What is Video Conferencing and Telepresence?
Video conferencing is many things to many organisations.
Enabling you to be in two, three, ten places at the same time without ever leaving your desk, it is the natural, inexpensive, green successor to the physical 'in-person' meeting.
It connects people, places, and processes at a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of business travel. It enhances and accelerates decision making. It speeds up time to market. It improves responsiveness and customer service.
Video is also an instantaneous remedy for time-consuming support and knowledge sharing issues, and a fast, flexible, proactive defence against competitive threat. In short, video conferencing puts you face to face with the world in the blinking of an eye.
An end-to-end video conferencing and telepresence solution incorporates a full suite of video systems, infrastructure for multiple environments and centralised management tools. You can expand it even further by integrating with external devices and productivity tools.
Your end-to-end solution may include some or all of the following products:
Telepresence
Telepresence creates the most realistic in-person meeting experience and provides an ideal platform for communication and interaction. Meeting participants feel as though they're having a conversation with colleagues right across the table — even though they may be miles or continents apart. The telepresence category can include immersive, room-based telepresence environments and personal telepresence systems for executive desktops.
Group Video Conferencing Systems (sometimes called Meeting Room Systems)
These high-quality video conferencing systems are designed to be used in meeting rooms, boardrooms, auditoriums and other shared environments. High Definition (HD) video conferencing solutions can offer the same clarity of picture and sound as telepresence systems.
Desk or Personal Video Conferencing Systems
These systems are designed for personal or single-person use and include Video VoIP phones, executive systems and PC-based systems optimized for use in the office workstation, home office or even the coffee shop.
Industry Applications
Telehealth, Distance Education, Defence and other industries have special video systems designed to meet their specific application. You may find that your applications match up to a specialised solution.
Centralised Management and Scheduling Tools
Management systems enable you to control an increasingly complex communications environment without decreasing the level of service or significantly increasing associated support costs. With a management system, you can perform remote diagnostics and system upgrades, control associated resources and link to third-party communication tools, generate usage reports and calculate your return on investment.
Multipoint Control Unit (MCU)
With MCUs, you can join multiple video and voice participants into a single conference. You can find MCUs that offer High Definition continuous presence to ensure the quality of your High Definition units across the whole network, and ones that are highly scalable media services engines that grow with your business demands.
Video Infrastructure
As video conferencing adoption in your organisation grows to include multiple sites and advanced functionality, you will require network infrastructure to support your solution.
Video Infrastructure ensures:
• That users on different networks can connect through the same video conference and telepresence solution
• That bandwidth can be regulated
• That video calls across different networks and user domains can connect securely with NAT-firewall traversal
An intelligent infrastructure component can make your network more reliable by ensuring that all calls are routed properly, convert IP addresses into directories for one-click dialling, and allow your video and telepresence units to interoperate with phones and other devices.
FindMe
Now you can call the person, not the device. With applications such as FindMe, callers can find you regardless of where you are. Individual video conference and telepresence users can log on to a Web-based interface and control where and how they are contacted. If a user will be away from the desk, for example, he or she can have inbound calls to a video or telepresence unit automatically forward to a mobile phone.
Content Server
By adding a content server, you can record and stream video meetings — such as company-wide announcements or trainings — to be shown to a wide audience at a time most convenient for viewers.
Peripherals and Accessories
There is a wide range of peripheral equipment that can enhance your visual communication environment. High Definition and wide angle cameras, as well as upgraded speakers and microphones, enhance the visual and audio experience. With document cameras, you can transmit drawings and other documents via video. You can connect your video systems to DVDs, VCRs, whiteboards and document and multimedia applications via your PC.