I must admit I neglected the Video Networker blog over the
past 3 years. I started a new job in 2013 and the scope was and still is much
broader than video. I had many interesting topics to write about but they did
not fit the Video Networker label, so I did not post. Over time I assumed that
Video Network had faded away, so imagine my surprise when I checked the blog activity
earlier today and realized that a lot of people still go to Video Networker for
information. Most visitors come from Germany, Austria, and Saudi Arabia.
I thought about it again and expanding the scope of the blog
would actually be very natural. Over the past 3 years video was absorbed in all
sorts of collaboration tools while Unified Communications gradually became part
of the broader Digital Workplace.
The virtual meeting experience has improved a lot. Most meetings
today require some kind of content sharing, and web conferencing has become the
default way for starting a meeting. Today, I rarely get a meeting invitation without
a link to a virtual meeting room.
Conferencing rooms however have not kept up. Many have only
a speaker phone in the middle of the table; selected few have video
conferencing systems. Bridging between video conferencing and web conferencing
is still not easy. Vendors that have both types of solutions are gradually converging
web conferencing rooms with video conferencing rooms but there is still work to
be done on the user interface and the affordability of such solutions.
Web conferencing vendors have tried addressing collaboration
rooms by offering endpoints or rather kits to build endpoints that seamlessly
connect to the web conferencing solution. But we all know that a room is very
different from a screen of a desktop or a mobile device. It has multiple walls,
and there are usually multiple people involved. Acoustics and view angles play
a major role in a great collaboration room experience. In addition, while web
conferencing and video conferencing do a good job sharing content (screens or applications),
they have not been successful in enabling true collaborative work on documents,
images, video clips, etc.
The industry is therefore working
on alternative next-generation collaboration solutions. True collaboration in a
room requires a lot of space (surface) and new ways to manipulate content. Larger
monitors at affordable prices deliver the additional space (surface), and
content and live video can be distributed over multiple monitors hanging on
different walls, thus fully leveraging the room. Touch technology allows
interacting with large screens in the same way we interact with mobile devices.
So the key remaining problem is how to bring the ocean of data that we have
today into the collaboration room. It is not about PowerPoint presentations and
spreadsheets anymore but rather about live web pages, video feeds, and
real-time analytics. Once the data is available in the room, new collaboration
room technology allows for creation of new assets, white boarding, brainstorming,
and for storing the results from the collaboration session, so that the next meetings
can continue from where the previous meeting ended.
In the meantime, the virtual
meeting camp has moved one step further and targets now continuous collaboration
in and between meetings. A new generation of team collaboration tools allows
for persistent collaboration via group chat and document collaboration that can
start long before the first meeting and continue uninterrupted between
meetings.
And then, there are considerations about cost and investment
protection. Making virtual meetings available to let’s say 100,000 enterprise
users means getting 100k subscriptions from the vendor / service provider. As the
technology evolves, the service changes but the cost for the enterprise remains
predictable. By contrast, upgrading several thousands of conference rooms in a
large enterprise is a big capital expense. There is also uncertainly about the
lifespan of new technologies.
There are good reasons to think hard before making a
decision on collaboration room investments, and I will continue tracking this
topic.
