Creating the Modern Meeting Room by Prodec Networks

Prodec Networks eGuide

An Introduction to the

MODERN MEETING ROOM

CONTENTS

CREATING THE

MODERN MEETING ROOM

INTRODUCTION | CREATING THE MODERN MEETING ROOM

WHAT MAKES A MODERN MEETING ROOM?

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW!

WHY IS THE MODERN MEETING ROOM SO IMPORTANT?

This eGuide explores how organisations can create Modern Meeting Rooms by successfully adopting today’s wide

WHAT IS COLLABORATION?

HOW DO MEETING ROOMS FACILITATE SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATION?

today’s businesses do everything they can to support it.

ROOM SHOWCASE | THE MODERN HUDDLE ROOM

Read on to discover:

ROOM SHOWCASE | THE MODERN MEETING ROOM

ROOM SHOWCASE | THE MODERN BOARD ROOM

INTERACTIVE PANELS: THE HEART OF YOUR MEETING SPACES

SIMPLE COMMUNICATIONS ARE KEY TO COLLABORATION SUCCESS

DONT NEGLECT YOUR NETWORK!

WHICH TECHNOLOGY SHOULD YOU USE IN YOUR MEETING ROOMS?

ABOUT PRODEC NETWORKS

range of available business IT resources. It also explores how organisations can use meeting rooms to facilitate collaboration, and considers why it’s so important that

- How to implement a Modern Meeting Room - Common issues caused by aging meeting room technology - The importance of collaboration in today’s businesses - Why meeting rooms are critical for collaboration success - Huddle, Meeting and Conference room showcases - How to pick an interactive panel that’s right for you - Leading meeting room IT Solutions This eGuide from Prodec Networks is vital for organisations of all sizes who are considering updating their meeting rooms but aren’t sure where to start.

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HISTORY

... THE

HISTORY For many, meetings have historically been a culprit associated with time misspent. We’ve all been victim to lost minutes due to difficulty setting up or using meeting room presentation technologies. Up until this point, collaboration and group-led capabilities may have been limited due to the setup of the meeting room, or the resources available to participants, leading to a lessproductive session.

What makes a

MODERN MEETING ROOM?

Today’s workforce is agile. It’s distributed across multiple locations, and like always, continues to thrive on efficiency. This distributed workforce needs to remain connected, and location can’t be an excuse not to collaborate effectively. Alongside this global shift in the way we work, the role of the meeting room has gained importance as a means of ensuring teams stay in touch and work together. As part of this, appropriate meeting room equipment needs to be provisioned to ensure that today’s modern workforce can continue to drive businesses forward.

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And what about communicating and collaborating with others located around the world? With today’s workforce situated anywhere and everywhere, it’s critical that communication is natural, seamless, simple and effective, in order to avoid project downtime or delays. How, then, do today’s meeting rooms help to solve these problems? What makes a meeting room “modern”, and why are these spaces vital for success in today’s business world? Any cause for downtime should be avoided like the plague, as it’s costly in terms of productivity and can be directly associated to time that could have been better spent driving new revenue.

What makes a Modern Meeting Room | eGuide

IN WITH THE NEW

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE

NEW!

Improperly kitted-out meeting rooms lack potential. They cause delays, are often difficult to use, aren’t cost-effective and prevent collaboration and teamwork-based meetings from being as productive or effective as they could be. There are many tell-tale signs that your business needs to upgrade its Meeting Rooms. Do your meetings suffer from any of the issues listed below?

Low staff uptake of meeting room tools due to difficulty of use or lack of training

Different technology in different rooms, further complicating successful utilisation

Delayed starts to meetings as technology is set-up

Limitations when collaborating with remote recipients

Difficulty or delays when swapping presenter

Recipients forced to travel long distances to attend meetings

Connection problems, including drops on calls

Separate systems for voice, video and data collaboration

Low quality audio, including volume issues, reverb and background noise

Cables… cables everywhere!

Don’t settle for mediocre When implemented correctly, the right technology can transform an aging meeting space into a collaboration hub where innovation, great conversations, and successful meetings happen. In turn, you’ll achieve true ROI on your IT investments by reducing travel requirements and improving the efficiency and productivity of your improved spaces.

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What makes a Modern Meeting Room | eGuide

MODERN MEETING ROOM

3 critical questions that guarantee success

WHY IS THE

With the usability of your new spaces in mind, there are three core questions to ask yourself when considering which technology you need to achieve meeting room success:

MODERN MEETING ROOM

If the collaboration solution you’re considering isn’t fit for purpose, it’s unsuitable for your business and won’t be effective in its role. Being fit for purpose could refer to a number of things, including whether it matches your business goals, if it’s a suitable fit for your teams, or whether it’s within budget. Perhaps most importantly though, does it enable successful collaboration?

