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Huddle Rooms: A Definitive Guide To Outfitting Your Smaller Collaboration Spaces

rAVe Team

By David Danto and Andrew W. Davis

The year was 2006.  Videoconferencing had been used in the corporate world for more than ten years — and everyone hated it. It failed to meet the promises of reducing travel costs and providing easy, “just like being there” experiences. Enterprise AV was really no better. Huge boardrooms and over-complicated large conference rooms were the norm, with most requiring an AV or IT technician to operate. Into this mix, Cisco inserted the concept of immersive “TelePresence” — easy to use, single purpose, high-definition rooms that finally provided the desired experience. Every enterprise executive seemed to love them — except the ones in the finance department. Despite expert advice about the limitations, these rooms — costing upwards of a half-million dollars each — took off like wildfire. Now, just about 10 years later, it would be difficult to find any of these immersive rooms still in operation at most enterprises. Additionally, anecdotal data suggests the number of over-complicated, custom AV rooms has also shrunk significantly. The high costs did help sink these models, but that alone wasn’t the biggest factor in the pendulum swinging back to smaller, simpler systems. The truth is that nature of business changed

Ten to twenty years ago, people would gather in these large rooms in one or maybe two buildings to hold meetings. Today however, most meetings take place with distributed participants. Some are in conference rooms, some are at their desk, some are working from home and some are in transit. All of these people need to be able to connect and collaborate effectively without having to look for a specially equipped room — and/or one that is likely too complicated for them to use. A growing number of people now manage to use their mobile device or PC to join a meeting, but many are still in an office — in much smaller groups.

Many enterprise technology leaders realized a different way to support information worker collaboration was needed.  Having their people wander the hallways looking for an empty large conference room to use (and hoping that they can figure out how to get the AV technology working) just wasn’t effective. People conducting meetings from their desks didn’t work anymore, because desks were increasingly likely to be in an open-office environment rather than a private space.  To meet collaboration needs, many organizations are installing smaller, simpler, easy-to-operate meeting spaces.  Many more of these can be deployed for the price of one of the complex rooms of the past. These new spaces have generally been called huddle rooms.

What are Huddle Rooms?

A huddle room is a space where small groups of people (generally fewer than six) can go to have meetings away from the noise and activities of today’s typically dense open office environments. Depending upon organizational culture, these spaces may or may not have walls (huddle spaces vs. huddle rooms) and may or may not be intended primarily for impromptu meetings. The majority of these huddle rooms are equipped with basic, simple to operate technology to support local presentations and collaboration with remote individuals. Everyone seems to agree that these rooms should be able to function under the control of the average user — and not require assistance from an IT or AV technician. Simplicity is the overall theme. What isn’t agreed upon, however, is what features constitute “basic” requirements.

Some organizations believe a speakerphone is enough, with or without a shared display. Others consider some form of videoconferencing to be a requirement. Further confusing the discussion is the fact that a wide variety of manufacturers have introduced a plethora of solutions that describe a huddle room in terms of only their own products. Today’s offerings run the gamut from repurposed older modalities to new products that were created just to serve the huddle room paradigm.
It’s easiest to envision huddle room solutions along a spectrum, each with different features and approaches.

Each of the possible huddle room solution types has a number of variables, and each has significant pros and cons.

Classifying the Types of Huddle Room Systems

It’s easiest to envision huddle room solutions along a spectrum, each with different features and approaches.

Each of the possible huddle room solution types has a number of variables, and each has significant pros and cons.

Simple Rooms

It’s generally agreed that the most basic huddle space has a content display of some type and a telephone of some type. Smaller “quiet rooms” may have only a desk with one or two chairs and a tabletop display. Larger spaces may have a wall mounted flat-panel display and a speakerphone on a table with up to five or six chairs. Getting a person’s content onto the display can be accomplished by something as simple as a cable strung over to the table or as complex as any number of wireless content sharing applications and devices.

While these simple rooms meet the need for small, local groups of participants, they are typically not equipped to support collaborative meetings with remote participants effectively. People may bring their own notebooks and use them to join a meeting, but when using only a personal device to support even a small meeting room the results are typically less than satisfactory — with poor camera shots and unacceptable audio.

