Today's collaboration needs are rapidly changing as organizations of all kinds continue to experiment to find the approach that works best for their unique situation. Meeting participants need to collaborate onsite or remote, using a variety of devices running disparate operating systems, and across UC platforms that could include Zoom, Teams, Webex, Go-to-Meeting, or a plethora of other products.
In many cases, users often tackle these technologies in huddle rooms, touchdown spaces, executive briefing centers, clinics, learning spaces, and even large auditoriums. And within these spaces, users may also want to include documents, cameras, and other peripherals, as well as whiteboarding, scrum applications, and visual collaboration apps that may not be standard or compatible with the solution already in place.
The dynamic state of the workplace, education, and healthcare heightens the importance of interoperability and the ability to customise the collaboration experience more easily, as well as the ability to quickly scale technology deployment up or down as the situation warrants. In short, to succeed, the collaboration platform must be as agile as the organisation.
Agility
This agility starts with a collaboration solution that has an open and extensible architecture, allowing broad compatibility across not only user devices and operating systems, but also across room displays and peripherals such as webcams and microphones.
Dave Buchholz, Global Director of Technical Sales Enablement for the Intel Unite team, describes it this way: “A lot of solutions out there today are really stove-piped, so you have to dial into one solution without a lot of flexibility. With an open architecture solution, like Intel Unite, you can integrate with multiple UC partners, multiple peripherals and work seamlessly across an ecosystem of clients.”
According to Buchholz, an open architecture also allows for the integration of collaboration enhancing apps. “We give away the SDK with a full API. If Intel hasn’t created the app already, end-users can create their own integrations to meet their unique needs, or MSPs can develop custom apps for their customers.”
