FOSTERING EASIER, MORE PRODUCTIVE
MULTIMEDIA COLLABORATION IN THE
WORKPLACE
A FIRST-OF-ITS KIND APPLIANCE TURNS MULTIMEDIA COLLABORATION FROM A SPECIAL
EVENT INTO AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE WORK DAY
A MITEL WHITE PAPER
CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY....................2
WHY IS COLLABORATION
SO CRITICAL?...................................3
COLLABORATION IN THE
NEW WORKPLACE.................................3
MAKE IT NATURAL –
THE COLLABORATION CHALLENGE.........4
MITEL MIVOICE VIDEO UNIT:
NEXT-GENERATION MULTIMEDIA
COLLABORATION.............................5
SPONTANEOUS COLLABORATION...........6
SIMPLE COLLABORATION......................6
COST-EFFECTIVE COLLABORATION.........7
NO ADDED WORK FOR IT.......................7
FLEXIBLE DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS..........7
COLLABORATION AS A NATURAL
PART OF THE WORK DAY.......................8
ABOUT MITEL...................................9
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Effective collaboration with co-workers, partners,
customers, and others is critical for meeting an
organization’s goals and driving its productivity.
And in a world where work groups are spread
throughout a building, across a country, or around
the world, fostering productive collaboration is
more important and more challenging than ever.
In response to customers who’ve said “give us a simpler,
more spontaneous and cost-effective way to foster
multimedia collaboration,” Mitel® developed a first-ofits-kind device that lets people do just that. Mitel MiVoice
Video Unit is an all-in-one multimedia appliance that
combines in-room presentation display and multi-party
audio and visual collaboration for remote participants in a
single unit that fits easily into the personal office meeting
space.
With the MiVoice Video Unit, collaboration becomes more
spontaneous. Its intuitive touchscreen display makes
starting and managing a collaboration session simple. It
costs a fraction of what you’d pay for a traditional solution.
Deploying it is as simple as plugging in a phone. And the
MiVoice Video Unit is SIP-compatible and standards-based,
so it fits seamlessly into existing infrastructures.
Mitel MiVoice Video Unit solves a range of multimedia
collaboration challenges to make next-generation
multimedia collaboration a natural part of any productive
work day.
MITEL WHITEPAPER | 1
FOSTERING EASIER, MORE PRODUCTIVE MULTIMEDIA COLLABORATION IN THE WORKPLACE
WHY IS COLLABORATION
SO CRITICAL?
[If] firms come into being in order to enable
human beings to achieve collaboratively what they
could not achieve alone … then the main focus of
executives’ attention should be on how to foster
collaboration within their companies.
Just about everything that gets done in an organization
is the result of collaboration. Only by working together,
by sharing knowledge and resources, and by building
consensus about goals and how to achieve them can teams
of workers accomplish what none of them could alone.
Collaboration within an organization drives productivity
and competitive advantage. Collaboration with partners
extends those benefits across the enterprise. Collaboration
with customers builds profitable relationships. In short,
collaboration is a critical ingredient for achieving any
organizational goal. This, combined with the changing
nature of the workplace, makes it both more important
and more challenging than ever to foster simpler, more
spontaneous and productive ways to collaborate at work.
COLLABORATION IN THE NEW WORKPLACE
It’s no secret that the traditional workplace is changing.
The once centralized and homogeneous organization is
becoming increasingly widespread and diverse all the time.
The classic warren of beige cubicles in a single location has
been replaced by offices across the country and around
the globe, by remote workers in satellite locations, and by
individuals’ teleworking from home offices.
With all of these changes, it’s not surprising that workers
aren’t what they used to be either. The evolving workplace
calls for new ways of working, and the best workers are
eager to embrace ways that will make their lives easier and
help them be more productive. In particular, those entering
the workforce – the Millennials or Net Geners, whose
skills and talents make them such a hot commodity – are
revolutionizing how work gets done. The “collaboration and
relationship generation,” they grew up in an environment
where spontaneous, technology-based collaboration is a
normal part of life, making them natural collaborators with
a need for speed.
In a world where speed characterizes the flow
of information among vast networks of people,
communication with friends, colleagues, and
superiors takes place faster than ever. And
marketers and employers should realize that Net
Geners expect the same quick communication from
others….
Net Geners “bring a culture of collaboration with them to
work,” and they are “comfortable using new online tools
to communicate.” This challenges organizations to provide
the new tools that workers want and need to turn creative
collaboration from a special event into a spontaneous and
natural part of their work lives.
MAKE IT NATURAL – THE COLLABORATION
CHALLENGE
Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration.
