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Creating a High-Tech Meeting/Conference Room?
papaia asks: "As the network geek in my company, I have been tasked with defining a high-end, fully connected and extremely easy to use conference room, for our CEO, who is your classic non-computer-using person. The requirements are to accommodate 'local' (to the conference room) meetings, as well as interactive sessions with people in other locations, allowing him to discuss/debate various product solutions, on files being opened and available to him to pinpoint issues, without the knowledge of the underlying software used to create them (e.g. CAD drawings where he could make annotations, etc). Do any of you have recommendations for building the 'meeting room of the 21st century'?"
"The solutions I have been looking into, so far, range from various types of whiteboards (Panasonic's interactive whiteboard, or SMART board one), to interactive displays, and software such as Netmeeting, or Cisco's meeting place.
I obviously need to combine any or all of the above with some capability of video (of course), thus I am looking into various webcams, and conferencing capabilities in some equipment - the latter is yet another challenge (VoIP or not?!?). I have also looked at meeting room suggestions, and I cannot really make up my mind."
I obviously need to combine any or all of the above with some capability of video (of course), thus I am looking into various webcams, and conferencing capabilities in some equipment - the latter is yet another challenge (VoIP or not?!?). I have also looked at meeting room suggestions, and I cannot really make up my mind."
Yes. First, make sure that he's willing to actually spend money on this. Once you're past that hurdle, order something like a Tandberg 6000, and a dedicated T-1 line. Install the Tandberg in the conference room, and install either two large projection screens, or large plasma display units along with it. This will allow you to have the main conference on one screen, and a presentation on the other. Make sure that you have equipment at the remote end that is simmilar, or appropriate to the remote end, I.E. for a small office with 10 or so people, a portable Tandberg 1000 should suffice. For a large office, you'd need another 6000. The small remote officess can likely get by with a fractional T-1, or multiple ISDN lines, since each video connection only needs like 384k symetrical to work. YOU need the T-1 has the hub, and if that becomes insufficient, you can upgrade that to a DS-3/OC-3 type link pretty easily.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Talk to the guy who did this for the Jedi Council. That guy did one hell of a job
You want a pitch black room with a couple of white spotlights and a bunch of tall black boxes with oversized orange numbers on them placed in a circle around the room. The boxes should project people's images on them when activated from secret remote sites around the world. The room itself should be located deep in an underground bunker.
All we want to do is eat your brains.
I highly recommend using Polycom's line of webcams.
They feature video auto-tracking (camera follows you) as well as PC integration. Using the H.323 standard, these webcams can connect with Netmeeting, Gnome Meeting, other webcams, and much more allowing you to offer conferencing to a wide range of people. With the PC integration you can share your desktop with your client while holding a steady conversation. H.323 also transmits voice as well elimating the need for phones. In our experiences, however, the clarity of voice is not as nice as a standard telephone call over a speakerphone. The unit will plug into either a monitor or television and can be connected directly into an ISDN line or assigned an IP address to receive phone calls.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
Just get a big whiteboard. Those computerized canvas devices are expensive toys, like buying a tablet PC when you need a notepad and pencil...they steal productivity, not enhance it. If you really want to get the whiteboard online, then point a very good digital camera at the whiteboard, hooked up to an iBook. Then you can output the shot to an AIM window, or whatever you want! I challenge you to find a "custom solution" that will have less problems.
Hire a bloody contractor with EXPERIENCE in this area!!!!
You're going to be spending a LOT of money. Don't base those spending decisions on "what sounded good to folks on Slashdot."
There are experts in this area. Find them. Hire them.
If that's too expensive, with due respect, then this isn't a project you should be contemplating....
It's a pretty complex process involving getting all of the wiring in, the lighting rigged, cameras speced & set, sound adjusted, matching conferencing systems, etc. There's a lot of art to it, figuring out room layout & microphone placement so folks sound natural, nobody has to shout or whisper, noisy equipment is muffled, lighting works for cameras while not leaving everyone dazzled, etc.
Could you do it? Sure, with lots of trial & error.
However hire someone who does this all of the time & they'll keep you from going down dead-ends, give you real numbers to work with, know the vendors and their offerings. Almost none of this overlaps with networking, nor with consumer product experience you might have had, so really a pro is probably best.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Your CEO doesn't want to learn the technology, but wants the best technology.
What he needs is not only a room, but someone to facilitate it's operation. You can get the best equipment in the world, but if he from the get go has basically said he doesn't want to know how to operate it (which I interpret from the original post,) Then it is just going to be dead weight to him and a waste of money.
