Designed for rooms and open spaces up to 18′ x 18′ (5.5 x 5.5 m), the HDL200 system “delivers the same consistent and reliable audio pickup that Nureva’s award-winning HDL300 systems deliver for larger spaces,” according to the company announcement.

All Nureva audio systems are powered by patented Microphone Mist technology, which “fills the entire space with thousands of virtual microphones so that everybody can be heard no matter how far apart in-room meeting participants are, how softly they talk or which direction they face,” the announcement says.

More on the Nureva HDL200 audioconferencing system

The system can be mounted above or below a display, on either a wall or a mobile stand. An optional magnetic mount is also available for attaching third-party cameras to the system.

The HDL200 also has “a built-in LCD to give in-room participants helpful information such as time, volume and mute on/off.”

“Further enhancements will roll out through future integrations with other products such as room control, building information management and room booking systems,” the Nureva announcement says.

Nureva’s audio product line includes the HDL200 for small spaces, the HDL300 for medium spaces up to 25′ x 25′ (7.6 x 7.6 m) and the Dual HDL300 for large spaces up to 30′ x 50′ (9.1 x 15.2 m).

Webinar: How to Achieve the Right Audio Quality in Meeting Spaces

Deployment of the full Nureva audio conferencing product line is supported the Nureva Console cloud-based platform.

“Clear, reliable audio conferencing is especially relevant at this time when there is a need to maintain in-room physical distancing, while ensuring remote participants can hear and contribute to the conversation,” said Nureva CEO Nancy Knowlton, in the company announcement.

“The addition of the HDL200 to our product line gives IT managers every option they need to support meeting rooms of all sizes,” she said.

This story premiered on our sister site, Commercial Integrator. 

The post HDL200 Audioconferencing System from Nureva Shipping Now appeared first on My TechDecisions.

In collaboration with Samsung SDS, Zoom will offer its Zoom Rooms customers a hardware bundle that provides a “seamless Zoom Rooms user experience,” the companies say.

Samsung SDS plans to offer a “Samsung Zoom Rooms Kit” by leveraging hardware products from Samsung Electronics and HARMAN, now a division of Samsung Electronics.

The solutions aim to simplify hardware purchasing and installation for Zoom Rooms customers and to interact with a single vendor to resolve hardware issues.

“Combining Samsung’s premier brand in building technologically advanced hardware products with Zoom’s innovative collaboration and communication software capabilities, we saw a great opportunity to create a hardware bundle that will equip Zoom Rooms customers to utilize the software to its full potential.” said Scott Koo, President of Samsung SDS America.

“With the new specialized Zoom Rooms package, we are making it very easy for companies to get up and running quickly and painlessly. We are making a Zoom Rooms hardware bundle that is as easy to purchase, install and maintain as you would with a consumer electronics product.”

Zoom says its solution tackles the three biggest pain points of the conference room: booking a meeting, starting a meeting, and sharing content.

Read Next: Collaboration Tech Fails (And What They Should Have Been)

Oded Gal, Chief Product Officer for Zoom, notes:

“At Zoom, we are constantly looking to deliver the most frictionless experience possible at every touchpoint. Building an ecosystem of partners enables us to provide our customers with an even better user experience. By partnering with Samsung SDS we’re providing direct access to state-of-the-art hardware and digital technology, thereby providing the seamless, interactive, and user-friendly experience our customers expect.”

The post Samsung and Zoom Team up to Deliver Integrated Zoom Rooms Hardware appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Today’s companies are global operations, with distributed workforces and around the clock customer support. Knowledge workers are increasingly trading cubicles at their HQ for remote offices, mobile workplaces and virtual rooms.

Travel budgets continue to shrink, while the need to work collaboratively with global teams continues to amplify.

In this joint Commercial Integrator and TechDecisions webinar, you’ll learn how companies are utilizing Webex tools to cut internal costs while allowing their workforces to be more agile and streamlined.

Register Here

Josh Satow, who leads Cisco collaboration business development for ScanSource, will cover topics including:

• Webex meetings and Teams update
• Cognitive collaboration and the use of AI
• Endpoint updates and features

This event is co-sponsored by AVI-SPL and will be moderated by Jonathan Blackwood, editorial director of Commercial Integrator and editor-in-chief for TechDecisions.

About the Presenter

The post Webex Meetings and Teams Update appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Forrester Research, 81% of global services decision makers say their firms are undergoing or investigating a digital transformation, and 35% of those are investing in workforce enablement technology to drive it.

“These leading firms know that delivering a superb technology experience to employees is key to enhancing productivity, improving the customer experience (CX), and driving top-line revenue growth,” Fuze says.