People scuttle from meeting to meeting to
coordinate work and share ideas, but far too little
gets done.
Recognizing the importance of collaboration, organizations
invest in a range of tools and techniques to foster it.
These include multimedia solutions that address the new
workplace by enabling people in diverse locations to
see and speak to one another, to share documents and
presentations, and to interact almost as though they were in
the same room.
But while these solutions have their place in the
organization’s collaboration arsenal, they typically don’t
integrate multimedia collaboration into the natural flow of
the work day. They don’t enable the kind of spontaneous,
any-time collaboration that people need to be their most
productive. And they don’t provide the intuitive and fast
collaboration that the changing workforce is coming to
expect. Instead, workers “scuttle” to meeting rooms to
engage in scheduled, formal collaboration sessions that can
be more disruptive than useful.
To be sure, occasional centralized meetings are necessary.
But they don’t address the need for ad-hoc collaboration
throughout the day. Something more is needed to make
collaboration a normal part of a productive work day – a
next-generation tool that makes initiating and conducting
Morten T. Hansen and Nitin Nohria, How to Build Collaborative Advantage, MITSloan Management Review, Fall 2004, Vol. 46 No. 1
https://www.student.gsu.edu/~llucas3/documents/IB%208990/readings/how%20to%20build%20a%20collaborative%20advantage.pdf
2
Don Tapscott, grown up digital: how the net generation is changing your world, McGraw Hill, 2009, p. 35
3
Ibid., p. 35
4
Ibid., p. 89
5
Hansen, Morten (2009-05-12). Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results. Perseus Books Group.
Kindle Edition, Locations 86 – 87
1
2 | MITEL WHITEPAPER
multimedia collaboration as natural and easy as making a
phone call. That is the challenge that companies tell us they
are facing. And it’s the challenge that we’ve addressed with
an innovative approach to multimedia collaboration called
Mitel MiVoice Video Unit.
MITEL MIVOICE VIDEO UNIT:
NEXT-GENERATION MULTIMEDIA
COLLABORATION
Mitel MiVoice Video Unit is a first-of-its kind multimedia
collaboration device for the personal office meeting space.
An all-in-one multimedia appliance, it meets the demand for
easier, more spontaneous, more cost-effective collaboration
by combining in-room presentation display and multi-party
audio and visual collaboration for remote participants in a
single, compact appliance.
SPONTANEOUS COLLABORATION
With MiVoice Video Unit in your office, you no longer
need to book a busy, shared meeting room to initiate
multimedia collaboration. Instead, it’s as easy as making a
phone call. Meetings become a whole lot simpler and more
spontaneous. Whether you plan them in advance, or start
them in response to emerging needs, collaborations become
just another part of a productive work day.
With MiVoice Video Unit you can quickly convert an inprogress phone call into a multimedia collaboration session
that lets team members not only see and hear each other,
but share documents and presentations. There’s no need
to send documents in advance or to interrupt productive
activity to schedule collaboration – it just happens when
you need it to.
SIMPLE COLLABORATION
We developed the MiVoice Video Unit partly in response to
customers asking us to “make meetings and presentations
simpler.”
You start a multi-party collaboration using the unit’s
high-resolution touchscreen to select collaborators from
your corporate directory, and then to connect with them.
You control presentations using the touchscreen as well,
accessing the files you need by linking to a remote desktop,
inserting a memory stick or card, or accessing Dropbox or
Google® Docs™ in the cloud.
With MiVoice Video Unit, you don’t lose time to
administration. There’s not much of a learning curve either,
because intuitive icons on the touchscreen mean that even
a novice can quickly understand and use the device. One
of those icons is a “wipe” button that ensures security by
With Mitel MiVoice Video Unit, starting a collaboration session is as simple as making a phone call.
MITEL WHITEPAPER
| 3
FOSTERING EASIER, MORE PRODUCTIVE MULTIMEDIA COLLABORATION IN THE WORKPLACE
MITEL MIVOICE VIDEO UNIT
• A first-of-its kind, cost-effective, all-in-one multimedia collaboration appliance
• Combines in-room presentation display and multi-party audio and visual
collaboration for remote participants in a single unit
• Superior HD audio and HD video display
• Installation is as simple as plugging in a phone
• An intuitive, touchscreen interface makes it easy to use, even for a novice
• Open and standards-based for ready integration into existing infrastructures
• A fraction the cost of traditional meeting-room collaboration solutions
completely removing sensitive content from the device when
you’ve finished a collaboration session.
