Extend Your Video Conference Experience Outside of the Boardroom

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 customers 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 seeks to change this paradigm. The enterprise can use a managed gateway to provide interoperability between video conferencing room systems, desktops and mobile devices.

When considering extending your video conferencing to remote users there are several key questions you need to ask of your vendor:

• Are the hosting data centres top tier at the heart of the internet?


• Is the solution intuitive and easy for users to use? o 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? o No capex or commitment just a simple pay as you go model?


• Call over flow and disaster recovery 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 24x7 live support?