How to transition your meetings to the cloud

Having a productive and inclusive meeting is always a challenge. Companies had to deal with cobbled together communication technologies, dropped calls as well as expensive solutions. Relying on traditional conference phone bridging and email to communicate across different offices don’t exactly inspire creativity and tone gets lost in translation with email threads. 

That is why a lot of companies are transforming their work culture to be video meeting-first. If you’re looking to transition your meetings to the cloud with video conferencing (VC), here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Encourage video engagement from the start. Every good idea needs a champion. Be seen as an innovator by promoting video engagement in company meetings from the start. Your team will thank you for it.
2. If you’re going to move to VC, make it available everywhere. Google transformed their work culture in the mid-2000s to be video meeting-first because they made VC ubiquitous. Hangouts Meet is a result of years of Google innovation that brings you a consistent experience across web, mobile and conference rooms. If you’re going to make the switch, go all in and make it accessible to everyone.
3. Focus on the benefits. Video meetings can help distributed teams feel more engaged and help employees collaborate whenever and wherever inspiration strikes. This means you’ll have more diverse perspectives which make for better quality output.
4. Get the right hardware. VC technology was extremely costly. Each unit could cost upwards of $50,000 and that did not include support, licensing and network maintenance fees. To complicate matters, the units were powered by complex, on-prem infrastructure and required several support technicians. With Logitech Room Solutions for Meet, organisations can power high-quality video meetings at a fraction of the cost of typical systems (bundles start at $3,000). Employees can also easily collaborate with colleagues through close integrations with other G Suite apps like Calendar. Most importantly, IT admins and A/V professionals can have peace-of-mind knowing that the bundles include built-in, enterprise-grade support. Companies can choose from three bundle options that are qualified for Hangouts Meet hardware and include a pre-configured computer, conferencecam and touch screen controller (among other features):
   1. Huddle room bundle (ideal for 2-6 people) with a Logitech Meetup conferencecam with built-in microphones and speakers, a Chromebox and Logitech Tap touch controller.
   2. Medium room bundle (best for 6+ or more people) with a Logitech Rally camera, speaker and mic pod, a Chromebox, and Logitech Tap touch controller.
   3. Large room bundle (ideal for 12+ or more people) with a Logitech Rally system, including a Rally Camera, two speakers, two mic pods and a Chromebox with Logitech Tap touch controller.
5. Design your meeting room. People are at the heart of healthy and successful organisations and teams are most effective when they connect face-to-face to solve problems. Every organisation, big or small, has different needs. To help transition your company to be video-first, here’s a guide to help you plan, design and deploy the best meeting room experience for your business.

With continued innovations and improvements to the VC technology, the meeting room experience is going to get even better in the future. Just to give you a glimpse into the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is already making its way into meeting rooms. You can now book rooms easily and can even get the whole meeting transcribed in real-time in different languages. 

Find out how AI could benefit your organisation