AV Technology - November/December 2008 - (Page 28)

Touch comes to Listen • Ideal for boardrooms, universities, courtrooms, council meetings, and government conferences • Built-in high resolution conﬁgurable touchscreen • Software for control, voting, polling, video display, and web streaming • Stand-alone “plug & play” • Uses Cat-5e cabling • Intuitive and easy to use • Makes meetings efﬁcient and productive ROOM SCHEDULING SOFTWARE Don’t miss a single sound. Touch and hear for yourself Free no obligation demonstration +1.800.330.0891 North America or +1.801.233.8992 sales@listentech.com • www.listentech.com does not reside on your computers. You simply pay a subscription fee, usually on a per-user, per-month basis. This option requires less upfront costs in the short term, as it eliminates the need to acquire inhouse hardware, meaning you don’t have a large capital outlay. The benefit is that you can switch from a capital cost to a monthly business expense, allowing you to save valuable capital funds for other company needs. Another benefit of the hosted service is that it minimizes the drain on IT department resources. Also — you never have to worry about upgrades, since you will always have the latest versions of the software vendor’s product. However, over the long haul (3-5 year period), hosted solutions may cost more than in-house deployments because of recurring fees. An important consideration regarding hosted solutions is the degree of flexibility to adapt to an organization’s unique scheduling processes: make sure the customization capabilities your organization needs are not lost when considering software provided as a service. You’ll also want to evaluate the vendor’s hosting infrastructure to ensure it provides adequate security and availability guarantees at the physical, network, server, application, and data levels. Look for a professionally managed data center with 24x7 monitoring and a proven track record of providing secure, high-availability service. One of the few drawbacks of a hosted solution can be limitations in functionality of the software. Make sure the SaaS product you are considering has a reporting feature, which is often a collection of built-in, templated reports. TOP FEATURES TO CONSIDER While each organization is unique, the following features are almost always common to room and resource scheduling needs: 1. Simple, easy-to-navigate user interface: A central interface where users can view, search, schedule, or submit requests for meeting rooms and resources. This saves users’ time in finding the room and resources they need. 2. Built-in customization tools to fully configure the interface, screens, workflows and processes: Tools that do not require deep technical knowledge to use. This allows you to customize the different screens and features to adapt to your unique business processes. 3. Security levels that allow an administrator to grant varying levels of user capability to different levels of staff: For example, certain people should be able to directly book available rooms while others would only able to view availability and submit room requests. This improves the management of the rooms and resources. 4. Integrated automated email notification capabilities to expedite meeting room and resource request processing: This saves time for users and eliminates the potential for errors. 5. Ability to scale to multiple locations: This is critical for organizations with meeting rooms and resources in many locations. 6. Ability to access — from anywhere, anytime — a web-based system: You don’t want to be limited from requesting a meeting 28 | AV TECHNOLOGY | november | december 2008 assistive listening • soundﬁeld • tour group • language interpretation • co ening conferencing http://www.listentech.com http://www.listentech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AV Technology - November/December 2008

AV Technology - November/December 2008 Contents Precedent Corporate: Finishing with Style Government: It’s Still About People Education: Surviving Budget Cuts Applying Metrics to AV ROI Selecting Room Scheduling Software Six Things You Need to Know About Webcasting The Way I See It: Becoming an Internet Native Casino Uses AV for Dramatic Impact Just What the Doctor Ordered The Loneliest Help Desk in Town Product Forum Product Spotlight Tech Horizons New Products Ad Index AV MO

AV Technology - November/December 2008

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