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    Senior Member Webhead's Avatar
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    Conference room meetings?

    How do you guys do conference room meetings? Over here I have a few things happening. First, I have a giant 55" TV with a computer connected to it. I have 2 long cables attached to it (one HDMI and one VGA) so that the presenter can host a meeting on the TV from his laptop at the conference room table. I can switch TV inputs from HDMI 1 to 2 and someone can present from the other computer using a wireless keyboard/mouse. In the middle of the table is a Polycom phone.

    So here's what happens,... let's say a meeting is called. The boss walks in with his laptop. He first powers on the TV. This takes maybe 15 seconds or more (I haven't timed it.) Then he connects the HDMI cable, switches to the correct HDMI input and then proceeds to find the file he wants to present from (Powerpoint, Excel,... or whatever the case may be). The whole process,... from the time the presenter walks in the room, everyone sits and the presenting begins is maybe a few minutes or so.

    Now if someone else brings in a laptop, then they transfer the cable to that person and then that person starts presenting.

    Also, we use WebEx with outside people.

    So that's generally how we do it. Seems pretty standard right? But I just had a request from someone who was asking me to starting thinking about a way to simply bring in a tablet and begin presenting immediately as soon as they walk in the room. Obviously I started thinking about AirPlay with iPad and Google Chrome with Google products. Then of course I also started thinking about just having a WebEx meeting ready to go. But other than that, we aren't really (technologically speaking) there quite yet. Am I right? Or again, am I missing something?

    I think the guy has a vision in his mind of the staff walking into a room with tablets and everything instantly connects and everyone begins presenting immediately where people can switch content between each other and collaborate and share easily. If something like this does exist, I imagine it must be very expensive (i.e. Cisco Telepresence?)

    I want to have a "can do" attitude but I sensed that the guy thinks I'm making excuses. First of all our computer equipment is getting a little dated. Laptops don't have SSD's in them and take a little time to boot, etc. I'm trying to convince them to (at the very least) upgrade these older laptops to SSD's or replace them with newer equipment. But they usually don't want to spend money. So I'm a little bit at a loss. I'm a sys admin, not a magician. Any thoughts on any of this? I'm going to start researching this a bit more but just wanted to see what other sys admins thoughts on this subject might be.
    Last edited by Webhead; 07-31-2014 at 10:47 PM.

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