3 Reasons Why Companies and Schools Are Jumping Onboard Our Smart Furniture Series

What is onView and how does it make our Furniture Smart?

onView combines a web app with a small computer embedded within an item of furniture to provide the ability to control and monitor its use remotely. Great for things like automatically scheduling your Chromebook charging trolleys to maximise the use of green energy, identifying a free desk space for working, powering down the monitors on a room full of desks or analysing the usage of your furniture and spaces.

Now that you know what onView is, let’s dive into the 3 BIG reasons why many schools, companies, institutions are jumping on board this bandwagon.

1. You Save on Electricity Bills

You get to schedule and automate charges for your laptop charging trolleys during off-peak timings with smart furniture. This means you only use power when it is needed. Beyond just scheduling, our smart furniture can cut charging when the battery is fully charged! This means greater savings for your company!

2. You Extend Battery Life Of Your Devices

With our Timed-On function, our powerHubs will continue supplying AC mains & USB power for a set time (typically 60 minutes) & then turn off to preserve battery life. Users can extend this time at any time, and the Timer can be restarted if required. Any rechargeable battery life is temperature-dependent, so the onView device & web system continuously monitor and manage the internal powerHub temperature to ensure long & safe battery life. Power will cut out in the event of overheating during use or recharging.

3. You Increase Your Staff Productivity

With Live View, your IT staff gets real-time status information with each powerHub displayed on a choice of map, list & tile views, including recharging state, power consumption, temperature and location. Our smart furniture can also help you identify if laptops are placed back in our wall-mounted cabinets and if it has been secured. This way, your staff need not walk around your office or school to do a check or physical count.

As a team, we are always keen to understand our customers’ challenges and see if we can come up with solutions that help. Several such challenges led us to the idea for onView.

Managing several charging trolleys across a school is challenging – are they all plugged into mains and set to charge overnight, ready for learning activities the next day? Are they locked and in the right location at the end of the day? Our powerHubs have also proved very popular, but given they are rechargeable, ensuring they get charged when needed is really important for their effective use and keeping batteries healthy. It was thinking about problems such as these that led us to develop the ability to control and view our products over the web remotely.

We believe that onView can provide lots of different benefits. Obviously, these benefits will vary by product and user. Learning staff can benefit from laptops all being charged and ready to go at the beginning of a lesson, older students will benefit from more easily finding a free desk for self-study, IT staff should save time finding and managing charging trolleys, and the finances should benefit from the use of less power and longer battery lives.