Organizations run on meetings. Many, many meetings. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index time spent in meetings increased by 200% through 2020. Ask anyone and back-to-back-to-back meetings are not only common but expected.

With people returning to the office, at least part time, an increasing number of these many meetings include people both in a meeting room and remote. According to the Cisco Global Workplace Survey, 98% of meetings will include at least one remote participant.

To better accommodate both in-office and remote participants, organizations are updating meeting rooms and many of these organizations are choosing Microsoft Teams Rooms for new meeting spaces.

With 300 million monthly active Teams users, it is not surprising that last year Cisco announced several of their devices were being certified for Microsoft Teams Room.

Cisco Devices for Microsoft Teams

Cisco now offers certified Teams devices for all sizes of meeting rooms. Cisco has a reputation for delivering some of the highest quality video devices, often described as embodying “Scandifornian” design (combining Nordic simplicity with California fun) by Snorre Kjesbu, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Cisco Collaboration Devices.

Room Bar (left) and Room Bar Pro (right)

The Cisco Room Bar and Room Bar Pro provide high-quality video conferencing and content sharing for huddle rooms and medium-sized spaces respectively.

Room Kit EQ (left) Room Kit Pro (right)

The Room Kit EQ provides support for large meeting rooms while the Room Kit Pro device bundle has been designed for the largest spaces and for specialist AV scenarios.

Board Pro

If you want to be more collaborative, the Board Pro provides a video conferencing and co-creation device that is designed specifically for hybrid meetings in small or medium-sized spaces. The Board Pro can be wall mounted, equipped with a floor stand, or connected to a durable wheel-stand to enhance its portability.

Mixed Meeting Rooms

As device capabilities improve, most larger organizations are continually in a multi-year process of upgrading meeting spaces. This translates to the need to support many different meeting room devices, often from multiple vendors.

Individual vendors focus on providing management tools for their devices:

• Microsoft Teams Room Pro Management Portal
• Cisco Webex Control Hub
• Poly Lens
• Logitech Sync
• Zoom Rooms Admin Management

While each of these vendor-specific solutions works well, the reality is that most organizations need to support a multi-vendor UC and room environment.

A True Multi-Vendor Meeting Room Management Solution

VOSS has long been known for providing multi-vendor migration, management, monitoring, and analytic tools to simplify and accelerate multi-vendor UC deployments.

Now VOSS extends those capabilities into the meeting room, helping large organizations manage and monitor all their meeting rooms from a “single pane of glass”, in other words, a consolidated control application.

VOSS Automate allows you to automate room deployments and updates regardless of vendor. VOSS Insights provides monitoring, alerting, and analytics across all your meeting room devices.

A global overview of all meeting room devices

Beyond Basic Room Management

Meeting rooms are important, but they are only part of an effective communication and collaboration solution.

VOSS Insights can report on remote, in-person, and hybrid meetings regardless of the room or device being used, along with UC calls.

Meeting and call stats

Additionally, data from building management systems or other applications can be combined with meeting room data to provide unique insights such as:

• Comparative quality across meeting room devices from multiple vendors
• Occupancy and power usage data aligned with meeting room device usage
• Service desk tickets attributable to each device and/or room configuration

Power consumption and cost per sq ft meeting room stats

More Choice = Better Solutions

It is exciting to see Cisco with some of the best-in-class devices embrace the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. Having more choice means organizations are better able to optimize their meeting room experience, increasingly important in this on-going era of hybrid work.

The VOSS toolset makes it possible to choose components from multiple vendors without adding management burden and without losing any data driven insights.

To learn more about VOSS for Microsoft, please click here, or to get in touch with VOSS, please click here. To learn more about the author, Kevin Kieller, please click here.