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How many meetings have you gone to where there was a scrabbling for the lights at the beginning and end of a slideshow? One new addition to the meeting room technology industry is interactive room-control systems. A room control system will allow you to control most of the electronic equipment in the conference room from a single centralized area.
A room control system ends all that moving around to switch on the lights, complaints that the thermostat has to be turned down, and questions about who is nearest the projector (and who knows where the button is to turn it on).
Another more basic addition to technology in meeting rooms is a committed computer. This is especially helpful for those that tend to spend a lot of time hosting meetings. Instead of having to unplug and haul a computer into the conference room (or, worse, calling the tech department to set one up in there for you), all you have to do is bring a CD of your presentation, or access the presentation via the web. This makes setting up for meetings swift and effortless, and also helps with video conferencing, as everything is already in its place.
When you can meet a person’s eyes and read their body language, communication is quicker and more consistent; a one-sided telephone lecture turns into, instead, a shared meeting. This is easy to attain with a good video conferencing system. With plenty of bandwidth and a quality internet connection, video conferencing is just as doable as a telephone call, especially if the meeting room is equipped with its own computer.
After a digital projector, the next step in meeting room technology is the electronic whiteboard. The traditional dry erase board has been a meeting room standard for years. But it has limitations which really show when compared to some of the technology on the market today. For one, everything written on a white board is temporary, and must be erased to leave room to write more. This means that, if the meeting notes will have to be referred to later, one person will have to be assigned to take notes from the board. But this old-fashioned system is a thing of the past. Electronic whiteboards abolish the need to take notes by hand, as all that is noted on their surface can be printed (as with Copyboards), kept as digital information (as with Peripheral boards), or even be classified, grouped, and interacted with (Interactive Whiteboards).
In general, knowing what kind of meeting room technology you need for your business is just a matter of surveying your needs. Do you typically hold important meetings with associates across the world? Do you find that most of the notes taken at meetings are unfinished or incoherent, or you don’t have anyone to take them? Then some of the advances discussed here may be for you. It’s just as easy to have too much technology in the meeting room as it is to have too little, so make sure not to spend more than you need. The technology you purchase should make meetings run more smoothly, not slow them down while employees spend all their time figuring out how to use these new tools.

www.edgevision.co.uk

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Audio, Business, Conference Call. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.