Lync Migration Featured Article

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Rolls Out New Modern Workspace System

By Steve Anderson Contributing Writer

With an increasingly mobile workforce—and a lot of value derived thanks to greater engagement, better flexibility and reduced turnover, among other features—that mobile workforce needs a better means to communicate and stay in touch with more office-bound elements that exercise command and control over the overall picture. Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) Enterprise (HPE) recently launched a new tool to help on that front in its new Modern Workspace system.

Modern Workspace draws on several tools, including Microsoft (News - Alert)'s Skype Room Systems and hardware from Logitech and EventBoard, to deliver a wider total value for businesses. With this combination, users get a center-of-room control device that makes its use of Skype (News - Alert) for Business flow a lot more smoothly, and using the Logitech and EventBoard hardware offers extra advantages in room management and audio / video input.

Plus, the new HPE service will offer new value, ranging from complete end-to-end service—everything from advisory and planning options to end user support is covered here—to faster collaboration that starts right from starting the system up. Easier management thanks to better meeting tools and motion-based analytics helps ensure a better experience, and high-quality audio and video alike help keep all participants engaged.

HPE's director of portfolio and practices for the South Pacific, Michelle Cox (News - Alert), showed just how valuable the system could be by detailing how HPE itself used the system. She said “We equipped some of our own conference rooms with the next generation of Microsoft Skype Room Systems as a test bed for the Modern Workspace solution and our experience shows five to 10 minutes of time savings per meeting locating and reserving a meeting room for ad hoc collaboration. Meetings started 75 per cent faster with local and remote users claiming a richer audio, video, and content sharing experience.”

A Dilbert strip actually took this concept on once, and showed how badly such an experience could go. Poor quality audio and video combined with thick accents left Dilbert facing down a call featuring dialogue like “Muwa flamel guapen,” in the end leading him to report to the Pointy-Haired Boss that the call had proven “better than anything I've done all week” in the grandest Dilbert tradition. While it's always a little more hyperbolic at Dilbert than reality commonly experiences, people have long had difficulty making videoconferencing work. It's come a long way, granted, but every improvement that can be had will be welcome on some level. Conferencing has proven too valuable to throw out, and refinements only make things better for users.

No one wants to be on the “Muwa flamel guapen” conference, and HPE is working to make sure that videoconferences in general go a lot better than they do for Dilbert. By pulling in Microsoft's best and some other powerful options, these muttered, impenetrable conferences should be, gratefully, a thing of the past. 

Edited by Alicia Young