Tag: conference room AV

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How do Meeting Rooms look like Post – COVID

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Back to “Normal”

COVID-19 wreaked havoc on normal American work life.  At the start of the pandemic, many companies around the world acted quickly to keep employees safe and moved to a new way of work – a work from home lifestyle. Across industries, COVID-19 serves as a lesson into the work-from-home life. How work is done and how offices are run has changed.  As we move forward, and as many companies are beginning to make the switch back to the office, industries are looking at offices and meeting room setups in more creative ways.  

Meeting Times

Studies show that time in meetings has been rising by 8% to 10% annually since 2000. As of 2019, an average of 31 hours are spent on monthly meetings. Meetings did not disappear during the pandemic and they are definitely not going to disappear when everyone is able to return to a conference room. Along with the added distancing and potential for masks, what we knew as typical conference room meetings are a thing of the past.  With modern day AV equipment and wireless presentation capabilities, the way we used to think of meetings will be a thing of the past.  

Meeting Rooms

A meeting room is especially designed for meetings and conferences and are typically found in places like offices, industries, and hospitals.  A meeting room should be equipped with the proper conference room audio video equipment to ensure smooth transmission.  There are a lot of ways a typical pre-COVID meeting room setup can look depending on the purpose of the meetings.  

Technology and Comfort

Thanks to technology (and COVID), meetings do not have to be in typical conference rooms like in the image below. 

 

Having conference room AV systems allows you to host your meetings anywhere.  This means with the proper equipment and positioning, meetings can be held and engaged from anywhere in the office.  This can keep employees safe, by keeping them distanced from each other, and comfortable in their own spaces.  

For example, the meeting space shown below encourages collaboration and flow while also promoting a relaxing and comfortable space.  The mobile lounge chairs allow for employees to distance themselves while the mobile whiteboard and wireless presentation can serve to move meetings to employees rather than all gathering in a stuffy conference room. 

Outdoors

Do you remember the first warm Spring day and your teacher taking the class to learn outside for the day? That first smell of fresh cut grass, sitting under a tree, enjoying a book for the day while you defrost from the cold classroom AC.  Nature has a great impact on humans. According to Kurstry Groves, a work space strategist, “Sunlight, fresh air and natural surroundings positively affect people’s sense of wellbeing and happiness.”  With modern day technologies like portable conference room AV equipment and wireless presentations, you can take your meetings outside! Your employees will be able to take a much needed mask break and enjoy the sunshine while staying productive, maybe even a little more creative too!

The days of piling into a stuffy meeting room are over.  We have to keep employees safe while still maintaining a productive and comfortable working environment.  If you are planning to return to the office and are struggling to figure out how your meetings will look, invest in proper conference room AV equipment, wireless presentations, and research the best way to adapt your meeting space. 

AV System Integrators: Are They Really Necessary?

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Your department has just been put in charge of renovating each of your company’s 10 conference rooms. New displays, new speakers, and new connectivity hubs will all be required. What do you do? Do you hire AV system integrators to do the job for you? Or do you attempt to do the job yourself?
For the absolute best results, hiring an expert is usually the way to go. Someone who has spent their entire life practicing something is usually going to do it better than someone attempting it for the first time. Anyone who has ever attempted to install a new bathroom sink can testify to this.
But is hiring an expert always necessary? Here are three reasons why hiring AV system integrators may be more hassle than it’s worth.

AV System Integrators: A Costly Solution

4K TVs and projectors are a lot cheaper than they used to be, but they’re still fairly expensive. So right from the outset, this project is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars. To pay a contractor’s salary on top of that will send the costs up significantly.
Now, if you’ve chosen to run wires from the conference room TV to a connectivity box in the center of the conference room table, then letting costs run that high is fully justified—installing HDMI, VGA, and mini DisplayPort cables in a way that’s seamless is a task which requires years of study, and the expertise of an AV system integrator will no doubt come in handy.
But we live in the year 2017, and connectivity boxes are borderline obsolete. Wireless solutions are readily available, and they only take 10 minutes to set up.

AV System Integrators: A Time-Consuming Solution

Since an AV system integrator can’t charge thousands of dollars for 10 minutes worth of work, it’s unlikely that they’ll recommend a wireless solution. Cables, they will insist, are your friend. For a truly stable connection, wires just can’t be beat. (If you’re planning on using your conference rooms to watch The Revenant in 4K resolution at the best possible quality and don’t care about wasting 10 minutes at the start of every meeting troubleshooting connectivity problems, this argument may have some validity).
But installing wires behind baseboards, under carpets, and through walls takes time. Do you really want your 10 conference rooms to be out of commission for a few days when you can easily solve all of your connectivity issues in just 10 minutes with a wireless presentation device?

