Everyone wants to bring their own device into a meeting and present content, such as photos, screens shots, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF documents. People and organizations more often are cutting the cord and going wireless. Undoubtedly, the trend is toward wireless presentation from laptops, tablets and smartphones. No longer is it possible for IT to standardize on a single platform. Individuals bring their personal devices, so there’s a growing need to support multiple technologies and platforms in the same room, including Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. This is truly a trend that must be recognized, and AV and IT managers must find a viable solution. As millennials and younger generations enter the workforce, mobile devices, wireless presentation, and remote collaboration will only become more common. This is a new challenge that presents many hidden obstacles. There simply hasn’t been a practical solution that enabled wireless presentation of HD content from mobile devices until recently. Here’s what to look for.
Problem 1: Ensuring Network Security
Most organizations limit or prevent employee and guest access to the Wi-Fi network in order to manage traffic and maintain the integrity of the LAN. IT certainly does not want to add additional gateways to open new entry points to their network, potentially increasing security risks.
Solution: Be sure that the wireless presentation solution provides a wired connection to the LAN enabling IT to leverage the existing security protocols. Presenters connect to the existing wireless infrastructure, so there are no new access points to manage.
Problem 2: Guest Access
Generally, access is a challenge. Usually software must be licensed and downloaded or someone needs to keep track of IP addresses, user names and passwords. Each of these processes is disruptive at best, and often lead to everyone huddled around a laptop or iPad.
Solution: Look for a solution that provides simple onscreen display of the log in information so you don’t have to hunt for it. Instead of an IP address, it should use “friendly names” that are easy to use and remember. Or, have an app available for instant download. When the app is launched, content on the device automatically appears on the room display.
Problem 3: Enterprise Management
The challenge for mid-size or global organization is implementation and management of hundreds or thousands of individual mobile devices. Any viable wireless presentation solution would need to have enterprise level management capabilities or else the “solution” presents more challenges than it’s worth.Solution: Make sure the device enables IT to silently deploy the application to all employee desktops overnight. There should be a simple device management utility built-in to make global updates and manage rooms remotely.
Source: Crestron
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Crestron AirMedia
www.crestron.com/airmedia
New White Paper: BYOD & Collaboration
The preference for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the workplace is a disrupting development for IT and AV business managers. This white paper discusses how IT and business leaders can empower employees to use their own devices to create effective, collaborative group meetings, regardless of which meeting room is available or what type of device, operating system or application is used. With increased access to mobile devices and a wide-variety of popular cloud-based collaboration applications, employees want the same control over how they collaborate as they do over other aspects of how or where they work. Yet, traditional group meeting rooms are typically appliance-based and often have proprietary solutions that don’t allow for using personal devices or cloud-based services to videoconference, stream media or conference call. To accommodate BYOD preferences, group meeting room design must abandon the appliance-based, proprietary solution model. Instead, group meetings rooms need to be equipped in a way that allows participants to use their preferred device as the centerpiece of the collaboration experience—whether it is a laptop, tablet, smartphone, PC, or Mac. With the device as the engine, users then can use whatever application they want (WebEx, Skype, YouTube, etc.) to collaborate. Visit www.vaddio.com/press/whitepaper-byod
