Creating a High-Tech Meeting/Conference Room?

papaia asks: "As the network geek in my company, I have been tasked with defining a high-end, fully connected and extremely easy to use conference room, for our CEO, who is your classic non-computer-using person. The requirements are to accommodate 'local' (to the conference room) meetings, as well as interactive sessions with people in other locations, allowing him to discuss/debate various product solutions, on files being opened and available to him to pinpoint issues, without the knowledge of the underlying software used to create them (e.g. CAD drawings where he could make annotations, etc). Do any of you have recommendations for building the 'meeting room of the 21st century'?"

"The solutions I have been looking into, so far, range from various types of whiteboards (Panasonic's interactive whiteboard, or SMART board one), to interactive displays, and software such as Netmeeting, or Cisco's meeting place.

I obviously need to combine any or all of the above with some capability of video (of course), thus I am looking into various webcams, and conferencing capabilities in some equipment - the latter is yet another challenge (VoIP or not?!?). I have also looked at meeting room suggestions, and I cannot really make up my mind."

jedi council

[antiaktiv]

Talk to the guy who did this for the Jedi Council. That guy did one hell of a job

Saw this idea somewhere else....

[Rei]

You want a pitch black room with a couple of white spotlights and a bunch of tall black boxes with oversized orange numbers on them placed in a circle around the room. The boxes should project people's images on them when activated from secret remote sites around the world. The room itself should be located deep in an underground bunker.

how to stall...

[RayMetz100]

Write up a paper with 3-4 options and schedule time to explain it to him. He'll have so many comments that he'll understand why you need more time to investigate.

Continue investigating until a real emergency comes up and distracts you. He'll understand.

Continue getting distracted and occationally researching more options until he either calls the whole thing off, finds a similar new stupid task for you, or decides he really does need a conference room and settles on the quickest easiest solution from the very first paper you wrote over 6 months ago.

Good Luck! -Ray

Re:jedi council

[iggymanz]

as long as he's not the one who did Darth Vader's op center, it's not good to have your boss able to throttle you to death remotely.

MOD PARENT UP

[limabone]

Amen brother..we spent a fortune on our executive boardroom...and we don't even have video conferencing. We have motorized projector that drops out of the ceiling, motorized blinds, wireless touch panel to control everything. It is as simple as that equipment can be, but the execs manage to @#%#$^ it up on a weekly basis and I end up having to get them hooked up for each and every meeting. They also like to go into the AV closet of the room and randomly press buttons thinking that will somehow fix everything.

Re:jedi council

[gcalvin]

The remote voice quality was surprisingly bad in the Jedi Council conference room. You'd think if they had the technology and bandwidth to do holographic video, then surely the sound shouldn't be as thin and tinny as it was. Then again, it was long, long ago, wasn't it?

Before I tell you what you need...

[xactuary]

I'll need the name of your company so I can short the stock.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This is the wrong place to ask

[Anonymous Coward]

...average engineer has a superior IQ, but can barely match his belt with his shoes.

You're suposed to match your shoes to your belt??!?

Projector Recommendation

[duffer_01]

My company blew the budget and installed one of these puppies http://www.thepooch.com/projector.html [thepooch.com]