The growth in Data Protection issues surrounding meeting solutions remains controversial, especially for the security risks involved in BYOD, but that hasn’t stopped some of the biggest vendors from dipping their toes into the market. Microsoft is one of the latest giants to launch a BYOD-centric innovation, as announced at this year’s Enterprise Connect, marking an interesting tweak in direction for the organisation.
“There’s been this love/hate relationship between Microsoft and BYOD because it’s a challenge for them,” Craig Durr, Senior Analyst at Wainhouse Research, told UC Today. “They want to provide this experience, but they can’t have a situation where they feel they don’t give a good IT experience, so they’ve solved this with a partner.”
Crestron is an established vendor in the BYOD space and Microsoft's new partner. Crestron has collaborated with Microsoft to create the AirMedia Connect Adaptor, a plug-and-play dongle optimized by Microsoft for wireless presentation in collaboration with Teams software. It is flexible enough to work with various other platforms, but it simplifies BYOD meeting solutions by eliminating the need for a specific application for conferences and presentations. All content transmitted via the dongle also uses encryption.
Microsoft Teams expert Tom Arbuthnot from Empowering.Cloud explained Microsoft’s moves into BYOD to UC Today: “Crestron is the first big vendor in the space, using a low-compute Android device, a more aggressive price point, a simple plug-in into the laptop, and then having a Rooms-lite type experience of BYOD. That’s bridging a gap in the Microsoft ecosystem where there’s Microsoft Teams Room, but there’s a whole bunch of Rooms where that price point might not fit. That’s where BYOD Teams solutions might come into play.”
Durr believed the AirMedia dongle helps address Microsoft’s concerns about the quality of IT experience they can provide with BYOD solutions. “By having a device there in the room, it allows Microsoft to create an environment that is networked and managed,” Durr said. “So, they can help IT administrators see what’s going on in these rooms that would typically have things walking away or couldn’t be seen to be working or not.
