How to Choose the Right Conference Room Technology

Start with how the technology benefits the room and its users before you shop for features

We are all lusting over the latest gear and trying to figure out how to justify the asking price for a digital whiteboard to add to the conference room. When it comes to choosing conference room technology, there is enough cool stuff out there to turn even the staunchest office luddite into a total geek. Let the research begin.

Before you start building a list of what you need, spend some time looking at why you need it. That is not a trick to make you feel guilty about budgeting, although thinking about responsible spending is exactly what happens when you put the why before the what.

What do you actually need in the conference room?

You know who uses the conference room and what they use it for, right? You have spent enough time observing their meetings to have a high level of confidence that the technology you plan to bring in actually helps these users become more productive.

So your selection criteria are based on giving this diverse group of people the technical flexibility and dependability they need to power things up and get to work the moment they walk through the conference room door.

Plan for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

You can look at this as a way to reduce conference room equipment costs if you like, but you will be closer to an honest appraisal if you acknowledge that nobody wants to use other people's stuff, especially company equipment, when they already have exactly what they need in their back pocket.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has gone from a grievous IT transgression to a company-wide expectation. If you are wondering exactly when that happened, the deal was sealed the day a CEO wandered into the CTO's office and asked to have a personal phone set up to pull email from the company server.

Walk into any gathering in a conference room today and you will see people with their mobile devices, tablets, and laptops. By "their," we mean personal property. Our mobile devices have become such powerful computing tools that we depend on them to get work done, and they have become collaboration and presentation tools too.

Your technology plan for the conference room needs to take the BYOD scenario, which is only going to keep growing, into account. This is a technology sword that cuts both ways. You might be able to retire the conference room computer. But you also might need to beef up the routers and Wi-Fi to accommodate the rising number of devices that connect to the network when the conference room is in use.

Look beyond sight and sound

There is something highly influential in your conferencing solution choice, and at first it has nothing to do with performance or price. Actually, it has everything to do with performance and price, just not the way you might think.

The most impressive telepresence setup you can find will be rendered practically useless if you cannot control the lighting, shading, and acoustics of the conference room. Windows, or the lack of them, will determine the kind of screen or projector you should use. The shape of the room, along with the furniture, will influence acoustics. It is unwise to commit to a solution until you have taken it for a test run in your actual conference room. A hefty investment in a video conferencing solution nobody uses, because nobody can see the screen or hear what is being said, is not a career-enhancing move.

Let the cloud do the hard work

It used to be that we were introduced to new technology at the office and held responsible for using it, or else. That philosophy about forced use of technology as a productivity tool faded away around the same time as the fax machine.

Cloud-based solutions have accelerated our expectations. The phone on our desk or the mobile device in our hand is not doing the hard work. That is happening up in the cloud. The technology we bring into collaborative spaces like the conference room deserves to be treated the same way. A modern cloud business phone system keeps conference calls, video, and messaging running on the same platform your team already uses, so there is less hardware to manage in the room itself.

Reliability matters more than any single feature. A meeting that drops mid-sentence costs you credibility, which is why CallSprout runs on a network built for 99.999% uptime. Moving off legacy phone service to VoIP also tends to cost around 30% less, so the room gets better technology and the budget gets a break.

Make the calls smarter, not just clearer

Great conference room technology is about more than the room. When a call comes in while everyone is heads-down in a meeting, you do not want it bouncing around or going to voicemail. CallSprout's AI Voice Agent answers, transcribes, and routes calls for you, so an important caller reaches the right person even when the team is busy collaborating. It connects to the tools you already rely on and can route calls based on your CRM, turning every inbound call into a clean, searchable record instead of a missed message on a sticky note.

Start with why, then choose the features

Start with why the technology matters. Figure out the benefits it must deliver in your conference room. That will determine the features you actually need.

One item that is rarely negotiable is the communications platform behind your essential calls and video conferences. We can help with that. See how much you can save with CallSprout, or book a demo to watch it work in a real room.