The Record - Issue 20: Spring 2021

68 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om V I EWPO I NT Video meetings: curse or blessing? ANDE R S LØK K E : P E X I P Despite the convenience of video conferencing solutions like Microsoft Teams, the vast number of products available is causing problems among users I n today’s home office landscape, there are many ways of meeting via video. Microsoft Teams leads the way by enabling millions of people with its platform-based approach, where video becomes an integrated part of users’ everyday tools alongside their chat, documents, calendar, and other work-related dashboards. The integration makes it easy to click the cam- era button and call the person with whom you are collaborating instantly, or schedule a meet- ing directly in the calendar. The growth in business video usage was long overdue – the industry has hoped for this for many years, but it took a pandemic to drive digital transformation in many businesses. The expan- sion of usage is creating better technology, as with Teams, for instance. But there are also many other video meeting tools available in the market. Many in the communications industry have assumed that these different solutions would eventually converge to create a smoother and more straight- forward user experience. However, with over- night video adoption caused by the pandemic, video meetings have become even more complex. When we call someone on the phone, it doesn’t matter what make of phone the recipient has or what network they use. There is no technological hurdle in this experience, so why is there still such a disconnect in the video meeting experience? When Covid-19 arrived, many organisations didn’t have time to think through all the elements of setting up a video meeting solution for long- term use; they just needed a solution to quickly enable people to keep working. The volume, growth and availability of new solutions provided many companies with a quick fix. But this ‘panic buying’ also created problems for end-users. We now have many ways of meeting without a simple way to bridge these gaps. Employees grow accus- tomed to their internal platform, but when some- one invites them to a meeting using a different provider, problems arise. Anxiety, intimidation, and even panic set in. Research shows that even as workers now return to their offices, video meetings are likely to remain the norm. Many companies plan for hybrid workforces, where employees can work from wherever they like. And this is where the challenges become evident. For many, every meeting is now a Teams meet- ing. More often than not, meeting invites include the Teams meeting link by default, and every meeting becomes a hybrid meeting with some in the office and some remote. This perfectly reflects the hybrid workforce. Because of this, when someone walks into the office conference room and wants to join the Teams meeting, they don’t necessarily see the difference between a Teams Room system, a Cisco WebEx system, or a dedicated high-end “Using a meeting-agnostic video solution like those from Pexip means empowering workers with tools they can trust”