“This integration brings together Slack’s collaboration hub technology with Fuze’s enterprise UCaaS solution. As the global enterprise evolves, organizations must support workers across diverse industries, backgrounds, and skill sets with tools that enable digital inclusivity and cross-functional collaboration.”

This integration includes Slack commands and the ability to escalate from a chat to a live conversation, in Fuze, with one-click simplicity.

“Fuze is dedicated to enabling the future of work. By empowering employees with the freedom to use the communications and collaboration tools they find most effective, delivered through a fully ​integrated and seamless user experience, we are helping drive new levels of productivity at enterprises across the globe,” said Jed Brown, senior vice president of product, Fuze.

“By integrating with Slack, we are enhancing workers’ existing collaboration capabilities, so teams can spend less time scheduling meetings and more time driving innovation within their business.”

Read Next: ‘Essentials As a Service,’ Or Why EaaS Is the Acronym to Look For Going Forward

The post Fuze UCaaS Solution Now Integrates with Slack appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Available in North America, the Yamaha Collaboration Kit bundles an AI wide-angle USB camera from Huddly, a manufacturer of award-winning, AI-powered conference cameras, with the ESB-1080 Enterprise Sound Bar.

“Moving into the future, the key to successful collaboration will focus on two things: the clearest possible audio and flawless video that intelligently responds to those in the room,” said Michael Fitch, vice president of global sales and marketing at Yamaha Unified Communications.

“With our new sound bar, we’ve made it incredibly easy to achieve the great, uncompromised audio that every meeting hinges upon. By bundling that with a video camera brought to by experts in AI, we eliminated the complicated purchase, deployment, and operation process so organizations can achieve their unified collaboration strategy faster and more cost effectively.”

ESB-1080 Enterprise Sound Bar features:

The ESB-1080 Enterprise Sound Bar provides full-range speaker output for conference rooms via two built-in subwoofers, a bass-reflex port, two dome tweeters, and two woofers.

Its conference mode preset is specialized for installation in conference room spaces with enterprise-demanded functions tailored for easy administration.

The Yamaha ESB-1080 is available as a sound solution for any enterprise room to provide or expand speaker output, or as part of the bundled solution with the Huddly IQ AI-powered conference camera.

The Yamaha Collaboration Kit’s Huddly camera provides 150-degree wide-angle 1080p video, an embedded mic array, automated AI features, and the Huddly InSights analytics API.

Read Next: How to Transform Surveillance Camera Footage into 3D Content

With the Genius Framing feature, the camera can automatically detect and frame participants in its field of view, eliminating the need to manually control the camera.

The post Wide Angle, AI-Enabled Yamaha Enterprise Sound Bar and Collaboration Kit Now Shipping appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Collaboration tech is one of the largest corporate product categories out there. So how come these horrifying examples of their use — like what you’re about to see in the slideshow — are so prevalent?

…And, yes, they are prevalent. Just take one look at AV Install Nightmares –  a group devoted to chronicling the very worst in AV technology fails. It has over 55,000 members. There’s a new post every few minutes or so. That’s not a good sign!

Collaboration Tech Fails

Technology, in theory, empowers employees to work better. In today’s team-based offices, workplace collaboration integration us exploding in popularity as collaboration technology becomes more sophisticated.

But the examples in this slideshow don’t have any of that. It’s not even that they’re unsophisticated…all of them are downright ugly, and some of these attempts are even somewhat dangerous!

Click here to see the slideshow of collaboration tech fails (and perhaps what they should have done)

So we’ve also taken it upon ourselves to compare these collaboration technology fails with examples of much, much more successful collaboration integration projects.

More Resources

Collaboration technology unifies every aspect of your communications with other people. For example, you know you spoke with a client and referenced a contract but you don’t know when or where.

One search can pull up all your communication with that person, whether that was through email, phone, video, instant messaging or chat.

As collaboration systems become more advanced, they become more integrated and provide a seamless approach to your communication needs, as explained in “The Technology Manager’s Guide: Tips for Buying Collaboration Technology.”

Learn how you can get the right technology for your company in “Tips for Buying Collaboration Technology.”

The post Collaboration Tech Fails (And What They Should Have Been) appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Something our colleagues over at Commercial Integrator – the trade pub for A/V installers – have noticed in recent years is that there’s an increasing number of technology decision makers attending InfoComm, the A/V industry’s largest American trade show. The show is responding by encouraging integrators to exhibit or bring along their best decision-making clients.  

