Videoconferencing has become part of daily life within the enterprise and most large organisations have a good strategy for room to room video conferencing and as a result they have been reaping the benefits of improved communication and travel reductions.
The problem comes when you need to join a meeting and you are not in the office, maybe working from home in the evening, at a customer’s office, at a hotel or you simply need to meet with another customer.
Traditionally in these instances people turn to audio conferencing or a mixture of video conferencing with audio participants. Audio conferencing is clearly not ideal and if you are the lone person on audio whilst everyone else is on video then you become at an immediate disadvantage as you are represented by a conference phone on the table often with no access to the presented material and certainly no way of gauging how a meeting is going from all of the visual cues.
To effectively participate in a meeting everyone has to be on an equal plane.
The implementation of a desktop video conferencing integrated into room systems is time consuming, complex and very costly not only that there is the added challenge of integrating different types of equipment, platforms and networks.
Managed Video as a Service from the likes of VCEverywhere seeks to change this paradigm. VCEverywhere for example provide the gateway to interoperability between video conferencing room systems, desktops and mobile devices. With no capital expense, a guest client download your existing video conferencing investments can be extended to the mobile workforce and to your customers.
Interoperability between systems and ease of use are key factors. VCEverywhere will provide onsite training for your users as well as 24×7 helpdesk for real-time assistance and our environment works with any platform on any device.
VCEverywhere take the office experience of participating in a video conference and make it available for global B2B, B2C and home or travelling users independently on our carrier-grade platform and through integration with existing in-room systems.
When considering extending your video conferencing to remote users there are several key questions you need to ask:
- Are the hosting data centres top tier at the heart of the internet?
- Is the solution intuitive and easy for users to use?
- Is the solution secure ? Is end to end encryption provided?
- Is H.323, SIP, SVC, iPad, Android, Telepresence, Mac, PC & Lync environments included ?
- Can I join the meeting via legacy ISDN or Audio ?
- Can I share and receive content?
- No need to make firewall changes and can the desktop software install without requiring admin rights?
- Is there an option to schedule meetings via outlook plugin?
- Does the solution integrate with existing voice and audio dial plans?
- Is end user training included in the price?
- No capex or commitment just a simple pay as you go model?
- Call over flow and disaster recovey for your existing environment?
- Can calls be recorded ?
- Are monthly service reports and cost centre billing reports provided monthly?
- Am I able to generate my own stats on demand?
- Is a complete service provided from consultation, training and ongoing 24×7 live support ?
If your service provider can answer yes to all the questions above then you are already talking to VCEverywhere. If not, visit http://www.vceverywhere.com for a free trial and start to see the benefits of extending your video conference experience.
Mark Stainton-James is a recognised technology leader with over 20 years of experience in managing global teams and setting technology strategy for many of the worlds leading financial institutions.
http://www.VCEverywhere.com is a video conferencing exchange provider allowing any video conferencing endpoint to communicate with any other end point regardless of platform.