Smarter Systems Collaboration Center:

 As COVID-19 restrictions lift and we slowly start to return to the office, businesses around the world will have to adopt a hybrid work-style. The balance between remote and office-based working will be hard for some, especially if it wasn't the business standard pre-pandemic. To ensure business as usual, it's now more important than ever to consider your conference room technology strategy.  

Video Conferencing Solutions

Ask yourself how you are going to continue to leverage your unified communications and collaboration (UCC) platforms in your conference room to engage with people on your team who are still remote. We find that the most popular solutions we work with are Microsoft Teams and Zoom. 

Once employees return, they'll likely be most comfortable with their devices and the UCC platform interface they've been using while working from home. This will be simply out of comfort and seamlessness. That means you may need to BYOM – Bring Your Own Meeting.

BYOM vs. RBM

A Bring Your Own Meeting (BYOM) relies on a meeting participant's device to drive the meeting technology. If that's not the approach you are currently taking, you may consider a Room-Based Meeting (RBM). RBM relies on a dedicated in-room system to drive meeting technology. Choosing which will be best for your company will make it easier for you to integrate conference room technology that aligns with your team's needs. 

Bring Your Own Meeting (BYOM)

Here at Smarter Systems, internally, we've taken a BYOM approach. We see it work well when our conference rooms are platform agnostic. To enable remote collaboration across a tool like Microsoft Teams or Zoom, it's helpful to at a minimum have three things in your conference room:

1. One to two displays appropriately sized for your space.
2. A high-quality HD or 4K USB camera
3. Microphone and speaker systems that cover the room

All of these are great options to integrate into a BYOM environment and offer the flexibility to connect over any meeting platform the meeting participant or host chooses to use. 

Room-Based Meeting (RBM) 

RBM is an excellent solution if an organization you primarily use one UCC meeting platform or if not everyone in your organization travels with their own laptop. In an RBM environment, it's helpful to at a minimum have four things in your conference room:

1. One to two displays appropriately sized for your space.
2. A high-quality HD or 4K USB camera
3. Microphone and speaker systems that cover the room
4. A meeting host, like a dedicated desktop computer or a component built into your other conferencing hardware that serves as an endpoint for the UCC platform you choose

An RBM can be set up by simply dedicating a desktop computer to be used in the meeting space with the components used for a BYOM environment. Several ready-made solutions allow you to set up the conferencing hardware as an endpoint for Zoom or MS Teams. This requires an additional user license to whichever platform you use for standardization.  

Will you adopt a BYOM or RBM? Are your conference rooms ready? Let us help with your AV technology strategy.