Managed.IT - issue56

28 MANAGED.IT 01732 759725 COLLABORATION SMART Technologies recently introduced three new families of professional interactive displays designed to improve collaboration and teamwork. Ahead of the launch, ManagedIT spoke to SMART Technologies Global Business Development Manager Frazer Couzens about key workplace trends and how the company’s new line-up of all-in-one displays meets growing demand for seamless collaboration throughout an organisation, from the huddle room to the executive boardroom. Couzens started out by explaining how changes in office design and working practices, notably the popularity of home working, had transformed the workplace, leading to more shared space, more meeting places and more sophisticated conferencing tools. “In the 2000s, if you went into a sky-rise office block in London, about 20% of the total floorplan would have been allotted to shared space – the cafeteria, common seating areas and meeting spaces – and 80% would have been a sea of cubicles in which employees had assigned spaces. Cut to now and the design of new office space has over-rotated towards shared spaces, with hotelling instead of assigned seating and so forth,” he said. This trend, claims Couzens, has also changed the types of meeting we have, with AV (and AV spend) no longer restricted to the boardroom but democratised and spread throughout the workplace to support a variety of interactions – informal and formal, ad hoc and planned. “There are two major areas where people are spending a lot of money on interactive audio-visual technology: the huddle room, a room with doors where you can connect and conduct conference room-type meetings; and open zones, which might not have doors but have the ability to convene and connect people,” he said. Both types of space are likely to be used for collaborative team- working and will therefore require a different technological set-up to traditional conferencing rooms that are better suited to more formal, one-way engagements. “A conferencing room is really designed for conversing. Typically, it would include a passive monitor – a projector or flat screen; it would have a modern speaker/ microphone in middle of the table or a soundbar on the wall. There would be the ability to plug in a laptop and share content to the screen and maybe some sort of control device that would let you change sources; and it would probably allow you to do a conference, perhaps in a Microsoft Teams room or Zoom Room.” Couzens adds that while there Station to station Why collaboration stations are taking over from boardroom conferencing systems is still a place in organisations for ‘conversing’, this presentation style is at the smaller end of the collaboration spectrum, good for HR interviews or financial review meetings but not for true digital collaboration. Interact and contribute “At SMART, we believe collaboration requires two key ingredients to be effective. The first is the ability to interact rather than passively participate in a meeting; and the second is the ability to contribute. The big challenge around current web conferences or UCC meetings is that where one person shares everyone must follow, so they often end up more like a broadcast than collaborative working. True collaboration democratises who can contribute and how they can contribute; it gives everyone the ability to work on something together and to contribute to material,” explained Couzens. He argues that as a result huddle rooms and open zones require integrated ‘collaboration stations’ rather than traditional conferencing solutions that might be made up of disparate pieces put together by an AV specialist, with attendant complications around warranties, management and support. “As a minimum, a huddle room requires the ability to do some conferencing – ad hoc and scheduled – so it needs to be audio- and video-enabled. Secondly, it will need a display of some sort to visualise that web conference/ meeting, as well as your content – you are three times more likely to share content in a web conference meeting than you are to share video. Content is king in these meetings, so the ability to do wired or wireless presentation from the device you have with you, to share your device to the screen is crucial, whether that’s a corporate laptop or mobile phone or tablet.

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=