For most companies making investments in meeting room technology is not a straight forward process. IT managers disregard the meeting room as a priority and are happy to keep it in the hands of general services managers. These in turn have to deal with limited budget for all-office expenditures and sometimes lack sufficient knowledge for an educated evaluation of meeting room technology.

Innovative concepts such as Norbert Streitz' Roomware ® are difficult to grasp for most people. Yet the full benefits of technology for group collaboration are already there and being ripped by the most successful companies. An investment into more effective meeting room technology can have big payoffs for your company in terms of more efficient group collaboration and increased productivity.

To know more about our value proposition with SMART products you can go here. If you want to learn about our extended value proposition with Zing software you can go here. For indepth subject coverage on meeting room collaboration technology please just keep reading. 

Room ware bonanza

The lack of a long term vision for meeting room technology is evidenced when we visit corporate meeting rooms today. Most executives stopped using overhead projectors and photocopies for some time. Nowadays they bring their laptops to the meeting room, and require the LCD projectors to be available. Typically LCD resolutions lag behind the one that is available from the company laptop standards. Likewise, note taking process from the room copy board cannot be exported to the laptops in the room or to the network.

Some companies had brought costly ISDN lines to the meeting room for audio and videoconferencing. More recently they discover the internet has now enough bandwidth for high quality videoconference, so new equipments are purchased. Finally the operation of all these "roomware" technologies needs to be controlled from a single location and more money is spend on cabling and wiring everything back to a room control hub, probably operated by proprietary communication protocols. In the end of the years, corporate board rooms absorb a lot of money. Yet the total amount of money that is spend in meeting rooms is normally way beyond the full benefits in terms of group productivity it should be delivering.

Cost savvy managers would immediate notice a meeting room technology that could be integrated or integrating all previous room ware investments and had virtually no operating costs. Moreover, it would be able to create an electronic meeting workspace where notes can be made, stored and shared among all participants, including those that have not attended the meeting. This is not a dream come true. It is the result of 20 years of innovation from SMART Technologies, the inventors of the SMART Board, a recognized market leader for meeting room productivity.

Whenever is necessary to present suggestions, evaluate alternatives or make group decisions, SMART Board™ interactive whiteboards and its accessories make it easier to share information, contributing to more productive and useful meetings. The software that is included in a SMART interactive whiteboard or interactive pen display - SMART Meeting Pro - helps you to create an electronic meeting process that guides you through the various meeting stages.

Two key ingredients to create a collaborative working environment (CWE) in a meeting room are the whiteboarding software and the hardware platform choices that revolve around it. In both these regards, award winner SMART Technologies presents huge industry breakthroughs. To learn more about these solutions, watch the SMART Corporate solutions demo: in room, room-to-room, and multiple display.

Zing Software

Besides the power of interactive surfaces, Zing Technologies offers an extended support for group collaboration face-to-face, team-to-team or across the internet. Zing software offers a set of tools to vote, sort, weight, rank, combine, summarise, provoke, decide. Zing offers two families of software for business, education and consulting uses. The Zingthing software connects your entire organisation into instant meeting and training events or delivers courses and consulting via the internet. Zing software converts your notebook computer into a portable meeting room for conferences, seminars and team meetings. More

- Permanent records of meeting files are kept and easily converted to exportable formats such as PDF or as a web page.

- All meeting materials can be housed in one location regardless of your location and are kept private and secure (combined with Alfresco or any choice of group collaboration repository software)

- Decisions and tasks are recorded, ensuring accountability (optionally mind mapping techniques can even enhance the tracking back of ideas or conceptual models that were used for the decisions made)

- Past meeting files are easily accessible in a single file that includes all the content materials that were presented in each meeting (optionally Presentation Librarian™ software assists you in organizing a repository of all your company meeting information).