The following audio visual products and services – which were on display at InfoComm 2019 and were buzzed-about by integrators — are ideal for technology pitches because they have a very clear demonstration of ROI: 

Mersive Solstice 

Mersive recently expanded its Solstice wireless collaboration platform to improve meetings and add value to the spaces themselves, even when not in use. This includes: 

• The capability to allow any display to be used for collaboration 
• Providing Miracast support to increase collaboration participation 
• Developing an analytics solution that provides both meeting room monitoring and in-depth meeting analytics to aid stakeholders in optimizing space planning, workforce scheduling and more. 

Mersive Solstice also added cloud-based software tool Kepler which collects data from Solstice Pods installed in meeting rooms and huddle spaces to provide insights into levels of user content sharing, device usage, meeting statistics, and room usage such as peak hour tracking, room popularity, average meeting length and more. 

Learn more here 

Intel Unite 

This collaboration solution supports most common devices, operating systems, and business plugins and is priced similarly between on-premise and cloud-hosted models. 

More competitively, though, the Intel Unite solution offers IT managers the ability to view telemetry data on connections, presentations, and average meeting times. With Unite, IT can measure the usage of hardware, software, and room utilization to inform planning. 

Learn more here

VisibilityOne 

This monitoring software for videoconferencing “eliminates troubleshooting by 90%” and saved one company over $1 million, says VisibilityOne. 

The VisibilityOne platform provides real-time data and system health status information across vendors and cloud services. After downloading and installing the VisibilityOne app, which is supported by the Microsoft Windows workstation and Server operating systems, companies only need a single app per building or location. Some features include: 

• Call disconnect information 
• Site-to-site quality of service (QoS) 
• 24-hour meeting schedule viewer 
• Live performance data, including network throughput, jitter and packet loss 
• Video conference device health statistics 
• Remote reboot 
• Microphone and camera disconnect alerts 
• VIP user priority video conferencing monitoring on cloud services 
• Management reports supporting ROI 
• Incident detail reporting 

Learn more here 

Logitech Sync 

The new Logitech Sync allows the IT department to remotely monitor, manage, and gain insight from Logitech devices in the conference room. Logitech’s recently announced Tap product is a good example. 

It’s a touch-panel device that plugs into a PC and works with Google, Microsoft, or Zoom, with a consistent user interface. Sync fits into this story by addressing the market for scale – not hundreds, but thousands of devices. 

Related: How-To Guide: Tracking ROI for IT Projects

The management works through a browser interface, and IT admins will be able to cut back on-site visits and trouble tickets thanks to the insights gained from the platform. Remote monitoring and management also simplify tasks like firmware updates, while the architecture readies users for new insights. 

AVI-SPL Symphony aaS

Tech managers can leverage AVI-SPL Symphony as a Service (SYaaS) to monitor and manage collaboration spaces and devices. 

Building off of their success with Symphony (for monitoring, managing, running diagnostics on AV systems), integrator AVI-SPL aims to provide an alternative consumption model for organizations to conduct proactive monitoring and management of their collaboration estate via Symphony. 

The as-a-service solution benefits tech managers it a couple of clear ways: 

• It enables integrated collaboration workflows, providing a single pane view into the supporting technology estate. 
• It delivers real-time, actionable business intelligence around network performance, room utilization, device functionality, and usage trends. 

“It creates a single-pane view into total enterprise technologies and it provides real-time access to actionable business intelligence to help our users make more informed decisions with respect to their technology purchases,” says senior VP of service operations Tim Riek. 

Learn more here 

The post Recent Audio Visual Products & Services That Will Help Your Technology Pitch appeared first on My TechDecisions.

You’re still trying to figure out how to adapt your workplace culture and office technology to millennials and now it’s time to consider an even newer generation’s needs.

Office designers are already moving on from millennials and onto how generation Z will use their work spaces, according to a piece by commercial real estate and professional services reporter Nicole Norfleet that originally ran in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

This is a significant shift in mindset. So much has been written about millennials in the workplace. So many broad generalizations:

• They’re not just tech-savvy, they have an expectation of constantly being able to connect and collaborate using technology at any time.
• They want to take a more nomadic approach to their workplace, moving from space to task-specific space as they see fit.
• They have high expectations from their employers in terms of accommodations.
• They’re less loyal to employers and likely to bounce from position to position, raising the stakes for companies to create a work environment that keeps their top-performing millennial employees satisfied.

Yes, I’m being sarcastic. No, I don’t out-right believe these generalizations.

I’ve seen employees from baby boomers to generation Z to millennials that reflect all these characteristics. In my opinion, it’s fine to call out a co-worker that has unrealistic expectations, but it’s pretty obviously wrong to paint an entire group of individuals with that brush.

