For years Yealink have had an advantage in Microsoft Teams Rooms with their use of network cabling to connect microphones and the Teams control touch panel.

The previous Poly Teams Room panel connected to the teams PC over an optical USB cable. In many installations this could be challenging. This could mean having to run the cable on the floor if there were no alternative routes available.

The new G9+ from HP/Poly changes that. It now adds the local loop network connection for the TC10 touch controller. On top of that, if you add a small POE switch you can run up to four touch controllers at the same time. that will be a real help in large room systems.

The G9+ starts off as a very well specified PC with i7 13th gen compute. This should be able to run Teams for several years as Microsoft continue to add features.

Another really neat addition is that you can set up and configure the PC from the TC10 touchpanel. You don’t need to have a keyboard and mouse any more for the initial PC set up.

The G9+ comes as a ‘base kit’ with the TC10 touch controller. so this would be a simple and smart upgrade for existing Poly Teams Rooms. Just connect to your existing USB soundbar and you are done.

Another new feature for installers is the wall mounting plate – The G9+ has magnets in the base so the PC simply attaches itself to the wall plate.

I have to say the collaboration between Poly software and HP hardware is really creating some excellent products.

I am really impressed by the Yealink SmartVision 40.

As usual you can choose the mode of the camera but our favourite is the IntelliFocus setting. The SmartVision 40 uses its two cameras to accurately frame the people in the meeting. It chooses up to four people who have spoken most recently. At the same time it insets a view of the whole room so you can see when everyone throws their hands up!

We have two very high resolution cameras each able to zoom up to 6x. Those cameras combined with AI mean that you can see everything you want to see in the room.

I was really impressed when there were just two of us in the room. I was sitting down. The second person got up and started walking back and for. Without any hesitation my section of the screen stayed static while the other section smoothly tracked my colleague as he walked about.

Probably the best meeting layout would be a round table, everyone can talk face to face easily. The challenge is how to reproduce this when some people are not in the room but on  a screen instead.

What if your boardroom table were square, with screens in the middle?  Then you could talk around the table and see and talk to the remote people all without turning your head.

If you are working at home, its easy. You look at the screen, and that’s where the camera is, so you are looking at the people you are talking to.

Now you are at a boardroom table. You talk to someone opposite you. Easy.

Now there’s a big screen at the head of the table and you want to talk to them as well. you have to keep turning your head back and for beween the two places.

Sometimes images don’t behave the way you want them to. For example you can take the output of one device, perhaps a BluRay player, connect it to a distribution amplifier and then to two monitors.

The picture appears on the one monitor but not the other. Even more weirdly if you disconnect the monitor that is working, then the picture appears on the other screen.

What is going on? Did I hear you say Enid? Not quite.

EDID – Extended Display Identification Data. Whenever you connect an image source to a display there is a dialogue over the HDMI cable. The display says its resolution and other details to the source, the source says OK, I can do that and sends the correct signal to the display. So far so simple.

Once you try to connect two or more different display screens then things get more complicated. The source can only send out one format at any time so if the displays ask for different specifications the source will only get one of them right.

At the time of writing the MS Teams Room app has a maximum resolution of 1920×1080. So if you use a PC connected to a 4k resolution screen, the PC may try to send a 4k image. This is most often an issue when there are two screens and it can even be intermittent making it a difficult problem to trace.

How can you fix it?

Sometimes you can go into the PC settings and tell it what resolution to use on the output. This can fail if the PC has to be reset or reconfigured in some way. The most robust solution is to use a little hardware device called an EDID manager or EDID emulator. This sits in the cable connection between the PC and the display screen and forces the PC to output a 1080p image.

The world has changed. In every meeting now, some people will be in the room and some of them will be at home.

What we want is for the meeting to be productive for everyone, wherever you happen to be. Because of that, the traditional room design is no longer suitable. We do not need so many seats in the meeting room, and we need a bigger screen, so the remote people are big enough.

Microsoft have thought about this and come up with the Front Row screen layout and room layout.

The aim is to have the screen big enough so that all the people in the meeting are as close to life size as possible. The camera system in the meeting room uses AI to identify the individuals. It then generates a personal image for each person. The result is that whether you are at home or on the meeting room you get the same priority on the meeting display.

Apart from the technical requirements for microphones, cameras and displays it is important to consider lighting and acoustics. Soft, even light on the faces will look best. Carpets and acoustic treatment on at least two walls will contribute to a calm quiet environment.

Glass walls, though attractive, can lead to a very reverberant acoustic that makes meetings unpleasant.

Event organisers are becoming more confident a little more ambitious with their events. More and more of the standard Virtual Events are changing into Hybrid Events….

The definition of a Hybrid event is simply mixing in a bit of live with a bit of virtual event.

For example….

A couple of weeks ago to announce the start of the construction work on the new Fitzlan High School we live filmed FM Mark Drakeford including a speech outdoors on the new Fitzalan High School site.

In order to limit the guests on site the live footage was broadcast through a Microsoft Teams meeting.

This meant the FM and a couple of socially distanced presenters could present live from location to the invited guests via a normal virtual Teams Meeting.

In order to run the live event from an empty field we used mobile phone technology and our live stream AV kit to make the link through to the virtual event.

More and more we are finding that there may be a live audience, but there will be many more joining the event remotely. There might be half a dozen people in one other location; or hundreds scattered in loads of different places.

We all know Wales has the A55 in the North and the M4 in the South and a lot of sheep in the middle. All I hear from event organisers is how do you get delegates from North Wales to attend conferences in Cardiff or vice versa. No one wants to spend hours on the A470 stuck behind a tractor or incur the costs of an overnight stay and the 2-3 days out of the office.

Second – tell us immediately.

If faults are left unattended they can often get worse. You may find people try to work around the fault by pulling out cables, or trying to connect them somewhere else. This makes the problem worse and makes fixing it even harder.

First – let’s try to delay that day.

Set up a routine service and maintenance contract. Then our engineers will visit your equipment regularly and check all the system functions. They will make sure everything is working properly. Sometimes there are faults that no-one notices, or no-one bothers to report.

We may be able to spot the problem and fix it before anyone knows. One common point of failure can be the cables. If we see a cable that’s worn and breaking we can replace it without waiting for it to fail.

Third – think about what you need now.

We suggest an occasional meeting with our sales team to check that what you have still meets your needs.

We have certainly found several cases where a system is never being used in the way it was intended. Time moves on and you may use a room for entirely different reasons. It may make sense to move equipment to another room. We can often use newer simpler designs to do the one thing that you want, without the complications of older systems.

We wouldn’t charge for this and we won’t sell you anything you don’t want.