: whether the room reports to IT or to facilities, fault calls, periodic maintenance and updates run through one place. Arguing about who owns the problem takes longer than fixing it.

Yes, and not as a theoretical risk.

AVIXA describes networked microphones, cameras, DSPs and control panels as genuine attack surface, through default passwords, out-of-date firmware, exposed web interfaces and unsegmented networks.

There is a concrete example. Tenable’s 2019 research on CVE-2019-3929 found a flaw allowing remote command execution as root without authentication, affecting many wireless presentation devices including Crestron AirMedia AM-100/101, Barco wePresent and Extron ShareLink. An attacker could see what was being presented and use the device as a pivot into the internal network.

So the exposure runs two ways: the confidentiality of what is said in the meeting, and the device becoming a door into the rest of the network.

The measures AVIXA recommends:

• Inventory every AV endpoint — in most organisations this list does not exist
• Segment with VLANs and firewall rules
• Update firmware regularly
• Disable unused services (web interface, SSH, Telnet)
• Strong passwords, role-based access and multi-factor authentication
• Monitor the traffic

Default passwords are common enough that regulators have addressed them: the first provision of the UK Government’s code of practice for consumer IoT security requires device passwords to be unique and not resettable to a universal factory default.

We work through this with the client’s IT team; installing the AV side and leaving the network side to someone else does not work.

They are, and the reason is security first: vulnerabilities in networked AV devices are closed by firmware. The CVE example above shows exactly why this cannot be deferred.

For Teams Rooms specifically, Microsoft describes the mechanism as:

Component	Update path
Operating system	Windows Update
USB peripheral firmware	Windows Update
Teams Rooms app	Microsoft Store
App and peripherals (fleet)	Pro Management Portal, in release rings

The release-ring model matters operationally: you can send an update to a few rooms first and widen it afterwards. In a twenty-room estate, updating everything at once means spreading any problem to twenty rooms at once.

Microsoft also sets a practical condition: it asks that the app is on the latest version before you open a support case. If updates have been skipped, the support process stops there anyway.

This is why firmware tracking is a separate line in our maintenance agreements. “If it works, don’t touch it” does not hold on the security side.

The short answer: before the architectural design is settled.

Heckler’s list of typical outcomes describes what late involvement produces:

• The outlet is “close, but not where it needs to be”
• Conduit stops just short of the equipment
• Reinforcement and anchoring for displays is never coordinated

AVIXA makes the same point from another angle: late planning leads to poor loudspeaker placement, weak sightlines and expensive rework. None of it is cheap to fix afterwards — running a cable where no path exists means opening a wall.

AVIXA’s recommendation is to get AV into the drawing set before design development closes.

There is a documentation side to this too: ANSI/AVIXA D401.01:2023 (formerly INFOCOMM 2M-2010) covers AV system documentation and can be referenced at project handover.

We work white-label with architects, contractors and IT companies; being involved in system design and specification early removes most of what otherwise gets solved improvised on site.

Rack photographs look like an aesthetic matter. They are not. AVIXA reports that untidy cabling and missing records make fault-finding and maintenance harder, particularly on larger installations.

The difference shows up here: tracing a line in a labelled rack takes minutes; in an unlabelled one the same job is done by switching devices off one at a time to see what disappears. That is both slower and riskier.

AVIXA’s recommendations: structured cable management, labelling every connection, and documentation at handover.

Standards worth referencing:

Standard	Subject
AVIXA F501.01:2015	Cable labelling for AV systems
ANSI/AVIXA D402.02:2013 (R2024)	AV systems performance verification (formerly INFOCOMM 10:2013)
ANSI/AVIXA D401.01:2023	AV documentation requirements

We treat this as a handover condition: when the work is done the rack is labelled and the connection diagram is written down. It makes life easier for whoever looks at that system in five years — whether or not that is us.

Largely yes, and this area is moving quickly.

Remote monitoring tools now see beyond their own brand: Logitech Sync, for example, can monitor certain devices from Poly, Jabra, Shure and Crestron alongside its own.

IDC reports that some tools monitor rooms of different makes from one place across Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and Webex — a trend that is pushing AV integrators from one-off projects towards continuous service.

What monitoring catches in practice: a room device that has gone offline, a camera or microphone that has lost its connection, stale firmware, and in some cases abnormal temperatures. All of these are visible before anyone walks into the room.

What it does not catch: echo, poor acoustics, badly placed microphones, or a table that will not fit the frame. Monitoring does not replace periodic site checks; it complements them.

In our maintenance service the two run together — remote monitoring so we can act before the client calls, and planned visits for what only shows up in the room.