Meeting Room AV: Bring Your Own Meeting and Platform Interoperability

At last year’s Enterprise Connect conference (hosted by No Jitter), Audio Video interoperability in meeting rooms became a trending topic. This is unsurprising given the fact that ease of collaboration is vital to the success of a newly minted hybrid workforce.

AV is a mission-critical meeting room component that needs to be assessed and addressed to ensure seamless communication and collaboration in the modern workplace.

In recent years, the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has become ubiquitous in the workplace. Employees use their personal laptops, tablets, and smartphones to work, and this has significantly increased productivity and flexibility. Now, a similar trend is emerging in the world of video conferencing with Bring Your Own Meeting (BYOM) and platform interoperability for meeting rooms.

Bring Your Own Meeting (BYOM)

BYOM is a concept where employees can bring their own preferred video conferencing platform to any meeting room space. This can include Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, and other platforms. With BYOM, employees are not forced to use a specific platform and can use the platform that they are most comfortable with—making meetings more productive and efficient. Platform interoperability for meeting rooms is the ability of different video conferencing platforms to connect and communicate with each other seamlessly.

The traditional meeting room set-up with a dedicated video conferencing system tied to a single platform is no longer sustainable. As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile and remote, employees need the flexibility to join meetings from anywhere and on any device. The rise of BYOM and platform interoperability is driven by this need for flexibility and the desire for employees to use the platform that they are most comfortable with.

One of the key benefits of BYOM is that it reduces the learning curve for employees. Rather than having to learn a new platform every time they join a meeting, employees can use the platform they are already familiar with. This results in more productive and efficient meetings, as employees are not spending valuable time trying to figure out how to use a new platform.

Another benefit of BYOM is that it increases collaboration and communication between employees. When employees can use their preferred platform, they are more likely to participate in meetings and share their ideas. This can lead to better decision-making and improved productivity.

Platform interoperability for meeting rooms is also important for companies that work with external partners or customers. Different organizations may use different video conferencing platforms, and being able to connect with these platforms seamlessly is crucial for effective communication and collaboration.

The adoption of BYOM and platform interoperability is also driving innovation in the video conferencing industry. Vendors are now developing products that are designed to work with multiple platforms, allowing companies to choose the best platform for their needs. This is leading to a more competitive and diverse market, for example, many enterprise IT leaders received news earlier this year that Microsoft software would be able to run on Cisco hardware. With more of these types of partnerships on the horizon in 2023, meeting rooms should be able to accommodate a full range of meeting solutions. 

According to a recent Metrigy study, more than half of the surveyed IT leaders plan to increase workplace collaboration spending in 2023 by an average increase of 26%. With many organizations fully implementing their hybrid work models this year they must be able to serve in-office meeting room needs in new ways.

IT leaders can leverage both BYOD and BYOM options to facilitate improved in-office and remote collaboration and communication, enabling users to not only utilize their own laptops or dedicated PCs during meetings but their videoconferencing platform of choice. While this offers a degree of convenience, it also presents challenges in terms of equipment compatibility issues as well as the need for additional user support with room reservations when connecting through meeting apps. To ensure optimal efficiency among employees while using these tools, proper training should be provided prior to usage. For more on why investments in Adoption and Change Management are key to meeting room success, check out our ACM page. 

In the end, organizations just want to deliver frictionless and consistent user experiences across every meeting room. And the end result of these efforts? Greater productivity (and overall happiness) for those employees who are working from offices and utilizing these mission-critical meeting room spaces on a regular basis. It's a BYO anything world and we're just learning to live—and work—in it.