Extreme Meeting Makeover: Interactive Edition

STEVE KNUTSON

Chief Information Officer

Marco, Inc.

stevek@marconet.com

Marconet.com

Topic: Marketing/ Communications

Faced with a pressing need to think smarter and respond faster, organizational leaders are looking for ways to redefine innovation, unleash intellectual capital and connect in ways they haven't before. They're making it happen in their conference rooms and classrooms with the help of new interactive tools.

Organizations that differ as much as the University of St. Thomas, SRF Consulting Group and Anderson Trucking are speckling their spaces with an assortment of integrated equipment that gives them control, connectivity and automation.

Real-time room management technology and whiteboards that electronically transfer notes to a computer are just two of the products that are fast becoming a standard in meeting spaces and classrooms nationwide.

Meeting Scheduling Made Easy
Outside of meeting rooms, organizations are installing compact touch panels to streamline meeting scheduling. These wireless pads provide an immediate view of each room's availability with clearly understandable green and red color coding. Integrated into the organization's scheduling software, these pads can look up the calendar for any room on the network and even book the room right on-the-spot.
These pads deliver not only clear graphic capabilities, streaming video and a two-way intercom, but also a built-in proximity sensor that instantly turns on the panel when someone approaches it. The sensor technology also can be expanded with other tools to detect when no one has shown up for a scheduled meeting and automatically update the calendar to make the room available to other users.
Organizations can further expand the technology to control and even automate several audio- visual and environmental systems of rooms from any PC. They can add components to control the audio, conferencing, climate and lighting capabilities within a room. Managers can see the entire control system at a glance and access built-in reporting to track usage.
Interactive Whiteboards
Interactive white board technology, now widely used in schools, is engaging groups and revolutionizing the standard business meeting or classroom learning. The virtually indestructible ceramic and steel surface allows leaders to go from markers to multimedia, from ink to internet.

Leaders can take notes with a regular dry-erase marker, stylus or finger. Then, with one click, they can save the information and instantly email or print it. For discussions that need to continue, users can reload the session at another time or day and continue the conversation.

Since the technology is connected to the network, users can bring up documents, presentations or websites from the board. Additional applications allow organizations to customize the technology for the classroom or board room.

What's Next
Meeting and classroom technology continues to evolve to bring applications that raise the level of learning and execution to both businesses and schools. Projectors - already integrated into phone systems and video conferencing - for example, are going three-dimensional (3D) to allow students to navigate through the body's organs. Businesses can show almost a real-life prototype for a new product to investors or vendors. It's a new world. This is just the beginning.