Upgrading DMC's Video Conferencing Systems

My FedEx Day 2015 project consisted of upgrading the Conference PC in Kingsbury, which is the largest meeting room in our Chicago office. Sharing information is one of our Core Values here at DMC, so we use the space several times per week to host meetings, trainings, and events that frequently involve group discussions and video conferencing with our other offices.

The main PC was running slowly and experiencing many driver and software issues, so I decided to do an upgrade and a clean install of Windows 8.1. We upgraded the PC's 7200 RPM Seagate HDD to a Samsung 850 EVO SSD and installed another 8GB of RAM. I spent a good amount of time testing the system to make sure everything worked reliably across a variety of applications.

I then spent the remainder of the day working on the DMC Portal, a product of FedEx Day 2014 that runs a group video chat all day long between offices. We recently installed a third Portal in our Denver office, so I had to choose a different kind of software that allowed unlimited video conferencing between 3 or more parties. Network issues or application crashes can interrupt the stream, so I installed software to automatically restart the application and send an email notification to the SMTP server when there is a crash.

I think all of these changes will have a big impact on our ability to connect and share knowledge between our offices!