Smarter offices & smarter meeting rooms

The history of the office is starting a new chapter. Businesses are embracing the benefits of hybrid working. As a result, we're seeing more organisations looking to invest in 'smart' offices that can better serve the needs of the modern workforce.

What is a smart office? A smart office is a workplace that uses high tech equipment to help employees achieve the best possible results most efficiently. It sounds simple, but the challenges become apparent when you think about the diverse range of tech needed for day-today office tasks. Most businesses use different pieces of hardware, made by different brands, each using different software applications. Smart offices connect all these devices and systems, creating an Internet of Things (IoT) that can exchange data – data that can be used to make better decisions.

Who benefits from smart offices? The most apparent benefactors will be the end-users of the technology, the office occupants who are going about their day-to-day tasks. For example, most of us have had at least one frustrating experience when it comes to organising and running office meetings. From free rooms being hard to find or double-booked to screen shares not working or faulty audio making your remote colleagues sound like Daleks - these issues aren't only disruptive, they often take time to resolve. Solutions like Mi Workspace take the stress of booking meeting rooms by integrating them into workplace calendars. You can even use it to manage huddle spaces, hot desks, car parking spaces or other workplace resources. Moreover, it handily sends out notifications of guest arrivals. Mi Insight also provides a lot of value here, proactively monitoring AV and UC equipment so that faults can quickly be spotted and resolved – allowing your workforce to focus on acing their meeting!

The other big winners are those who organise and manage the office resources, such as your operations and IT teams. They need to be able to monitor, analyse and optimise the performance of office resources. This can be quite the challenge for large businesses with several teams working in numerous offices (if not remotely), sometimes in various parts of the world. Again, Mi Workspace offers the ideal solution here, providing a dashboard of analytics for all your meeting rooms, including AV equipment status and performance metrics. In fact, Mi Workspace can do a lot more, such as help with health and safety compliance by showing environmental data and stats on office space occupancy vs capacity.

Just how smart can smart offices be? To take your smart office to the next level, you'll need more than just easy-to-interpret data. The smartest offices can automate their processes, saving your IT team and your end-users time. A great example of automation in practice comes from Mi Insights. Not only does it proactively monitor AV and UC equipment, but responses to errors are also automated. If a staff member suffers a problem with their device, a notification is automatically sent to your helpdesk ticketing system. Automated responses can even be set up to recommended troubleshooting actions, give simple reset commands, or even enable complex configuration changes.

For more information on Mi Insight, please visit miglobalservices.com or email info@miglobalservices.com.

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