“Many AV and IT providers as well as end user customers are already well on the way to being power users of remote team collaboration technology, using the best new tools from the world’s top hardware and software providers.”
Across the country millions of people have suddenly embraced collaboration technology as remote working, teaching, and learning is – for a while – the order of the day. As I write this, work-from-home is the new norm, and millions of students and their families now have months of experience immersing themselves in remote classes.
We can learn a lot from the Education world. It’s important to note that the fast transition to remote teaching/learning was largely focused not on collaboration per se but on simply facilitating a one-to-many webcast of a teacher teaching while students watch from their homes/apartments. Schools were tasked with basic instructional continuity in the first phase. In a top university’s IT/AV war room meeting I was invited to attend just before their spring break, the stated mission for the campus was clear: with students barred from attending class in person, get the 90% of classes that just need a one-to-many video webcast up and running, fast. Then figure out the other stuff later – like accommodating the more interactive and collaborative classes, and how to administer final exams when there is no airtight log-in credentialing in place to guarantee academic integrity (yet). So students have been funneled into remote platforms everywhere, and despite the big wave of Zoom-based approaches, everyone is learning fast that one size does not fit all.
According to research firm Apptopia, on Monday March 30th, daily users of Zoom did rise to a record 4.84 million, as many school children as well as college students switched to virtual learning programs. (Part of that was due to Zoom waiving their 40-minute meeting limit on free accounts, which accounts for much of the spike in usage.) But it’s now clear that even one-to-many, non-interactive remote teaching/learning needs robust solutions, not oversimplified ones. Security issues have come immediately to the foreground, and not all platforms count security as their strong suit.
It’s interesting to note that the more enterprise and business-focused collaboration platform, Microsoft Teams, was used by 1.56 million users on that same day, March 30th. In fact MS Teams is being ramped up fast, and in different and very innovative ways. Teams just added several new upgrades to make it a great option for digital education and video conferencing – not just for corporate/enterprise/SMB where its strength has long been recognized. Some of those features are:
- A global admin setting for the default role of meeting attendee (so that attendees such as students can’t present, mute the instructor, or remove the instructor from a meeting)
- End meeting for all participants (so students can’t chat, etc., after the class/meeting)
- Custom video background capability
- Attendance reports for meetings
- Better video support
Of course we’re all remote meeting and class attendees now – for a while anyway. But remote corporate/enterprise workers are in a different category from schools and students, aren’t they? Aren’t they power users of remote collaboration tools, having used them for a while now, and also having more resources to purchase the best solutions? The answer to that is yes, and no. Indeed, for years all of us in the AV and IT worlds have been telling everyone: work smarter, do more Collaboration, Videoconferencing, with new generation AV, IT, and UCC tools – soft codecs, tracking and conferencing cameras, BYOD connectivity, wireless connectivity, large touch/interactive displays for meeting rooms. And haven’t many of us been marketing products and services to facilitate all of that and more? Yes, but in this crisis many are – like our college and even K-12 kids – scrambling to just connect from home with Zoom calls, MS Teams calls, Webex – with whatever platform we can, to facilitate business continuity, not necessarily up our collaboration productivity.
Did you or your purchasing team procrastinate getting that nice Logitech webcam for your office, or home office, last year? Don’t feel bad about it, we’re all seeing CEO’s, captains of industry, NBA stars, and Federal Reserve Board members being interviewed on network TV as they connect in with their built-in grainy laptop webcams and bad lighting – the kind of leveling, democratizing effect that crises bring. In this crisis, that kind of “leveling” is of course not our top worry, but it does point out that you need to communicate your message without tech distractions or bottlenecks, now and going forward.
It’s also being said that this crisis will fast track many of the tech innovations and evolutions that where already in progress over the past few years. In terms of AV and IT technology, remote collaboration/remote working solutions head that list, and there is a lot of speculation today that “the workplace will be changed forever, after the crisis passes” i.e. many of us will be working remotely more if not most of the time. Predictions are difficult, especially in the middle of the immediate disruption. But the very good news is: many AV and IT providers as well as end user customers were already well on the way to being power users of remote team collaboration technology, using the best new tools from the world’s top hardware and software providers. Now is the time to learn from those power users. Thank God for the simple platforms that are the nearest ports in this big sea storm, today, for our kids’ schooling and for many of us – but it’s time to learn from the people, companies, and solution providers that are forging new paths in team collaboration, with new tools.
More on those new tools in the next blog, where we’ll look at what separates basic web-based collaboration from the kind of robust room-based systems that get better participation, better interaction, better data sharing, and better results for collaboration teams.
