The Blog on Meeting Room Management

As a CIO, CTO, or an IT project manager, balancing your company's immediate needs with its long-term growth is paramount to success. But it is also one of the business's most significant challenges.

Complicated questions arise, such as whether you should invest aggressively in long-term initiatives or take a less expensive and more conservative approach. And these questions have not become easier considering the consequences of Covid-19.

A standard piece of this puzzle is the "build versus buy" question that many companies face when addressing their software needs. Does a cloud-based solution address your company's unique needs, or do you need a customized solution designed for your organization?

Hot desking has become a popular practice for growing companies as a way to save money, improve efficiency, and create a more agile work environment for their employees. Office space can be pricey, and in more traditional office models space is often under-utilized. Hot desking capitalizes on the growing agility in today’s workplace to help save companies money by moving away from the 1-to-1 seating model in the office. Rather than have assigned desks, employees operate out of an open workspace where they can reserve a desk for the day on-the-spot.

In a nutshell, the biggest difference is that Active Directory Server handles user management on-prem vs. Azure Active Directory handling user management in the Cloud.

Teams, the new hub for collaboration in the modern workplace, also works with AskCody

This year, Microsoft launched Microsoft Teams. A platform that's truly redefining teamwork and collaboration in the modern workplace, integrating all business critical tools into one shared platform, that all employees can access and use, with the same ease of use as Facebook Messenger, Slack or other conversational interfaces. 

But, Teams is not just yet another Chat App. It's "Collaboration 2.0", and with the new announcement for this year's Ignite, Teams is going to have a significant impact on teamwork in the modern workplace going forward.

As Microsoft put it: "Microsoft Teams is now the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. Going forward, Microsoft Teams becomes the core communication and collaboration client for Microsoft 365".

Teams will, therefore, have a huge impact on how you book and schedule meetings.

Superhero. Police officer. Firefighter. Service member. Meeting room hero? If you're reading this blog post, your childhood dreams of heroism aren't as far off as you might think. Here are our three steps to becoming the hero of meetings by eliminating tediousness and boosting productivity for all. 

Here's an elephant in the meeting room that no one ever discusses: Meetings are hugely expensive. 

During the next meeting you attend, add up the hourly cost of every person in the conference room. Then imagine, that you're writing the check for that meeting. If the money came out of your pocket, would you have the meeting? Has the meeting been worth that amount? Who's going to pay for it? And would you have any meetings at all?

Then factor in the opportunity cost for what every person in the room could be achieving instead of listening to John from the Dev Team talk about groundbreaking innovations in a code update somewhere in the stack, or Suzy from HR having another of her monologs during the roundup.

Any meeting that won't directly generate revenue or cost savings, either in the form of a key decision or a concrete plan of action, is likely a complete waste of money.

And I would bet that a lot of people and organizations don't have a clue! One thing is the cost of all the resources and time spent on planning the meeting. Now, this is just about the meeting itself.