That being said, there will be a narrative about what generation Z workers are like. In fact, it’s already being written.

As you prepare your office and company culture for an onslaught of graduating generation Z employment prospects, let’s take a look at what we think we know about these individuals.

Generation Z: What Broad Generalizations Can We Make?

Generation Z is less likely to job hop.

Consider that many generation Z individuals grew up watching their parents battle through the recession that started in 2008, suggests Forbes writer Eric Trabold.

So they value job security and solid benefits. Trabold suggests that employers “place emphasis on strategy rather than tactics.” He writes: “They should bring in coaches to work with Gen Zers to strengthen their personal growth and challenge them to articulate how they can impact the growth of the product or organization.”

Generation Z is technology integrated.

Millennials, at one point a long time ago, existed in a world in which everybody and their grandfather didn’t have a smart phone. That’s not really the case for generation Z. As Business Insider points out, by 2000 when the earliest generation Z-ers were turning 3 years old, most Americans had at least one computer. It didn’t take long for most generation Z members to have an Internet-connected phone in their pockets.

“A world without mobile technology is foreign to Gen Z,” writes Trabold in his Forbes piece.

Related: Why You Should Write for MyTechDecisions in 2019

There’s also a Netflix factor. This is a generation that didn’t have to wait until NBC’s “must see TV” lineup to catch the new episode of Seinfeld. They’re accustomed to watching what they want to watch when they want to watch it. That applies to work-related training opportunities, as well.

“Companies will need to re-imagine their training and on-boarding programs to favor the preferred on-demand, YouTube-like digital content,” Trabold writes. “Shred the boring PDFs, and get creative with shorter video snippets.”

So if you thought millennials required constant connectivity, the expectation will be even higher for generation Z workers.

Generation Z values workplace relationships.

Be prepared to mentor generation Z employees. According to HR Technologist, generation Z employees value one-on-one engagement with their bosses and company leaders. “This means that management should be prepared to be involved in the development their Gen Z workers’ careers,” it writes.

Generation Z wants workplace flexibility.

The concept of working remotely is at least a little bit new and requires a little bit of getting used to …. for most. Not for generation Z, which enters a workforce that already embraces and facilitates remote employees.

Think beyond traditional work spaces and focus more on remote and nomadic workers if you want to appeal to generation Z. “Co-working spaces are expanding,” points out Trabold. “Open spaces are becoming more popular. The future workplace is anywhere.”

Generation Z are like everybody else.

Are any of these characteristics reflective of a generation of people? I don’t think so. Iff they turn out to be accurate, they’ll be reflective of folks who grew up in a certain environment. If gen Xers never had to adjust to smart phones and on-demand streaming content, they would have entered the workplace with similar expectations.

In Norfleet’s article, she cites Rich Bonnin, a design principal at HGA in Minneapolis, who expects Generation Z to be “more realistic, social change-oriented, tech-integrated and interested in on-demand learning.” He adds that “Gen Z workers are more likely to value face-to-face interactions, shared space, choice-rich environments, security and the natural as well as the digital experience.”

Who can blame them?

The post Generation Z Enters Workforce in 2019: Is Your Office Ready? appeared first on My TechDecisions.

AVI-SPL says Symphony as a Service (SYaaS), which is on display at ISE 2019 (Integrated Systems Europe) at AVI-SPL’s stand No. #11-C155, provides an alternative consumption model for organizations to conduct proactive monitoring and management of their collaboration estate via Symphony. According to a company press release, the new as-a-service solution benefits tech managers it a couple of clear ways:

• It enables integrated collaboration workflows, providing a single pane view into the supporting technology estate.
• It delivers real-time, actionable business intelligence around network performance, room utilization, device functionality, and usage trends.

Related: Tips for Purchasing Collaboration Solutions

Delivering Symphony in an “as-a-service” model is significant, says AVI-SPL senior VP of service operations Tim Riek, who gave sister brand Commercial Integrator an overview of Symphony as a Service during ISE 2019 (watch the video above). “We’re pulling the engine that has been under the hood and powering our managed services,” he says. It’s now “enabling our customer to deliver an optimized IT environment leveraging the Symphony platform.”

The goal of AVI-SPL’s Symphony is to collect and streamline valuable information that can help organizations make better business decisions, Riek explains. “Symphony helps to bring together disparate applacitions and creat an integrated collaboration workflow. It creates a single-pane view into total enterprise technologies and it provides real-time access to actionable business intelligence to help our users make more informed decisions with respect to their technology purchases.”

