Turning your Conference Rooms into Teams Rooms
By Josh Farlow, Director of Cloud Services
At the height of WFH, we all got used to virtual meetings. Most everyone has used Microsoft Teams video conferencing to some degree. But now that people are returning to the office more and more, there’s a disconnect between virtual meetings and being in physical offices.
As more workers come back to the office and Microsoft Teams continues to be a useful tool, Teams Rooms are an effective tool for bridging the gap and elevating your meeting experiences.
IN THIS ARTICLE:
What is a Teams Room
Virtual meetings won’t be going away anytime soon. Even as more people return to the office, there’s still a significant remote workforce joining meetings virtually. Teams Rooms are Microsoft’s solution for hybrid workspaces. They create a seamless integration of virtual Teams meetings into the physical conference room setting.
By installing compatible hardware and setting up your meeting spaces in your Teams system, you can transform your conference rooms into Teams Rooms. This makes joining a meeting from the conference room as simple as walking in and pressing a button.
How Teams Rooms change your meeting experience
If a business is using Teams already, Teams Rooms are a great way to simplify and enhance the overall meeting experience as they bring more people back into the physical office. Here are a few reasons why businesses opt to smarten up their conference rooms with this tool:
Ease of Meeting & Reduced Set-Up Time
Say you’re at the office and there’s a Teams meeting scheduled. Some of the participants are physically present in the office, but everyone’s joining from their individual offices with their own computers and their varied cameras and microphones.
Typically, you may have to wait for someone’s laptop to update, troubleshoot someone else’s speaker issues, or remind another attendee that they’re, again, on mute. With Teams Room set up in your conference room, you can save time and frustration by gathering everyone in one place and joining seamlessly from there.
Enhanced Audio & Video Quality
With the rapid shift to WFH, everyone had to collectively lower the standards for what was acceptable video and audio quality. We had to work with what we had, but that’s not the case anymore.
Turning your conference rooms into Teams Rooms immediately raises the overall quality of the meeting. The meeting space hardware offers higher quality than a laptop could provide including:
- Better cameras that can auto-adjust to center everyone who’s in the room, zoom in, and more
- Bigger screens with higher resolution
- Better audio from multiple, high-quality mics in the room
No one sounds too far away, everyone’s on the screen, and everything is set up to support professional, high-quality meetings.
Easy collaboration & content sharing
We’ve all gotten used to just clicking a “share screen” button during our meetings. But you might be wondering “how would I do that if I joined from the conference room?”
One of the coolest things about a Teams Room is the ability of the hardware to detect which devices are nearby. The hardware can detect your computer and you can share your screen instantly from the Teams app. No fumbling around with HDMI cords, just one seamless meeting with content sharing.
Possible Future Applications of this Tool
The setup of a Teams Room opens the door to all sorts of other hardware options and productivity tool additions. A few examples include:
- Non-Teams Content Sharing-installing a wireless presentation pod so vendors and other guests can easily cast presentations to your conference room TV
- Content Capture- capturing and digitizing the contents of a whiteboard
- Presence sensors – start meetings as soon as someone walks into the room!
By modernizing your conference rooms with the powerful hardware for a Teams Room, you can enjoy an elevated meeting experience now with room to keep expanding your efficiency and productivity into the future.
Exploring Your Options
CIO Solutions is constantly testing and researching solutions to meet our clients’ needs. As our clients find themselves adjusting to returning to the office and having more hybrid meetings, they’re looking for solutions that solve their challenges and enhance their experience.
Our team has sourced some of the highest quality and cost-effective products for Teams Rooms setups, focusing on specific features and priorities that will provide the best experience possible.
Are you a current client of CIO Solutions? Talk to your vCIO to continue the conversation!
Not a client yet, but curious about maturing your productivity tools? Let’s talk!