By promoting and simplifying collaboration, the MiVoice
Video Unit helps workers, including eager Net Geners,
to be productive and innovative. They spend less time
scheduling and managing collaboration, and more time
actually collaborating. Collaborative relationships within the
organization and with partners and customers become a
natural part of any day, seamlessly helping people to work
together more effectively.
COST-EFFECTIVE COLLABORATION
At a fraction of the cost of typical meeting room multimedia
solutions, MiVoice Video Unit is a remarkably cost-effective
multimedia collaboration solution.
The lower cost per unit makes for a much less expensive
multimedia collaboration tool. With the same budget
that would acquire only a single traditional multimedia
set up, you can establish many collaboration points
throughout your organization. It makes productivityboosting multimedia collaboration available to even smaller
organizations without breaking their budgets. Because
collaboration can take place more easily and spontaneously,
it also reduces costs associated with travel.
NO ADDED WORK FOR IT
MiVoice Video Unit doesn’t cut into the precious time of
the IT department. Deploying it is as easy as plugging in a
telephone. Out-of-the-box operability and ease of use make
for minimal support and virtually no training requirements.
The MiVoice Video Unit is an open, SIP-compatible,
standards-based technology that fits seamlessly into
existing infrastructures, leveraging Mitel and other PBX
deployments and existing video solutions and computing
4 | MITEL WHITEPAPER
environments. It accommodates multiple file transfer
methods, including cloud access, USB Flash Drive, and Micro
SD card.
FLEXIBLE DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS
The MiVoice Video Unit isn’t just for personal office meeting
spaces. It was designed for meeting rooms as well, and
combines four-party audio conferencing with in-room
presentation delivery not found in even more expensive
conference phones.
A 16-microphone array with patented Beamforming
technology delivers crisp HD voice quality, 360-degree
sound pickup, and advanced audio processing in any
size meeting room. And its compatibility with existing
infrastructures means that it integrates with Mitel and
other PBX deployments, video solutions, and computing
environments.
COLLABORATION AS A NATURAL PART OF THE
WORK DAY
Mitel MiVoice Video Unit delivers what customers have
been asking for – a multimedia solution that simplifies
collaboration and makes it a natural part of the work day.
A one-of-a-kind multimedia collaboration device,
the MiVoice Video Unit is ideal in offices and other
shared spaces that you wouldn’t normally equip with
collaboration capabilities. It makes it easy to engage
in the kind of spontaneous, ad hoc collaboration that
increases productivity and drives innovation throughout the
organization.
To learn about the Mitel MiVoice Video Unit,
download the MiVoice Video Unit Solution
Overview at mitel.com/micollab.
MITEL MIVOICE VIDEO UNIT SOLVES
MULTIMEDIA COLLABORATION CHALLENGES
CHALLENGE
MIVOICE VIDEO UNIT
Business-to-business visual collaboration is difficult
Deploying video is as simple as plugging in a phone
Open and SIP compatible, it integrates with existing
infrastructures
Out-of-the-box operability
Video conferencing user interfaces can be confusing,
intimidating casual users
Starting a multi-party collaboration is as easy as making a
phone call
Intuitive, touchscreen controls make it simple to operate,
even for a novice
Equipping multiple meeting rooms with traditional visual
collaboration solutions is expensive
Equip more personal office meeting spaces with multimedia
collaboration capabilities at a lesser cost
Less support required than with complex systems and to
support user issues
The MiVoice Video Unit also provides superior audio conferencing capabilities through its 16-microphone array combined with
Mitel’s patented Beamforming technology that delivers crisp HD voice quality, 360-degree sound pickup, and background noise
suppression processing.
MITEL WHITEPAPER
| 5
ABOUT MITEL
Mitel® (Nasdaq: MITL) is a global provider of business
communications and collaboration software and services.
Mitel’s innovations make it easier to connect and
collaborate, while reducing costs and implementation
headaches. Market leaders like VMware® and Research in
Motion® (RIM®) partner with Mitel to seamlessly integrate
their solutions – increasing value to customers.
Mitel’s Freedom Architecture provides the flexibility and
simplicity required for today’s dynamic work environment.
Through a single cloud-ready software stream, Mitel
delivers a powerful suite of advanced communications and
collaboration capabilities that:
• provides freedom from walled garden architectures;
• enables organizations to implement best-of-breed
solutions;
• extends the “in-office” experience anywhere, on any
device; and
• offers a choice of commercial options to fit business
needs.
Mitel’s solutions fit companies across the spectrum – from
single-location businesses to multinationals – servicing
customers through a network of over 1,600 value-added
resellers and partners.
|
MITEL | SIMPLY COMMUNICATING®
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