Enabling Your Conference Rooms for Modern Collaboration

Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more.

Last week, I worked with an great R&D company that was looking to transform their conference rooms to enable collaboration across their many offices.  This is a common scenario and in fact, studies have discovered that 97.5% of conference rooms only a projector/display and speakerphone.

typical-conf-room

To help solve this business challenge, Microsoft has released version 2 of the Skype Room System (SRS) .  SRS enables customers to plug in their existing projectors/displays and speakerphones.  Add a camera.  And transform the room into a Skype Meeting Room that enables people in the room to collaborate with anyone on Skype for Business.  Since Skype for Business runs on PC, Mac, IOS, and Android devices, it opens up the scope of collaboration from just the people in the conference room to people working anywhere on almost any device.  [Also, on my last post, our partner, Citrix, extends the reach of Skype For Business to Linux and even a Raspberry Pi ]

The great thing about the Skype Room System (SRS) is that with a single touch, users can join a meeting.  One of common pieces of feedback that I get from my customers about traditional videoconferencing systems is that they are difficult to use.  With Skype, users just need to tap the meeting on the display to join the meeting.

srs-1

In the picture below, I have setup the Logitech Smartdock with their ConferenceCam Connect.  This is a great solution for small huddle rooms.  The Skype Room System can be combined with other cameras to support larger rooms as well.

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For more information, please see

Skype Room System Technet (here)

Logitech SmartDock (here)