Collaboration in Conference Calling

Wireless presentation solutions are becoming increasingly more important in the current global business market, but the current market solutions deployed in most conference rooms are not able to efficiently meet these needs. They require significant amounts of legacy hardware, such as video switchers, scalers and control panels – all of which are costly and complex to implement. These legacy solutions have meeting participants searching for cables, scrounging for adapters and then taking turns to show their content on the display. Meeting participants are not able to easily share and collaborate on the display with media that resides on their laptops and mobile devices. Collaboration has emerged as an industry buzzword that echoes around the offices of resellers and integrators, consultants and end-users. This requirement extends to more than 300,000 meeting rooms in Australia and New Zealand alone.

In March 2013, Mersive, a provider of display management and collaboration software, changed all of this with the introduction of Solstice Display Software. Solstice enables multiple users to connect simultaneously to a shared display using a range of devices and applications over an existing WiFi or Ethernet network. With Solstice, you can walk into a meeting room and instantly connect, share content and control the display, fostering collaboration and decision-making. It is the only solution that enables simultaneous display access for an unlimited number of users, sharing data files, images, applications and even video.

The most common questions analysts now field from organisations refer to specialised rooms or the enhancement of current software. Mersive’s founder, Christopher Jaynes, saw the need to ensure people in these meetings could easily share information, visual aids and files. From that vision, Solstice was born.

Initially funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Solstice was designed to offer a mainstream collaboration solution. Solstice provides a broad range of solutions, ranging in use from corporate conference rooms to classrooms.

Leveraging Solstice, a modestly equipped conference room can easily be turned into a collaboration centre where visual data can be effectively used for decision making, planning, problem solving and business command and control. As a software-only solution, Solstice offers a great deal of flexibility and scalability. It can work with any type of display, including a single projector, flat panel or a large video wall. It can run in parallel with soft-client video conferencing solutions, such as Vidyo, WebEx, Lync or GoToMeeting. It also comes with an IT dashboard that centrally manages all Solstice displays throughout the enterprise, and the recent addition of the Solstice Open Control Protocol makes it easy to integrate with in-room AV control panels, providing additional efficiency, functionality and cost savings.