The reduction in expense budgets and an awareness of the impact of travel on the environment is driving the search for new ways of holding effective virtual meetings that provide face-to-face collaboration for remote workers and dispersed teams.

The traditional solution has been to invest in videoconferencing equipment in corporate meeting rooms.  This enables dispersed teams to meet without having to travel to the same place.  It works well for a few locations but starts to become expensive and less effective where staff are mobile or more locations need to join meetings.  There are also scheduling problems. The room may be booked for a two day customer training session or perhaps the chairman can’t make an emergency board meeting because he is travelling and can’t get to one of your rooms equipped with video equipment at the scheduled time.

The challenge is how you reach beyond the boardrooms and make video calls with your whole team, getting the benefit you expected when you invested in videoconferencing?

Desk top videoconferencing is the answer

Now there is a way to use video conferencing beyond the boardroom. Visual Nexus is a professional grade solution that you can use in conjunction with your existing investment in videoconferencing.  It is a software solution that turns a personal computer into a videoconferencing system, enabling meeting participants to join a conference from their desk, from home or from anywhere that you can get a broadband connection to the Internet. It is just like personal telepresence.

Because Visual Nexus is standards based you can make video calls from a personal computer to a videoconferencing room system.  These can be simple point-to-point calls.  The Visual Nexus meeting manager can also join multiple locations into a virtual meeting room.  When you add the ability to share documents and applications, your whole team can enjoy the same productivity that they would achieve if they were meeting in the same room. Because they can see the other participants, the energy level in meetings increases.  Calls can be unscheduled and made whenever you need to discuss something. You don’t even need to use the videoconferencing system in your meeting room if it is already booked, everyone can join the meeting from their computers.

Examples of how desktop videoconferencing can be used with room systems

The Board Meeting
Board meetings are often very difficult to schedule.  Even the annual board schedule will often change because of travel commitments by members.  An urgent meeting will usually be done using a telephone conferencing call which is not the best option.  By providing board members with desktop video on their personal computers they can all into the videoconferencing system installed in the boardroom. Meetings will be easier to schedule and even ad hoc or emergency meetings will be possible.

    Review meetings

An example may be a meeting called to discuss an urgent incident.  Most of the people required can gather in a meeting room equipped with a video conferencing system, but supposing two technical experts are required for a short part of the meeting to present some findings.  It is neither practical nor always possible to fly these experts in to attend the meeting.  With Visual Nexus they can call into the meeting room and make their presentations using one of the data or application sharing options.  They avoid the lost time and productivity of travelling to the meeting.