Crestron's touchscreen Microsoft Teams Panels for meeting room scheduling and management is the first to be generally available. June 18, 2022 Microsoft is releasing a new series of touchscreen Microsoft Teams panels to provide a space and time management solution on a compact digital display. The company announced the general availability of the meeting room scheduling and management panels Friday, but the panels were originally announced in October 2020 during the company’s annual Ignite conference. The Microsoft Teams Panels are powered by a native Teams experience and can be mounted to es ..read more

The eagerness of businesses to play catch up following the pandemic has had a profound impact on the world of AV. The forced introduction of working from home and the transition to a hybrid model had already increased demand for collaboration solutions hugely. But although this decreased after an initial peak in 2020, the return to the workplace has further increased demand from end users. Now, a combination of issues from a shortage of chips, to Brexit and the closure of ports in China, has led to supply chain shortages across the industry. Darren Clayman, managing director of AV Award-winnin ..read more

Global Remote Audiences Can Now Participate in Live Events With Their Smartphones Biamp continues to create extraordinary collaboration experiences between presenters and audience members with the launch of Crowd Mics™ Online at ISE 2020. Crowd Mics transforms every smartphone into a personal microphone and interactive response system via a free iOS or Android app. Now, Biamp is extending the use of Crowd Mics to remote locations. With Crowd Mics Online, geographically diverse audience members can use their smartphones to connect with the event presenter as if they were in the same room. Demon ..read more

Microsoft's Front Row feature for Teams Rooms is meant to blur the lines between virtual and in-person meetings participants. Last summer, Microsoft announced plans to make hybrid meetings better via new Teams enhancements. On February 1, officials said they were starting to roll out one of the key updates, known as "Front Row" -- a feature in Teams Rooms that's meant to make meeting interactions between virtual and in-the-room meeting participants more natural. With Front Row, Microsoft moves the video gallery to the bottom of the screen, so remote participants are actually f ..read more

Natalie Harris-Briggs | November 12, 2021 If you are hosting a meeting, one of the most important considerations is the room layout. The optimum meeting room layout will help everybody see the whiteboard or other meeting materials and hear the speakers. It will also help anyone who is joining the meeting virtually, experience it as if they were there.  In this article, we will look at several meeting room layouts and examine which is best for certain types of meetings.  WHAT IS A CONFERENCE ROOM LAYOUT?  A conference room layout is the set up of chairs and tables in a ..read more

For the better part of a year, we’ve changed the where, when, and how of our working and collaboration habits as the world adjusts to social distancing and remote work. Over the last seven or eight months, we’ve moved our workflow to collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Webex and others, and we’ve become familiar with the display hardware that can make using those platforms even easier and more productive. However, this remote workforce won’t continue – at least not at these numbers – once COVID-19 is behind us and no longer a driving force behind new collaboration ..read more

Have you found yourself transferring from a conference or huddle room in your office to using remote conferencing software at home? If you are making the switch to more virtual meetings, whether that be out of necessity or to keep up with modern workplace trends and to attract more millennial employees, this guide to running a video conference room and engaging participants is a must-read for you! WHAT IS REMOTE COLLABORATION? First, let’s talk about remote video collaboration. Collaboration is the act of working as a team on a project that involves every member in the grou ..read more

By Mark Miller  DvLED video walls have different installation requirements than other display options With so many advances in digital display technology in the last decade, the types of displays and video walls that consumers expect to see has changed over time. We see an increasing need for large video walls that deliver memorable first impressions and achieve maximum impact. True video walls are not simple LCD screens, they require something more because they are something more. They are intended to be the eye-catching, mind-blowing centerpiece that delivers nothing short of that ..read more

Shure audio technology helped ensure that Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” achieved stellar sound throughout.   On the evening of December 15, I had the opportunity to join Shure and many of my media colleagues at IPIC Fulton Market in New York City for a screening of “West Side Story.” Following the screening, a Q&A with Tod A. Maitland, sound mixer for the film, took place. During the movie, the audience watched with rapt attention, transported by the ill-fated love story of Tony and María, and enjoying the flawless audio capture that the company’s technology was ..read more

Extron announced the NAV Pro AV over IP Series has received Joint Interoperability Test Command — JITC approval by the U.S. Department of Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). This approval complements Extron FIPS 140-2 validation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Extron says the NAV Series is the most advanced professional AV-over-IP technology to receive these U.S. federal government certifications, enabling the confident installation of NAV Series systems in the most secure information a ..read more