The challenge here is different: Success depends less on how content is presented from a technological perspective and more on ease of use. Research indicates meetings that involve the use of technology can take up to 15 minutes to start. This is, of course, a real cost to the companies involved in lost working hours. Removing this 15 minutes goes a long way to enabling an effective meeting. Any form of content sharing has to be simple and consistent with user expectations, whether they’re expecting to connect a PC by a wire to a display or share using the UC infrastructure. Applying those same principles for the experience in the meeting room is critical.

To consider video. When done well, video enhances a meeting. Participants remain more focused and engaged. Facial expressions and body language provide an important extra layer of human interaction to improve comprehension and understanding. With that in mind, it’s key to ensure that the equipment can capture and display those expressions. Video and audio have a lot in common: capture, transmission and reproduction. Is the camera right for the room—size, magnification, color fidelity and lighting? Is the resolution and view adequate to cover the room, i.e., is the camera designed for the size of room or is it just a high resolution personal webcam? Is the screen large enough, accurate enough, of a high enough resolution and bright enough (but not too bright) to faithfully reproduce the image? When looking at the video image, can the user on the far end see a sufficient level of detail to make sense of the images and are the facial expressions recognizable? Are the remote people almost life-sized when on screen? Is the network adequate to transport the video traffic reliably? Video requires bandwidth to work well, and that means the network has to be correctly sized and optimized to allow the best video quality. Just like audio, video technology has also evolved significantly over the years. Easy to use solutions can be found that are both network ready and properly designed to enrich the meeting experience, and at a price far more affordable than the telepresence solutions of the past. Modern video codecs can dynamically compensate for network variances and maintain very high quality images. Remember “garbage in, garbage out,” so ensuring video capture, transmission, and reproduction are all appropriate is essential to ensuring video adds value.