As many organizations look to evolve their spaces and adapt to employees changing workflows, they need data to support their decisions, adds AVI-SPL VP of sales and marketing, EMEA, William Hegan, also to CI during ISE 2019. “Symphony allows us not only to manage the devices but also to provide utilization analytics off the backend that allows customers to make informed real estate choices around number of rooms.”

AVI-SPL Launches ymphony as a Service (SYaaS) at ISE 2019

“Accountability for the meeting room has historically been compartmentalized between video conferencing and audiovisual management applications,” says Tim Riek, senior vice president of services, AVI-SPL.

“With Symphony now unbundled from the company’s managed services program and available on a subscription basis, AVI-SPL is unlocking the potential for all organizations to integrate a disparate application topology, have one lens into all deployed collaboration technologies, and enhance the return on its technology investment.”

More from AVI-SPL’s SYaaS press release:

Today AVI-SPL Symphony is powering global organizations in the enterprise, healthcare, financial services, as well as higher education market. RMIT, a university of technology and design with campuses in Australia, Southeast Asia, and Spain, is among those who entrust AVI-SPL’s Symphony as a Service to maintain the health of its AV and UC systems and ensure a positive classroom experience.

“Since the implementation of Symphony, RMIT’s audiovisual services, have been able to become more efficient and increase the student and staff experience,” says  Tim Sullivan, senior manager of operations, learning, teaching, and research at RMIT, in the press release.

“[Symphony] is something that I wish we had a number of years ago.”

Tech decisions makers can find more information on the AVI-SPL Symphony as a Service offering here.

The post AVI-SPL Symphony as a Service Makes Monitoring Collaboration Spaces Easy appeared first on My TechDecisions.

With the addition of the ClickShare CS-100 Huddle and the ClickShare CSE-200+ to the portfolio, Barco ClickShare now has “a complete offering of intuitive, IT-friendly collaborative experiences for every meeting room in the enterprise—shifting its focus from wireless presentation to interactive meeting collaboration,” according to the company announcement.

Related: How to Choose Your Organization’s Video Collaboration Solution 

ClickShare: Enterprise-Wide Collaboration

The ClickShare CS-100 Huddle, designed for huddle and small meeting spaces, completes the ClickShare product portfolio. It brings “spontaneous, ad-hoc and swift content-sharing—ideal for short catch-ups or instant brainstorming with a limited group of employees,” according to the Barco announcement.

“ClickShare now brings the exact same experience for every type of meeting room in the contemporary office environment: from a huddle space to a regular meeting room, from a collaboration room to a fully equipped large meeting room, such as a boardroom or conference room,” said Barco product manager Gauthier Renard in the company announcement.

“Different meeting room sizes or types in both traditional industries and new businesses can all be given the same intuitive and uniform collaborative experience,” said Renard.

New Ways of Working

With the ClickShare CSE-200+, new ways of meeting can be introduced in the current workplace. Brainstorming or more creative discussions are enabled by a wide set of features: annotation, blackboarding, touch back and 4K support with every type of device.

The integrated HD switch in the CSE-200+ model “takes away the stress and hassle of having to switch manually between wired legacy sources (such as cameras) and the ClickShare wirelessly presented content,” according to the Barco announcement.

Related: State of the Video Collaboration Market

Choose Your Way

ClickShare also launched an app for PCs and Macs in addition to the ClickShare apps for mobile devices (both Android and iOS devices).

The combination of sharing content with both button and app “provides an intuitive way of collaborating, enriched by power-user functionalities in the ClickShare app, such as extended desktop, pause function, moderation, etc.,” according to the Barco announcement.

The IT friendliness of Barco ClickShare is also underlined by its integration with existing company networks and legacy infrastructure. All models function both as standalone pieces and in a network, and can be remotely managed by the ClickShare XMS.

“We’re dedicated to providing the most reliable, intuitive and innovative collaboration solutions, which means we can give contemporary companies a serious competitive advantage,” said Barco head of go-to-market strategy and services Lieven Bertier in the company announcement.

“Investing in future-proof collaboration technology is investing in new ways of working, in attracting the best talent and in optimizing decision-making. Heightening efficiency and productivity keeps you one step ahead of your competitors. We offer customers new, more interactive ways of working, required by today’s workforce and help businesses to prepare for the future of work, driving efficiency in the brightest, simplest and most productive way,” said Bertier.

The original version of this article appeared on sister site Commercial Integrator.

The post Barco ClickShare Adds Huddle and 4K Collaboration Models appeared first on My TechDecisions.