The commercial audio visual integration industry has been changing over the last few years. Many people that use the communication systems we have installed, learned to communicate with very different methods than some of us have traditionally used. The younger participants, often labeled Millennials, grew up with cell phones and use these powerful devices with the ease of my parent’s use of typewriters.
I grew up with PCs & Macs and used Microsoft software products. Telephone modems to connect to online “communities” or bulletin boards- nope, not even in colour!
So, how can we all come together to communicate? We need to meet, discuss and collaborate to achieve our business goals. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is very popular right now. Most people carry a smart phone that runs programs (applications or “apps”) just like a PC or Mac or Deep Blue. These apps can and do include many viable communication tools, essentially for free. Many of us use FaceTime, Google Hangouts or Skype. How can we leverage these devices and apps to get business done? How does that translate to business when you work in a cubical, office, home or on a skateboard?
Figuring your Perfect “Space” requires you think about a few things:
- Do you need to present to a display in the room?
- Is your presentation space a large room with a projector and screen, or a small huddle room with a flat panel?
- Do you need a simple presentation space that knows when you walk in and turns on?
- Do you need a standards based video conferencing solution that guarantees a quality experience, or is a casual Google Hangout your gig?
- Do you use all kinds of devices for presentation or just laptops?
- Is wireless connectivity important (iOS or Android phones or MS Surface)?
- Do you work in teams or alone on your tablet?
- Mac? PC? Android? iOS? Linux? Which one or all?
- Do you go to an office where you work with others on PCs?
- Do you work with folks from various geographic areas?
- Do you need to stream events, like town hall meetings, to your whole organization for those not able to be present?
- Hey, we are collaborating, do you want to annotate and share the results with the team?
- Do you want to schedule a meeting in Outlook and the panel outside (or display inside) the room shows this?
- Do you work in cubicle land and have a bunch of huddle rooms?
- Do you have conference rooms with fixed or flexible furniture?
- Do you use a cafe-gyma-torium?
- Do the folks on the other end of your call always complain they cannot hear you well? Maybe they cannot hear anyone well?
- Maybe you do not hear them well in your cubical/huddle room/café/boardroom or on the phone?
- Cameras. Do you hate to always have to point the thing at who is talking? Do the little ones in your laptop make you all look fat or tiny?
- You bought all this stuff online, but it never works…where do those wires go?
- Networks! My IT gal/guy says no way, we cannot do that…or we cannot let you do that!
- Why can’t this be EASY?
Vistacom handles these questions all the time. We can help you communicate and work together. We know the challenges and benefits of integrating all these divergent technologies and making them work for you. We talk IT. Boardroom or phone, one participant or a thousand, we have been doing this for over sixty years. We can make your perfect “Space”?