Hard to Future-Proof Your Conference Room With Cables

Once wires are installed, they’re installed for good. Taking them out requires just as much time and effort as putting them in. And who knows which wires end users will require in 5 years? Thunderbolt 5? USB 7? HDMI 4?
If you decide to hire an AV system integrator to install wires, you should plan on re-hiring them every 5 years. Those wires are not to going to replace themselves.
A wireless presentation solution, in contrast, is only the size of an iPhone and requires only two short cables to install. Taking it in and out of the conference room requires no effort whatsoever.

Conclusion

If you decide to spend thousands of dollars hiring AV system integrators to install wires, prepare to spend thousands more on conference room delays. By offering your end users a wide variety of cables to connect their laptops to the TV with, you are essentially offering them a recipe for confusion. End users who have standard laptops may figure out which cable and which TV settings to use after two or three minutes, but end users with atypical laptops may need to call IT to help them out. The cost associated with all of these delays adds up fast.
A wireless presentation solution, meanwhile, gives end users the ability to connect their laptops to the TV in under 1 second no matter what video outputs their laptops have.
ADDITIONAL READING
5 Must-Have AV Products For Your Conference Room
6 Reasons System Admins Spend More Time in the Conference Room Than the IT Office
Conference Room Cable Management Checklist
 

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Wireless Screen Sharing vs. Conference Table Cable Management

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To share your laptop screen with a room full of people, you basically have three options: 1) hook your laptop up to a TV or projector using an HDMI, VGA, DVI, or Thunderbolt cable and/or adapter, 2) ask everyone in the room to awkwardly huddle around you, or 3) share your screen wirelessly.
The first option has been the go-to solution since the 90s and it works fairly well, except for one thing: In today’s BYOD environment, hooking a laptop up to a TV isn’t so easy. Laptops come with so many different outputs that you’ll need to have at least a dozen different cables on standby to accommodate them all. It should go without saying that a conference room with dozens of wires strewn across it is not only an eyesore, but due to the tripping hazards associated with cables, also a palm, elbow, and face sore as well.
Some businesses attempt to deal with this problem by hiring an AV installation company to drill wires through the conference room table and put cable management boxes and connectivity boxes at each seat.
In addition to being costly and time-consuming (an AV installation can leave your conference out of commission for several days), this solution is also a little near-sighted. Who’s to say what ports end users will need in 5 years? Thunderbolt 5? USB 7? HDMI 4? Will they even have ports at all? Companies that go this route may as well make “Conference Room Table Cable Management Expert” a full-time salaried position.
This is where the Ubiq Hive enters the picture. It only takes 5 minutes to set up and costs a fraction of an AV installation. All that’s required of the IT department is to: 1) Take the Hive out of the box, 2) Hook the Hive up to the TV or projector and to the company’s LAN, 3) Hold down on the power button.
When we say that it only takes 5 minutes to set up, there’s a good chance that we’re being overly cautious. The below video explains everything you need to know in just 57 seconds.

Once the device is up and running, your end users can begin presenting. For internal users, only one action is required—going to www.goubiq.com/downloads and downloading the app. This is a fairly self-explanatory task, but we made a quick video (27 seconds long) explaining how to do it anyway.

For guest users, the process is almost identical. The only difference is that guest users go to a different url (www.goubiq.com/guest) to download the app. The below video is basically the same as the one above, except we swapped in a different title card for the section where the url is displayed. We will not be offended if you decide to skip it.

(Alternatively, both guests and internal users can just use our browser-based solution at https://present.goubiq.com/).
Once the end users have connected their devices to the Hive, the IT department can monitor the Hive remotely through the Ubiq dashboard. To do this, go to https:dashboard.goubiq.com and login with the credentials that were sent to you in an email with the subject heading “Dashboard Credentials.”
The dashboard also comes with a bunch of other features that you can play around with. The two videos below will walk you through each of these features step by step.


In addition to solving all of your screen sharing issues, the Ubiq Hive will also solve all of your digital signage issues as well. If you want to optimize your conference room displays when meetings aren’t in session by showing videos, stills, or websites, the below video will show you how it’s done.

