A lot of my customers have brought Zoom into their enterprise as a web conferencing option. Its easy to use and priced fairly so its not surprising to me. Where I have been surprised though is how the Zoom Room app has changed how people use their conference rooms for in person meetings. Specifically around video presentations.
I’ll use a recent project with Swisher International as an example. We were tasked with putting in some new conference spaces.
Based on their old standard that would have involved a Cisco codec, Mersive wireless and an HDMI connection at the table. Since switching to Zoom I figured we would replace the Cisco codec with a Zoom Room PC and everything else would be the same. WRONG. What Swisher had figured out was in spaces where they deployed a Zoom Room solution their users were presenting locally through Zooms wireless screen share option.
Ok, so no Mersive. Got it, everything else stays the same. WRONG AGAIN! Because of how how well Zooms wireless sharing worked they ditched the HDMI too. And taking the HDMI out also takes some of the backend video switching equipment out. No extenders, no cable runs, no conduit.
Rooms are now simplified from:
to
Of course you still have microphones and cameras to work with but just focusing on the video presentation portion it really does simplify things. Users also have the same experience in either local meetings or Zoom calls as it comes to presenting video.
Zoom Rooms also have the ability to ultrasonically detect a PC running their app and enable one touch sharing. Walk in, run Zoom, share screen. It really is hard to beat that kind of simplicity! Throw in some ceiling microphones and you end up with a super clean looking meeting room.
We used Sennheiser Teamconnect mics in this room. You can hardly see them but if you look close two of the ceiling tiles have an X on them. I’ll talk more about microphone arrays in an upcoming blog post.
On to the next project!