BYOD Rooms

In order to improve the user experience yet still maintain a BYOD model, many organizations provide huddle rooms with peripheral devices meant to connect to a person’s notebook. These devices — which are commonly based on USB connectivity — can include:

The general benefits of BYOD systems include:

Drawbacks include:

Hub Based Rooms: 

Some organizations that want a more powerful and manageable system in their rooms than a BYOD strategy will allow, but don’t want to install systems that they perceive to be “large” “complex” or “expensive” have opted for a permanently installed table top system. These hubs can be envisioned as a center of table speakerphone on steroids. Of course they make audio calls, but can also handle such things as connecting to mobile devices, sending content to the rooms display, and making very basic video calls (with restrictions.) Options for these can include the following:

The general benefits of Hub Based systems include:

See related  Why Long-Term Trust Matters More Than the Next Feature

The general drawbacks of Hub Based systems include:

All In One Rooms: 

Many organizations want to equip their huddle rooms with a single product – or a single product bundle – from a single manufacturer – to simplify the processes of ordering, maintaining and updating any software/firmware. Some of these systems still require a third party display, some of them come with the display, and some have all their features built into a display. Subcategories for these include the following:

The general benefits of All In One systems include:

The general drawbacks of All In One systems include:

Mini Full System Rooms: 

These systems represent the custom AV Integrators’ response to the huddle room hype. The recommendation is to build a smaller custom designed, custom programmed, multi-component system using best-in-breed AV and collaboration components — just as was traditionally done in the AV model – but in this case done smaller.

The general benefit of Mini Full Systems is the specific ability to have the technology, user interface and displays customized to exactly what the end users require.

The general drawbacks of Mini Full Systems are plentiful:

Trade-Offs

It is important to realize that there are inherent trade-offs for each of the huddle room solution types categorized above – and the trade-offs are not always evident. Can the system connect to all conferencing platforms you use? Will the camera deliver an adequate shot in your specific room? Is the system compatible with the cameras or other accessories you want to use? Is quality sacrificed for cost savings? Understanding the trade-offs and how they map into your organization’s collaboration needs is a crucial step to success. Independent technology consultants with experience across multiple platforms can provide valuable and cost-effective advice.

The Future

All the systems detailed above will continue to improve as technology advancements are brought to market. This is the nature of the electronics market. We can already envision a number of these improvements in price, performance, and feature sets.

Final Thoughts

Whether you are an information worker in a large enterprise or an SMB, huddle rooms are likely to play a role your business communications future. IT professionals will need to wrestle with the myriad of technology choices available. Our advice to all readers is to start by assessing your actual user needs (not as easy as it sounds) and then identifying the best approach or approaches to meet those needs along with key concerns. The second step is to outline priorities – start by considering price, performance, ease-of-use, compatibility with already-deployed technology, training and adoption requirements and manageability. These will vary depending on the number of rooms you are considering, their location, your IP network bandwidth and other factors as well. The optimal choice may not be just one solution, but rather a blend of them.

Our guide above details the types of solutions that the different vendors have brought to market and our assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. Many of the solutions are sufficiently low cost that trialing them is a reasonable step. Be careful, however, not to expose large groups of end-users to systems that are being tested. End-user adoption is a critical component of a successful collaboration strategy, and confusing the users — or exposing them to technology they will not be using — is rarely a good step. Nothing good comes from showing users technology they will not like, or technology they did like but will not be using. We strongly urge organizations to decide upon a single strategy based upon actual user needs and go forward with it, deploying huddle room technology that is consistent with all of their collaboration experiences.   This will create a stable and uniform user experience across any environment.

About the Authors

This article was written by Andrew W. Davis and David Danto and expresses solely their own personal opinions.

The co-founder of Wainhouse Research, Andrew has been reporting on the visual collaboration industry since 1994.  He has published numerous reports, opinion pieces, magazine articles and newsletters and has presented at numerous industry events over the years.

David has over three decades of experience providing problem solving leadership and innovation in media and unified communications technologies for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting and academic worlds including AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley, NYU, Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan Chase. David is the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology and a noted industry analyst and consultant. He can be reached at DDanto@imcca.org, and his full bio and other blogs and articles can be seen at Danto.info. Please reach-out to David if you would like to discuss how he can help your organization solve problems, develop a future-proof collaboration strategy for internal use, or if you would like his help developing solid, user-focused go-to-market strategies for your product or service

About the IMCCA

The Interactive Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA) is a not-for-profit user application and industry focused association with membership comprised of service and product providers, consultants and users. Members benefit from the understanding and the use of various interactive and collaborative communications technologies in their professional and everyday lives.

For further information please contact Carol Zelkin, IMCCA Executive Director, at 516-818- 8184 or czelkin@imcca.org. Visit the IMCCA web site here.

This article was reprinted with permission from IMCCA and originally appeared here.

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