No matter how much we wish to replace meeting rooms, they are undeniably the best place to get a fair amount of work done. With the rise of the distributed work culture, collaboration with remote parties has become a part of everyday work life. Today, meeting rooms are not just used for conventional meetings but also for collaboration and innovations.

We have all experienced the scenarios during our meetings where everyone is waiting to get started, only to be held up by some critical piece of technology that is either missing or isn’t working correctly. According to this HBR article, every minute spent in a meeting, multiplied by the number of people in the room, will give you an estimate of why it’s so important to make sure that you have the best meeting room setup you can possibly get: Considering the cost of time, you simply can’t afford not to!

We’ve listed out the top five features you should look for in your meeting room solution while planning to upgrade to a modern meeting room:

1. BYOD presentation

The driving force behind BYOD is its self-sufficiency among employees from every department (engineering, sales, marketing, management, vendors, customers, and partners) who already own and use personal laptops, tablets, and smartphones. With each of these devices having different input/output ports, it becomes a hassle to maintain all kinds of cables and adapters at hand. Different types of users have different network restrictions, which again affects the ease of use for any meeting room solution. Supporting these devices of multiple form factors, operating systems, I/O ports, and network configuration is not an easy job.

A wireless presentation system that supports all operating systems and different network configurations will provide a flexible platform for your employees and guests with any type of device to present without struggle, preventing unproductive downtime.

2. Video conferencing

Even in the digital era, face-to-face meetings are considered extremely valuable, and it’s worth investing in modern video conferencing technology for your meeting rooms. With video conferencing becoming increasingly affordable, rather than viewing it as an add-on to existing meeting room technology, it must be a standard feature in a meeting room solution for all mid to large-sized meeting rooms.

It is wise to have a meeting room solution that lets you make video conferencing calls easily with minimal steps; with your partners, customers, and vendors using different VC applications, a device that supports multiple VC applications makes your VC experience more effortless and seamless.

3. Room booking and management

Overrunning meetings can lead to a lot of unproductivity and wastage of everyone’s time. Hence, it is important for your meeting room solution to ensure that all users adhere to scheduled meeting times.

A room scheduler, a small display mounted outside your meeting room door, is mapped to your calendar system and will indicate whether that specific room has been booked, for what duration, and by whom. With a touchscreen interface, these systems let users book the room for another time window or find an available room. Ad-hoc meetings can be easily logged in the system for others to plan their meetings accordingly and can also be used for analyzing the meeting room usage. Therefore, room scheduler is a must-have feature.

4. Managing and efficiency tracking

Once implemented, the meeting room solution must be simple to manage and maintain, thereby reducing the burden on the IT team, freeing them to complete priority tasks. In addition to this, the IT team should be able to configure the devices remotely and also monitor all meeting room devices and peripherals. Though the office perception is often that the rooms are never available, studies show that the utilization rate tends to be lower than generally perceived. Thus, it is necessary for the meeting room solutions to provide insights on usage patterns and individual meeting room utilization to help you plan the infrastructure.

5. Use display for more than just presentation

With the right meeting room solution, you can turn your touchscreen display into interactive and collaborative displays, use it for annotation and whiteboarding to allow your team to brainstorm or jot out plans. The displays can also be used as a digital signage space to showcase your company, products, or for welcoming your guests, announcing updates, or simply displaying aesthetic backgrounds.

These features are essential for any modern meeting room, so make sure your next meeting room upgrade covers them all.

Zoapi provides all these features in a single simple bundle with technology that fits the meeting dynamics, as opposed to kitting out meeting rooms with multiple devices with generic sets of features that are expensive, difficult to use, and may or may not be suitable.

Zoapi is hassle-free, low maintenance, and affordable.

Know how Zoapi can help you update your meeting rooms here.

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Know more about Zoapi here.