SO IMPORTANT?

Creating springboards for collaboration Refreshing the technology available within your meeting rooms can create new opportunities for your users that are already actively using your meeting rooms. At the same time, you can remove IT-based frustrations that are preventing potential users from seeing the value of meeting room collaboration. Improved meeting room uptake means you’ll receive an increased return on your investment, so it’s vital that you consider your users when designing your new meeting rooms.

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Is it fit for purpose?

Is it simple to use?

So many meetings fall short of being constructive because vital IT tools such as legacy video conferencing are difficult to use, don’t interconnect well, or are overly complicated. Simplicity is the key to success. If you want your employees to fully utilise these new spaces, making sure meeting room technology is quick and simple to use is vital. You’ll also save set-up time and improve collaboration capabilities while you’re at it.

Is it cost effective?

Like any investment, you’ll want to see a return on your purchase. Creating a suitable meeting room environment provides payback by improving collaboration and communication capabilities. For example, Microsoft claim their Surface Hub tool provides a 138% ROI over a three-year period. Successful collaboration can be extremely powerful!

What makes a Modern Meeting Room | eGuide

COLLABORATION

WHAT IS

COLLABORATION? “The action of working with someone to produce something.” – Oxford English Dictionary

COLLABORATION

How do

MEETING ROOMS

facilitate successful collaboration? Meeting rooms provide private, creative spaces void from office distractions where information can be presented, where ideas can be developed, and where business decisions are made. By formalising the process of collaboration through dedicated meeting spaces, the priority for your session is to work together to achieve something, whether

While uninspiring, this definition pretty much hits the nail on the head. “Working with someone”, though, is potentially a little limited, as collaboration could involve two, three, ten, a hundred, or even thousands of individuals. Crowdsourcing is an excellent example. Global projects such as Wikipedia and open source software have revolutionised the world, and are proof that large-scale collaboration involving hundreds of thousands of people is extremely powerful.

it’s a business plan, a constructive argument, a distribution strategy, a new brand, product development, or HR process. By integrating interactive, easy-to-use technology into these spaces, barriers to collaboration such as location and poor user engagement are resolved. Meeting spaces such as huddle rooms, meeting rooms and conference rooms are no longer designed just for face-to-face or phone “meetings” - they’re also spaces curated for collaboration, creativity, innovation and business success.

In a business environment, although the numbers involved aren’t nearly as large, collaboration is still critical to success. Take the creation of a new widget as an example. Your designers work together to create an idea. Your manufacturers bring the idea to life, while your marketers and sales teams work together to sell it, before your distribution teams send it out to happy customers. Your individual teams collaborate internally and with each other so that your product is as effective as it can be, and your route to market is as efficient as possible. Collaboration is essential for today’s modern workplaces, so it’s important that you provide your employees and partners with the capability to collaborate successfully.

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What makes a Modern Meeting Room | eGuide

WHAT MAKES A MODERN

HUDDLE ROOM? These Intimate spaces are commonly used for 1-1 or 2-1 meetings, although could potentially be used for small group sessions. Privacy is important, as is providing your users with the capability for clear communications with external recipients via phone and video.

Separate business and guest WiFi networks make connecting to meeting resources simple and secure.

Integration with the room communications system ensures simple audio and video collaboration capabilities regardless of whether your employees prefer to use your business phone system, or software tools such as Skype For Business and StarLeaf.

Choosing between an interactive or non-interactive panel offers a range of ways to communicate with external recipients through video collaboration, while sharing data efficiently and clearly.

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Integrated camera, speaker and microphone arrays incorporate all communications tools into one unit perfect for small spaces. The wideangle camera ensures all recipients are viewable even when in peripheral view of the camera.

What makes a Modern Meeting Room | eGuide

A microphone array provides crystal clear sound for audio and video collaboration.

A dedicated pan tilt zoom camera allows for video collaboration with external participants. These tools are agnostic to the communications platform used, allowing for â&#x20AC;&#x153;plug and playâ&#x20AC;? capabilities.

The centrepiece of your meeting room, interactive touch panels make collaboration sessions engaging, creative and productive, no matter the location of participants.

Found next to the entrance of your meeting spaces, room booking systems ensure double-booked meeting rooms are a thing of the past.

WHAT MAKES A MODERN

MEETING ROOM? 5|

By using a unified system for your voice, video and data sharing requirements, collaboration with remote participants is quick, easy, and efficient. Wireless presenting tools make switching presenter simple. Spend less time setting www.prodec.co.ukup, and more time collaborating.

The perfect collaboration space, these multi-purpose environments are suitable for small and medium-sized meetings, and are great for hosting interactive sessions with participants situated in the room or connected remotely. Meeting rooms are key collaboration and teamwork spaces, and require a range of interactive, communications and network technologies to support the demanding goals of interactive sessions.

