Onboarding Center – Data Management and Room/Device Import Processes

Introduction

This guide describes how the NetSpeek Onboarding Center establishes Lena’s understanding of your environment including locations, rooms, devices, integrations, and the relationships between them. This foundation enables Lena to assess room health, facilitate room checks and troubleshooting, and orchestrate supported devices. The amount of time required to gather source data will vary by organization; once that data is assembled, the Onboarding Center is designed to make platform-side configuration possible within a few minutes whether importing a few rooms/devices, or many thousands.

While these procedures are focused on initial room creation and device import flows early in the customer journey (eg setting up a new tenant with location hierarchy, rooms, and devices), the feature is called “Onboarding Center” and not “device import.” It is designed to evolve beyond initial import and encompass additional data types and lifecycle activities, including location hierarchy, Room Health Check target-state configurations, and MACD (Move-Add-Change-Delete) operations for devices.

The initial release of the feature focuses on XLSX/spreadsheet based workflows as a flexible starting point. This is not intended to be the end-state experience. The Onboarding Center is designed to evolve toward leveraging existing enterprise data sources and third-party systems, including UC platforms and hardware-vendor management systems, to simplify and increasingly automate device import and ongoing data-management functions.

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Prerequisites / Getting Started

There are two primary steps to onboarding your data:

• Preparing your room and device data
• Uploading that data through Onboarding Center, where NetSpeek’s user interface will guide you through validation, field mapping, and confirmation before anything is imported

If you already have access to a NetSpeek tenant, start in the Onboarding Center and download the workbook template. If you do not yet have tenant access, use the example workbook linked in this guide to begin gathering your room and device data.

Orientation to the workbook and relevant data

The example workbook is found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16yJL0MMXMWNpxg5rPY9m6PYc-QzW6-Rs/view?usp=sharing

The Onboarding Center interface is accessed from Tenant Settings while logged into your tenant in the NetSpeek Portal – there is also a link to it from the main workspace area of a new chat with Lena.

Different devices require different information. You do not need to complete every field in the workbook. The information required depends on the manufacturer, model, and integration method. For example, some devices require credentials, MAC addresses, serial numbers, device IDs, network settings, or other configuration details. Refer to the manufacturer-specific integration guides here for the exact information required for each device type.

Before you begin, configure the integrations you plan to use in your tenant – this includes deploying any required Edge VMs and connecting the NetSpeek tenant to the relevant cloud services. The import process described here associates devices with existing integrations; it does not create integrations. (There is a procedure available for for specific circumstances which permits the creation of integrations using the workbook – see the addendum about this topic if of interest.)

The example workbook includes fields used across all supported device types, so some columns may not apply to your environment. Of course not all devices support or require all data types – for example:

• When importing a display whose API is authenticated exclusively via its MAC address, there will not be a relevant username/login to configure
• A device that does not support custom network port configurations will not need a port value defined
• Many cloud-to-cloud integrations require only the device serial number and no additional configuration

Note that the workbook includes a sheet labeled Connections which focuses on how devices are physically connected/wired to each other. Connection types include audio-visual cabling between room components (such as HDMI and USB), power/electrical cabling (represented as as connections to controllable power-strips known as Power Distribution Units or PDUs), and network cabling (represented as Ethernet/RJ-45 connections to network switches).

You do not need to have every data point available before you begin. Start with the accurate information you have. For example, you may import Rooms and Devices first and add cabling, connection, or configuration details later. The Onboarding Center supports subsequent imports to add or update information as it becomes available.

If information is sensitive or not yet available, you may import the data you have and complete the remaining fields later in the NetSpeek Canvas. For example, you may choose not to include device management passwords in an import procedure, or you may add integration-specific settings after the initial device import is complete.

Configuring your workbook for Import

The example workbook linked above, and the template file you export from your NetSpeek tenant, have a sheet containing usage instructions. This portion of the guide is a supplement to those instructions.

The Devices and Connections sheets are the core of the import process. Most of the additional sheets are provided as reference material to help you prepare, and to aid your understanding of the import process.

Devices Sheet

Use the Devices sheet to tell NetSpeek where each device is located and what the device is. For each device, provide the applicable location information – such as country, state, city, building, floor, and room – followed by the device details, such as name, manufacturer, model, serial number, and IP address.

If a device appears in the workbook but should not be imported, set the Skip field for that row.

Add any additional configuration values required for your environment in columns after Skip. During the guided import, you will map those columns to the corresponding NetSpeek configuration fields.

Connections Sheet

This sheet is where you define physical connectivity between devices. You can identify multiple types of connections related to audio-visual, power, and networking cabling. These relationships give Lena important context about device dependencies and how the room is expected to operate. The information is represented in the Room Canvas and used by Lena in Room Health Checks, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and other aspects of the platform.

For each connection, identify the source device, source port, destination device, destination port, and cable or connection type. You may also add a note in Cable Spec. Select Skip for any row you do not want imported. Custom parameters are not supported on the Connections sheet; columns to the right of Skip are ignored.

Other Tabs

The Devices and Connections sheets are the only ones imported. The remaining sheets are reference material designed to help you understand valid values and prepare your data.

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Importing your workbook into the platform

When you have an XLSX file ready for import, return to the Onboarding Center interface in your NetSpeek tenant. Upload your workbook to start the guided import process.

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