To book a free trial of our product, please click here.
ADDITIONAL READING
Conference Room Technology: 5 Investments You Should Make
Top 10 Conference Room Cable Management Fails of 2016
Meeting Room Setup in 1 Day

Want to set up a wireless Conference Room?Try Now

Conference Room Screen Sharing in 1 Easy Click

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With hackers constantly trying to infect your system with ransomware, corporate spies salivating at every opportunity to access your e-mails, and un-tech savvy employees doing everything they can to compromise security, being an IT manager can feel a bit like being a Secretary of Defence during wartime.
Luckily, Ubiq is here to help. Our wireless presentation system provides a simple, seamless user experience without skimping on security. Unlike certain other wireless presentation solutions which will go unmentioned, Ubiq allows internal users to stream over the corporate network and guest users to stream over the guest network. All media streams and messages sent between the Ubiq Hive and the user’s device are securely encrypted through standardized encryption protocols, which provides an additional layer of security.
For both internal and guest users, conference screen sharing only takes one click of the button. The two videos below explain how it’s done.

Want to set up a wireless Conference Room?Try Now

The Ubiq Wireless Presentation Solution Is Also a Digital Signage Solution

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When a TV is turned off, it’s basically just a big slab of glass and plastic that doesn’t serve any function other than to take up space. In the consumer world, this isn’t much of a problem: In the era of Netflix binge-watching and 3-day-long Game of Thrones marathons, very few people complain that their TV just sits on the wall unused. In the business world, the situation is a bit different. When business presentations aren’t in session, most conference room TVs remain powered off.
Given how expensive TVs can be (especially if your company has shelled out for a fancy 4K model), this seems like a bit of a waste.
Luckily, the Ubiq wireless presentation solution is also a digital signage solution. By logging into the Ubiq dashboard, you can send videos, photos, and weblinks to all of your conference room TVs. Rather than force your employees to look at a black screen every time they walk by the conference room, why not keep them motivated by showing them infographics regarding incentives, business wins, or new product information?
The below video explains everything you need to know about Ubiq’s digital signage in just 50 seconds.

Want to set up a wireless Conference Room?Try Now

Conference Room AV: How to Avoid a Lengthy and Costly Installation Process

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The first colour laptop, the Commodore SX-64, hit the market in 1984. It came with two video ports: an S-video port and composite video port. The device didn’t have batteries, weighed 23 pounds, and used a floppy drive that was bigger than the monitor (5 1/2 inches vs. 5 inches).
The laptop has come a long way since 1984, and so too have the ports that they come with. Over the course of just the last 8 years, laptops with one or more of the following ports have been in widespread use: VGA, DVI, USB, miniport, HDMI, Thunderbolt.
Prior to 2012, the multiplicity of video ports did not have a significant impact on the efficiency of business meetings. Most conference rooms had a shared PC connected to the TV or projector, so as long as everyone’s PowerPoint project was transferred to the shared PC prior to the meeting, presentations could go forward without too much difficulty.
In today’s BYOD era, this is no longer the case. If the shared PC hasn’t already gone extinct, it’s certainly high up on the endangered species list. Nowadays everyone brings their own laptops, and hooking up all those different laptops with all those different ports to a TV or projector can be a bit of a nightmare.
Luckily, 99.99% of today’s laptops come with WiFi capability, and connecting laptops to a TV or projector through WiFi is a lot cheaper and more time-efficient than hiring an AV company to drill thousands of dollars worth of wires, adapters, and cable management boxes through your walls and conference room tables.
In the three videos below, an unfortunate IT manager learns this conference room AV lesson the hard way…


Want to set up a wireless Conference Room?Try Now

We Bet Your Cable Management Box Doesn’t Have a Dashboard

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Apart from the obvious advantages that a wireless presentation system has over a conference room that’s been crammed full of cables and cable management boxes, there are a few not-so-obvious advantages as well.
For instance, it would require a very active and fertile imagination to use a cable or cable management box as an online collaboration/productivity tool.
With the Ubiq Hive, it’s a bit easier. All you have to do is log onto the Ubiq Dashboard at https://dashboard.goubiq.com and enter your credentials. From there, you can monitor all of your conference rooms, send notifications and digital signage to all of your displays, and analyze the usage logs.
Check out the two videos below for a step by step walkthrough.


Simplify your conference room AV setup today by requesting a free Ubiq demo.