What makes a Modern Meeting Room | eGuide

Unobtrusive ceiling speakers ensure everybody can hear external participants regardless of their location within the room.

Conduct presentations to the board and other stakeholders with impressive LED screens and video wall displays.

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Dedicated pan tilt zoom camera sits below the screen for a natural communications experience when conferencing with external board members or customers.

Integrated table microphones allow all board members to communicate clearly without relying on unsightly hardware being dotted around the room.

WHAT MAKES A MODERN

BOARD ROOM? While great for board-level meetings, these rooms also often act as showcase areas when important customers or partners visit premises. As such, the most successful board rooms are impressive spaces with high levels of investment. Technology needs to be unobtrusive, simple to use, and bespoked so that they work perfectly for these unique spaces.

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Room control panels provide the host with the ability to set up the room to fit any requirement, including dimming lights, shutting blinds, turning on screens, dialling external participants and setting up video conferencing.

What makes a Modern Meeting Room | eGuide

HISTORY INTERACTIVE PANELS

INTERACTIVE PANELS

INTERACTIVE PANELS ARE THE HEART OF YOUR MEETING ROOM.

Interactive, network-attached screens have revolutionised the way that business collaboration can be conducted. These multipurpose boards act as the hub of the Modern Meeting Room, and can be used to improve the output of almost any type of meeting.

With an interactive panel in your meeting space, you can achieve the following: Fluid group collaboration Interactive presentations

How do you choose the right interactive panels for your

MEETING ROOMS? As is often the case when implementing a new IT solution, the variety you have to choose from can be staggering. Your business size, sector, applications and software commonly used across your internal teams all have an impact when deciding upon the most appropriate interactive panel for your organisation’s meeting rooms.

Digital annotation of content and applications “Blank-canvas” whiteboard activities Screen sharing with local and remote recipients High-definition video conferencing

First and foremost, you need to consider your users, and think about what you can see your teams using the screens for. If your business will only be annotating Office based systems like Word or Powerpoint, your requirements are going to be different to a specialist business that needs to annotate bespoke applications. Different interactive panels support different annotation tools, so matching the right screen to fit individual collaboration, education and training environments is key to success and ROI.

Long-distance collaboration Collaborate with home workers and satellite office ROI through improved efficiency, productivity and reduced travel

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Certain panels such as the Microsoft Surface Hub and Cisco Spark have built-in cameras and microphones for video collaboration, and interoperate with other communication tools such as Skype For Business or Cisco Spark UC; these portable tools are perfect for small to medium-sized collaboration spaces or for covering multiple rooms. What makes a Modern Meeting Room | eGuide

COMMUNICATIONS

SIMPLE COMMUNICATIONS TOOLS

ENABLE

GREAT COLLABORATION

How to keep meeting room collaboration

SIMPLE

Being able to communicate effectively is critical for successful

Having separate systems for voice, video and data collaboration causes

collaboration. If your meeting participants arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t all present

complexity during a meeting for the host and also for remote participants.

physically, you can provide the means to collaborate over

By combining your individual meeting room systems and integrating them

distance by implementing critical tools such as video

into one platform, communication and collaboration becomes just as

conferencing and unified communications platforms.

efficient and productive as if everybody was present in the room.

Historically, voice and video conferencing (VC) tools have often been overly intricate and difficult to use, and as a result have been the bane of many a meeting. Challenges with interoperability and usability have meant that video conferencing tools in particular have suffered from poor user uptake, and in many instances have resulted in the entire systems being relegated to a dusty shelf.

With an all-in-one unified communications system in play across your meeting room environments, recipients only need to access a single platform for seamless collaboration capability.

As the demand for mobility and remote working has increased, communications technology vendors like Cisco, Mitel and Polycom have been forced to rethink the way they approach their solutions, or face losing market share to video conferencing innovators such as StarLeaf. Video conferencing is now a necessity within the modern workplace, and as such it needs to be simple to use and high-quality in order to be effective. When the right video communications platform is supported by an excellent business network, simplicity and quality are both achievable, and as such video conferencing is becoming a staple for success within Modern Meeting Rooms.

