There are plenty of situations where "live" collaboration between people is warranted and without it, roadblocks remain. Video is the eyes and audio the ears, but what about the hands and feet of collaboration?
Our new challenge was migrating email over to hosted Microsoft Exchange (Office 365). While Microsoft has plenty of choices, once you decide on the bundle you want, there's not always and easy upgrade path. Meaning, if you choose one package over another, you may limit your future capabilities and this means completely abandoning the package you selected initially. In short, I did not elect to have the bundle include voice (Lync).
Given those factors, here's how we collaborated to set it up: My buddy did a desktop share with my Mac desktop and we spent the next couple of hours implementing hosted Exchange. He walked me through the steps, which were imperfect, though to be fair, this is true for most processes like this one.
Desktop sharing is a key feature and it's one that for this particular purpose proved to be very beneficial. I can say that now I feel even more comfortable after having gone through the process with someone who has done it many times before--it has given me a higher confidence to do the same thing again. Desktop sharing was the perfect solution, coupled with a phone call.
Here's a different example of collaboration: A few weeks ago, I had a videoconference with Stu Aaron, CCO (chief commercial officer) of BlueJeans Network, discussing their announcement at Enterprise Connect to run their new app on Apple iPhones and iPads. After their prompting, I installed the app on my iPhone. (BlueJeans offers the "free trial" here.) In our conversation, Stu touched on what defines the BlueJean experience: quality, reach (any device, any location) and ease of use. These qualities, I believe are behind the exponential growth of videoconferencing minutes that BlueJeans is capturing on their network.
The question is whether we can get these sorts of collaboration into the endpoints people really use, to make it more meaningful. Last month I was privy to the conceptual designs of new SIP desk telephones and got to see, touch and experience first-hand some of the new key design changes. What I envision is the ability of consumers to purchase new SIP desk telephones with the added feature of a screen that has enabled videoconferencing of their choice: WebRTC, Skype and even Google.
Some videoconferencing capability exists in some products now, such as Grandstream and Polycom. I believe we may see growth in the consumer market simply because video is becoming more popular, but not everyone wants to boot the PC. Maybe I am overly optimistic about point-of-use videoconferencing, but the telephone desk set is still a "terminal."
A meaningful consumer telephone call to me is when Grandpa or Grandma has the option to pick up the phone to talk and see who's calling; younger viewers already are comfortable with video. Once video calling is in wide adoption, users may find it hard to give up because it does offer a more complete experience.
That's video with a traditional telephone endpoint; what about participating in videoconferences with an iPhone, so I could show the other participants in the call what it is that I am seeing, experiencing, etc.?
Well, the reality is the iPhone or iPad really aren't necessarily the best tool to do this. I understand field services can be a huge hit for videoconferencing, but this is where I ask: How? The tools I have--my iPhone and even my buddy's iPad and iPad mini--just don't lend themselves to being the most effective tools to show other people what I want them to see, and this I think limits the effectiveness of collaboration.
I've reached out to several companies and I will report what I find next. The hands and feet of collaboration are the users themselves. I would say they are not yet "Well equipped with the right choices of tools." Stay tuned.
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