Whether used as source devices or to control installed AV solutions, the use of mobile devices in meeting room applications is growing exponentially. Here, we take a look at some recent AV product introductions that can be integrated with a BYOD strategy.
While meeting room integration predates the current concept of collaboration by some years, the emergence of smartphones and tablet PCs as source and control devices has rewritten the rule book. A good indicator is the pace of development in Barco’s landmark ClickShare meeting room collaboration system.
When ClickShare was first unveiled early last year it was aimed at the laptop generation, with assumption based on the familiar issues that arose when several presenters needed to hook up their machines to an installed AV solution in the meeting room. Even while ClickShare was in development, the technology landscape was evolving and by the time it was launched BYOD had arrived.
Barco responded, helped in no small measure by the acquisition of AWind, with ClickShare support for mobile devices was introduced, starting with Apple’s iOS. Last month, this support was extended to users of Android phones and tablets. An app provides a virtual button allowing users to show documents, pictures and screen shots in the ClickShare composition.
Competition
With a market volume estimated to be 40 times that of the education sector, facilitating presentations was sure to attract competition for ClickShare –particularly with the window left open by the Belgian company for lower-cost competitors.
The most recent entrant to the market is Christie Brio. This is described as a meeting presentation and content sharing solution that takes the hassle out of single and multi-site workplace meetings. Brio enables multiple attendees at meetings to run audio and video presentations from their own devices, without scrambling for matching display cables and adapters, plugging in dongles or installing and configuring new software to get it working.
Brio ‘nodes’ route up to five presentations to a meeting room’s displays. Once the content is processed by the node, it can also be made available to other Brio nodes via a shared network. In this way a variety of content – including PowerPoint, audio, whiteboarding and videoconferencing sessions – can be pushed to any display attached to the Brio node, and shared with all the displays in the same meeting.
Brio nodes can be connected via a network to multiple worksites on a corporate campus, or across the country. All Brio nodes added to a meeting will see the same presentations, and any Brio node user can add a presentation to the meeting. Brio is said to make interactive content sharing across multiple rooms and offices straightforward, plus the cost of Brio nodes is low enough to equip even remote users in home offices.
Brio also takes full advantage of interactive whiteboard collaboration. Users in multiple locations can work together on notes and sketches. Any Brio node connected to a meeting allows users anywhere to contribute to that whiteboard session. “We’ve all been in meetings that were slowed down or fell apart because of the many hassles that come up when multiple people with their own laptops and software try to get presentations successfully running on meeting room screens. I’ve seen cheers break out when it all actually works,” said Christian Merrill, Christie Brio product manager.
Direct to display
For those with less complex requirements, there are a number of solutions that don’t require a ClickShare or a Brio to get a presentation on screen.
At the last ISE, for example, Mitsubishi showed the UD740U WUXGA projector with thin-client network support and tablet and smartphone accessibility. This allowed users t o present directly from their iPads, iPhones and Android devices. Wi-Fi Doc is an application that allows data stored on a tablet or smartphone (in txt/pdf/ppt/xls/doc/jpeg formats) to be sent directly to the projector and shown.
An option that is increasingly attractive to the corporate meeting room environment is the interactive flat panel. The last month alone has seen a number of new solutions pairing touchscreens with collaboration apps. These are an alternative to an interactive whiteboard- based collaboration solution.
SMART has been a pioneer in collaborative solutions in the classroom and the meeting room and a new range of corporate touchscreen solutions will appear in the next few months. Earlier this year, SMART released its implementation of the Microsoft Lync Room System architecture . The mobility clients for Lync 2010 were launched in 2011 and Microsoft continues to expand the mobile capabilities of Lync on the devices. The latest features include instant messaging and presence, conferencing and telephony.
New entrants
Other vendors active in the field include Sahara, BenQ and Hitachi – although these vendors are largely focussed on the education market for the present, software like DisplayNote (adopted by both Sahara and BenQ) gives vendor’s hardware collaboration capabilities.
With 2014 tipped as the ‘year of the interactive flat panel display’ expect many more entrants to the market, plus the addition of BYOD collaboration capabilities to existing products. CTOUCH, for example, has announced its Smoothboard Air technology. This new collaboration software allows presenters to share their screen among multiple participants with mobile devices such as iPads, Android tablets and smartphones.
With the novel use of a QR Code projected on the screen, or displayed IP address and PIN, participants within the room may scan and access the screen from their mobile device without any app installation.
Smoothboard Air will stream to up to 30 devices simultaneously, Participants may be invited to join and start collaborating instantly. Each mobile device becomes an interactive whiteboard surface where both presenter and participants can annotate on any application simultaneously. Smoothboard Air also allows remote desktop control directly from the device. The presenter may assign permissions for each participant to have access to annotation or remote control functions.
BYOD or BYOC?
As innovative as these solutions are, there will be instances where one group of users or another – Blackberry usage seems to pose a particular problem – is excluded from BYOD provision. In these instances, current meeting solution are available to provide users with other means of getting their presentation on screen.
Arguably an unexpected by-product of InFocus’s Mondopad, which uses the ‘internet of everything’ concept to email presentations to the screen, the Bring Your Own Content (BYOC) idea divorces presentation materials from their physical container. The mobile device is no longer the source – it is merely the point of origin for the file, which might just as easily be in the cloud. InFocus has continued its development with BigTouch, and the company is no longer alone in pursuing this course.
Assessing a customer’s need for a meeting room solution in a BOYD context is far from straightforward. Do you specify a solution that meets the majority of situations, covering iOS and Android applications? Do you take a safer route with a BYOC solution? What happens if the customer is a financial services organisation, and everyone has a Blackberry? One thing’s for sure: there will be many false starts before the ideal solution emerges.
