Microsoft's Managed Meeting Rooms:  Meeting room management made easy

With the continual trend in remote collaboration, most business leaders attribute the external effectiveness of meetings to room environment and technology. A typical meeting room will consist of hardware - computers, screens, microphones, cameras, projectors and cabling - and collaboration software, all of which must be sound and functional to guarantee an efficient meeting.

But, not all organizations can afford to build up the expertise required for proficiency in meeting room management, particularly in smaller organisations with fewer collaboration spaces available.

What are Managed Meeting Rooms?

In recognition of the need for productive meetings and the associated challenges, Microsoft created the Managed Meeting Rooms (MMRs) service to help organizations run seamless and effective meetings necessary for productive outcomes.

The soon to be released Microsoft product is a cloud-based IT management and security monitoring service. It serves to ensure that Teams meeting rooms devices are kept secure, up-to-date, and proactively monitored to guarantee optimum in-room meeting experience. With this solution, organizations do not necessarily need to build up meeting room management expertise because Microsoft has instrumented all of the necessary requirements.

Microsoft can help select the right tools (currently either through Microsoft Teams Rooms or Skype Room Systems, both of which the MMR service supports) for setting up a meeting room. Companies can then monitor their systems through a cloud service to ensure that the entire set up is running smoothly. And, if issues are detected, particularly those that can be fixed remotely, Microsoft Teams can take care of them to ensure that the meeting can begin as scheduled without any delays.

Prior to the launch of Managed Meeting Rooms, Microsoft worked with over 100 customers, where it has managed over 1,500 meeting rooms to ensure success.

Benefits of Managed Meeting Rooms Service

Microsoft�??s Managed Meeting Room service offers many benefits, with the main being that it provides a foundation for maintaining an excellent and consistent end-user experience in rooms across locations.

Some of the other benefits include:

• Enables meeting room planning.
• The maintenance of devices and software.
• The use of cloud intelligence to accurately identify meeting room issues, resolve these issues, and provide insight for strategic facilities planning.
• Allows customers to focus IT resources on strategic issues instead of in-room maintenance and troubleshooting.
• Reduces operating costs by relying on standardized room infrastructure across the enterprise.
• Enables customers to recoup a quick return on investment (ROI) through their ability to expand their management at any rate.

Please contact us for more information on using Managed Meeting Rooms in your organisation.

Meetings form an integral part of corporate life, particularly in the modern-day office; productive meetings, not just meetings, are now crucial to our success. Despite the dependence on office space collaboration, if physical meeting rooms are not properly managed, they can lead to wasted time and resources.