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What makes a Modern Meeting Room | E-Guide eGuide

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NETWORK INTERACTIVE PANELS

NETWORK

DON’T NEGLECT YOUR

NETWORK Forgetting something? You’ve installed your new screens, unified communications platform and video conferencing system, but something’s not quite right. Perhaps you’re suffering from poor-quality video and drops on your VoIP phone calls, or you’re waiting an age for your data to display on your new interactive panel. The biggest crime? You’re still relying on dated wired connections that cause delays and make presentations less fluid. It’s the network aspect of meeting room refresh projects that many businesses don’t properly consider. If you have insufficient network bandwidth to maintain your organisation’s new collaboration tools, or if your wireless network isn’t built to properly support the meeting room environment, your new technology will be limited. Collaboration tools are often bandwidth hoggers, so it’s vital you consider the impact your new meeting rooms will have on your network, and ensure you take relevant steps to prevent this from being a problem in the first place. Ensuring you can maintain security across your network is always high priority, no matter the project. Employing separate guest WiFi networks that are simple to access can prevent unauthorised access to your network resources while maintaining a stable internet connection for your guests. At the same time, considering how you secure your multi-site collaboration sessions can prevent data interception when in transit and at rest.

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Removing cables from the Meeting Room Input cables are untidy, inefficient, and cause delays with setup and presentation sharing. By making your meeting room environments wireless, you don’t need to worry about recipients having the correct port on their endpoints to present, and swapping presenter can be as simple as pressing a button. Look out for wireless presentation tools such as Barco and Solstice – there’s nothing better on the market.

What Whatmakes makesaaModern ModernMeeting MeetingRoom Room| |E-Guide eGuide

PARTNERS

SMART Interactive panels and collaboration tools

WHICH

TECHNOLOGY

AVOCOR Interactive panels

SHOULD I USE IN MY MEETING ROOMS?

Avocor manufactures a range of interactive panels designed to enhance the meeting space by enabling smart and fluid collaboration. An excellent alternative to SMART if you’re working to a lower budget.

You’re not alone in your quest to make your Meeting Rooms the best they can be. There are a number of IT vendors that provide best-in-class tools that integrate to create excellent business collaboration environments.

NUREVA Audio and video collaboration solutions

Here are some of Prodec’s favourites:

The SMART Board Pro range of interactive panels enables local and digital collaboration by combining excellent hardware with great collaboration applications. You’ll see enhanced productivity from the get-go, leading to huge long term ROI.

Nureva specialises in providing audio and visual solutions that accelerate your collaborative processes in meetings. Look out for Nureva’s innovative Span tool - it’s bound to make waves in a meeting room near you.

CISCO Networking, communication and collaboration tools

BARCO CLICKSHARE Wireless presenting

Cisco provides a massive range of business IT hardware ranging from network equipment, UC systems and interactive panels that all integrates together seamlessly. Pay close attention to SPARK, Cisco’s collaboration range that’s rapidly growing in popularity.

This “one-click” presentation tool enables you to present from your endpoint without installing any software. With simple integration and setup, all you need is a USB port on your laptop or an app for mobile devices.

MICROSOFT Surface Hub Interactive Whiteboard

SOLSTICE POD Wireless presenting

Microsoft’s high-end digital whiteboard integrates with other Microsoft apps, has built-in cameras, and provides the capability to create and collaborate with teams no matter where they’re based. It’s difficult to get better than this, if it’s within budget!

The Solstice Pod from mersive allows you to stream content to your interactive panels from a range of endpoint devices. It’s extremely simple to use, doesn’t require training, and makes meeting set-up quick and easy.

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What makes a Modern Meeting Room | eGuide

PARTNERS

HPE ARUBA Wireless Networking Aruba’s range of wireless access points and management system options ensure suitable wireless coverage no matter the size of your meeting spaces or the budget you’re working to.

Achieve meeting room nirvana with

PRODEC NETWORKS

STARLEAF Video Conferencing With dedicated video room systems, Skype-for-business interoperability and desk-to-meeting room interoperability capabilities, StarLeaf’s range of innovative video conferencing tools are miles ahead of most of its competitors.

Prodec Networks provides business IT solutions that enable teams to share information, ideas and knowledge without geographic or

REVOLABS (YAMAHA) Video Conferencing

technology limitations. By combining true expertise of business networks

Perfect for huddle rooms, the Revolabs video conferencing system doubles up as a room management system by combining audio, video and screen sharing into one simple-to-use platform. It can also be managed remotely for simple configuration.

panels and phone systems, Prodec’s customers enjoy stable, secure and

MITEL Conference phones and Unified Communications Mitel’s unified communications tools are brilliantly simple in their execution. Mitel’s range of conference phones are easy to use, so your meeting recipients can connect quickly and focus on the real matters at hand.

RESERVA Meeting room Signage This range of meeting room signs integrates with calendar systems such as Outlook to provide a clear display of availability of your meeting rooms. No more double-booked rooms!

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with leading industry knowledge of user-friendly tools such as interactive scalable IT environments that nurture true collaboration and encourage employee productivity. If you’ve got an upcoming Meeting Room project, would like to get handson with an interactive panel, or want to learn more about how Prodec Networks can help your business grow through IT, contact the team using the details below.

enquiries@prodec.co.uk

+44(0)118 924 1216