The New Normal: Effective Video Conferencing

As we move into the new normal I believe we are going to continue to see the importance of video conferencing as a form of business communication.

With activities like visiting customers / partners, work travel and reduced people within offices it seems clear that video conferencing will still continue to be a primary method of business communication. However as we move from this temporary fix lockdown state to a new normal we will want to be delivering solutions that allow for the mix of office based workers and those still at home within our companies as well as connecting with others.

As such business will need to be considering how they can ensure the everyone has the right tools for the best experiences in these situations. This will range from improving home setups with better webcams and headsets as they start to become available again and maybe even better home WiFi for some users. To to dedicated Teams or Zoom rooms within our offices. It will be very usual for every meeting to have people joining via video whilst some maybe in the office whilst socially distancing.

But I firmly believe there is a need for a solution that can allow people to quickly and easily share content within a room and across a video conference at the same time, across a multitude of video conferencing solutions with people who work within our organisations and outside. Have you ever tried to get a laptop visitor to share content within the meeting room and simultaneously to video attendees, typically those is a nightmare, you end up trying to get their presentation onto a corporate device or room facility or everyone joining a remote meeting on there devices.

These meetings will be in both formal meeting spaces and huddle spaces, which with social distancing is likely to increase. The good news, is last year it was announced that Teams, Zoom and WebEx would be allowing their room platforms to join alternative solutions, as yet I don’t think we have seen that come to light but hopefully we will see this come to light soon. We need solutions that are flexible and easy for the users to use as well as being effective, we need high quality audio and video for these to replace in person meetings for the long term.

I have a lot of interest in this space and I’m excited to look at technology by a number of providers such as Poly, Logitech, Jabra , Barco and others. I will be starting by looking at the exciting new Barco ClickShare Wireless Conferencing Solution. Watch out for a video and thoughts shortly.