People may complain about meetings—how many they’re required to attend, how long they take, and how they prevent one from getting any real work done. But the reality is without them, it’s hard for companies to achieve anything meaningful.
For organizations, therefore, investing in the right meeting room technology should be a high priority. And this usually means deploying systems that are easy to use, standard throughout the campus or across campuses, and embrace emerging technologies.
Oliver Van Kamp, product director—meeting experience at Barco, said meeting rooms are often where the biggest differentiation for a company finds its origin. "It’s where innovation is happening, it’s where decisions are being made, it’s where culture is being transferred between colleagues. It’s really a central point for driving innovation, collaboration, [and] culture," he explained. “It has become more important to connect to that AI capability, but also simplify usage to make sure that any meeting room in the workplace has the same workflow, the same capabilities, and is basically the same for any user."
Keeping It Simple
In organizations that house large numbers of conference rooms, the flexibility and scalability that AV over IP-driven systems offer simplifies deployment and management, according to Joel Mulpeter, senior director of product marketing at control and automation systems manufacturer Crestron Electronics. At the room level, meeting participants want wireless plug-and-play capabilities that don’t require additional adapters, dongles, or software—or a complex set of commands to share content.
“As much as we love talking tech and talking about how amazing it is, [our users] want to meet with colleagues in a meeting room,” Mulpeter said. “And if it is too hard to use, that’s a problem.”
Joel Mulpeter
Image credit: Crestron
Jonas Gyalokay
Image credit: Airtame
Ryan Blair
Image credit: IES Communications
This is why Airtame aims to deliver a system that gives users a similar experience to what they enjoy when streaming movies at home. In the conferencing environment, the meeting participant’s focus should be the other people in the room and the information they are sharing. Jonas Gyalokay, co-founder of Airtame, argued the enabling technology shouldn’t require people to pay much attention to which conferencing platform they’re using during any given session.
“As a user, you shouldn’t actually care that much about which type of video call that you have," Gyalokay said. "I don’t care whether that’s a Teams meeting, a Zoom meeting, a Google Meet, or a Webex. The only thing I care about is having good audio and good video and getting that [meeting] started on the screen.”
Ryan Blair, CTS-D, CTS-I, pre-construction manager at IES Communications, noted that the modern conference room must support hybrid teams, and relies on features such as AI-powered enhancements like real-time transcription, speaker tracking, and video framing. In BYOD or BYOM workflows, participants may use their own devices to control the cameras and microphones in the room.
Blair also points to the adoption of USB-C, enabling one cable interface for video, data, and power. “It’s exciting because the USB power delivery has been extended to 240 watts to support high-power and performance laptops, docking stations, and even small monitors between 27 and 32 inches,” he said.
While USB-C may have expanded capabilities, it’s also made the end user’s life easier, Mulpeter observed. Not that long ago—with the multitude of connection options that existed, such as HDMI and VGA—it wasn’t always clear to meeting participants which cable to use. “We walk up to a desk, we see a USB-C cable, we plug it in, no questions asked,” he explained. “USB-C has normalized that.”
Platforms Are Driving Design
For Blair, one of the most important developments in conferencing technology has been how the platforms have evolved to support AI-driven framing, voice tracking, and even intelligent direction/production. The goal is to make the room as user-friendly as possible, and he believes Microsoft Teams and Zoom have pushed AV professionals to standardize these workflows.
For Barco’s Oliver Van Kamp, USB-C has made meetings, at least from a technological perspective, a lot simpler. “A few years back if you wanted to do your conference call with a camera, audio, and a display, you probably had a USB cable to do the camera and the audio, and you had an HDMI cable to do the screen sharing,” Van Kamp illustrated. “Today, all of that is converged into USB-C, [which is] now delivering not just the audio, video, and the display ports, but also even power to your laptop throughout the hours of meetings that you’re doing all day. The conversion of all that technology into one connector has been a major simplification.”
“It’s really changing how we look at rooms,” he said. “Keeping the connections in the room minimal and the interface simple goes a really long way.”
That said, BYOD/BYOM environments add a level of complexity because they must support multiple platforms and a variety of different generations of devices. Blair said providing a "single, clearly labeled BYOD or BYOM seat helps a lot. Engineering USB correctly with validated hubs, bridges, and cable links to support people bringing in their own ecosystem is very important.” It’s also necessary to test different laptop brands and models to confirm that, for example, a MacBook will behave the same way as a Windows laptop.
While wireless room configurations cut down on the need for physical cables and connections, Blair acknowledged it’s not ideal for all applications. Wireless systems may be great for displaying documents and slides in high-attendance sessions, but high-motion content, environments that experience heavy RF interference, or meetings with strict security requirements are often better served by wired connections.
However, in most cases, Blair prefers to provide both options. “I like to do a hybrid design where we have wireless as a backup to a wired path, or vice versa,” he added.
Keeping Things Secure
At the individual manufacturer level, the reputable brands have worked to ensure that their devices are secure, cannot be tampered with easily, and that connectivity between their products and, for example, the cloud is solid. The integrator’s job, then, is to verify that all the points throughout their deployments are also secure, according to Van Kamp.
“There have been examples in meeting rooms where even cables could be the breach point,” Van Kamp said. “Making sure that all of the connected devices, and the way that the information is transported between those devices, is secure is key.”
The first step in ensuring that conference rooms are secure is determining the security posture of the client in question, Mulpeter said. When it comes to AV/IT security, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. “Every customer will want to keep it secure in their way and not just [follow] a blanket document that covers everything,” he said.
Some organizations, such as government agencies and financial institutions, have stricter requirements than others. While companies with fewer constraints may be tempted to turn off some security features to make the technology easier for its users to navigate, this isn’t always recommended. Arriving at the best solution requires integrators to conduct some meaningful discovery.
“Understanding the security posture of the customer, making sure that the products can comply with that, and then making sure the work is actually done to make them compliant is critical, especially since everything is network-connected these days,” Mulpeter said. “You can’t have something on the network and just skip these steps.”
For the engineers at IES, centralizing firmware management and segmenting networks are two of the primary ways to keep conferencing environments secure. “[We ensure that] our AV network has its own VLAN,” Blair said.
