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Facilities Management
Converge & Conquer
7/1/2008
INTELLIGENT BUILDING controls are the centerpiece of construction on Mount Holyoke's 116,000-square-foot unified science complex, reports Russell Boudreau, HVAC/utilities specialist.
Catching up to IT
While a great deal of progress has been made with intelligent building management products in the past few years, such products still lag behind IT systems in a number of areas. First, building automation protocols are not as open-- and therefore the products are not as easy to mix and match-- as, say, web-based products. Protocols such as BACnet do represent a significant improvement over traditional proprietary approaches for collecting building performance information, but they are not a panacea. Additionally, BACnet requires that technicians possess specialized skill sets in order to deploy compliant solutions, so finding individuals familiar with these protocols may be challenging.
Another area where IT has been ahead of intelligent buildings systems deployment is in support for wireless connections. While WiFi connections are commonly used to connect roaming students to their classwork on laptop or handheld devices (and the internet in general), intelligent building systems that support wireless connections are rare. Still, structures such as Harvard's Blackstone complex represent what universities can achieve right now. Though few academic buildings currently possess this level of intelligence, so much more is possible if Facilities and IT work together.
::WEBEXTRAS ::
Building Smarts www.campustechnology.
com/articles/48823.
Where Green and IT Meet www.
campustechnology.com/articles/
40993.
Paul Korzeniowski is a Massachusetts-based freelance writer specializing in networking issues. His reporting has
appeared in Business 2.0, Entrepreneur, Investors Business Daily, Newsweek, and InformationWeek.
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