Long story short: Remember when you were the AV guy in high school? Welcome back.
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
Execs want all this stuff to impress people with their high-tech toys and the "he must be important, look at this stuff" factor. Will he ever understand how to use it (both the operation of the equipment, and effective application of it)? Likely not.
I think I've been in maybe 2 video conferences over the span of 6 years that were better than a plain telephone conference call. The video usually adds nothing, or even detracts. We don't even attempt to integrate computers into the process, it'd just be more confusion (we tried to add a VGA feed once to a video conference, it did not end well, we ended up having the remote site refere to paper handouts of the PPT I'd made).
Keep it real simple. Wasting 30 minutes of an hour-long meeting making the electronics work right is no way to run things.
I do this for a living. Don't screw around with netmeeting or skype or any of that stuff. If you want the meeting room of the 21st century - it's going to cost you. I suggest you get demos of Polycom (the VSX series, not the iPower that's PC based) and Tandberg systems and decide which one is best for you. Polycom offers particularly good microphone and echo cancelling technologies. These systems also offer dual stream technology for sending video and high res content pictures at the same time. For that you need two indepenent front screen projectors with independent control systems from someone like Extron - or control them both with AMX or Crestron - but keep them logically separated in the menus for the user.
Document camera, DVD/VCR and good audio reinforcement.
Amen brother..we spent a fortune on our executive boardroom...and we don't even have video conferencing. We have motorized projector that drops out of the ceiling, motorized blinds, wireless touch panel to control everything. It is as simple as that equipment can be, but the execs manage to @#%#$^ it up on a weekly basis and I end up having to get them hooked up for each and every meeting. They also like to go into the AV closet of the room and randomly press buttons thinking that will somehow fix everything.
Make the entire wall a whiteboard. Here is the first thing I found on Google. I'm sure there are more. When I visited Emerson Process Controls recently, they used something like this in their training center. The instructor could draw anywhere, as long as it was on the correct wall.
if it's set up and not "fooled with" (people turning it off while its busy, ISDN lines getting unplugged, etc.) This cannot be a criterion for success if multiple people are going to be using it without supervision. If you're willing to have a someone hired to babysit the conference room, it's fine, but otherwise people will turn it off while its busy, people will unplug the ISDN lines, etc. At my old job we had AV racks that could be rolled around to different rooms. On these racks were large, clearly visible signs that read "DO NOT MOVE UNLESS ALL CABLES ARE UNPLUGGED FROM THE WALL SOCKETS". So, of course, people would move the whole rack with all the cables plugged in, all the time. It got to the point where we had to pick permanent AV rooms, but there was no money in the budget to get new equipment racks. So we just removed the wheels from the ones we had. We thought, "surely no one will try to move these huge heavy carts without any wheels and big signs saying 'Do Not Move'" but humans are remarkably adaptive in their stupidity. Not one day went by after the switch before we got a call, saying the AV system wasn't working. When we asked for the room number, it was a room that shouldn't have had a system in it - the professor had gotten the pair of football players in his class to carry the whole cart from the room down the hall...
I'll need the name of your company so I can short the stock.
Say hello to my little sig.
It sounds like we would have been able to leverage some of the technical genius we have around here, but putting together a world-class conference room is much, much more about usability and interior design than technology. So much so, that Slashdot isn't even the right place to be asking about it.
First part of the problem is usability. Engineers do not typically understand how to make things easy to use, because they have a much higher tolerance for complexity than the average person. An engineer figures stuff out and gets the job done no matter what. They hardly even notice when something is hard to use or a user interface is clunky. A difficulty that would be a showstopper for a regular user is just background static to an engineer.
Then there is the other side of the problem: the interior design and looks. The average engineer has a superior IQ, but can barely match his belt with his shoes. There is no way they could pick out a color scheme, lighting, furniture, chairs, podiums, desks, etc., and have it all look professional and attractive. People go to school for years to learn how to do that successfully; it is such an intricate and intuitive discipline that most of us cannot even appreciate how difficult it is. We tend to think of interior designers as non-essential and trivial people, but they are very skilled and valuable when needed. I know people who are so technologically inept they cannot send an email even with extensive coaching, yet their house looks straight out of an interior design magazine.
If you want a good conference room, you do need nerds for the equipment selection, installation, and configuration, but they must be kept on a tight leash, subordinate to the interior designers. Engineers are a curious, helpful folk and probably won't be able to understand why they're a liability to the rest of the project.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard