As VP of Product, I manage our product team made up of product managers and UX designers, who are responsible for defining what we are building and why it matters as well as ensuring alignment across the organization. I work with our executives, stakeholders, and customers to ensure our product strategy is sound, and an appropriate execution plan is put in place represented by our roadmap.
We develop the Mersive product roadmap through ongoing collaboration between our customers and ourselves. Our annual customer council meetings and constant feedback loop have helped us create an impressive roadmap that delivers continuous value and consistent improvements to our wireless collaboration platform.
One of our most highly requested features was room calendar integration. We introduced meeting room calendar integration to Solstice in late 2017 to address the need to combine a conference room scheduling display into our product—an early step towards our goal of a building full-featured wireless collaboration platform.
To those of you who haven’t considered adopting the Solstice Room Calendar integration to display conference room and meeting space schedules easily, here is some basic information about this capability along with a few reasons why you should consider it for your deployment.
What is room calendar integration?
The Solstice Room Calendar integration capability introduced in our 3.1 release displays meeting room schedule information on the Welcome Screen of the Solstice display. It supports Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange Server out of the box, with a robust level of configuration capabilities, such as various authentication modes and display options. Additionally, other calendar or scheduling systems such as Google Calendar can be indirectly integrated via our OpenControl scripting APIs.
Employee Benefits
Visual indications in a meeting room that show when spaces are booked or available create clarity for employees and efficiency for room usage. For those who book rooms as resources, they can rest assured there will be less chance of squatters taking over their meeting spaces because it will be more obvious which rooms are available versus those booked.
AV/IT Manager Benefits
There are also benefits for the AV/IT administrator to adopt the Solstice Room Calendar integration. First, you gain another tool to assist in optimizing meeting space utilization. With clearer indications of which rooms are free, utilization increases because employees seeking an ad hoc room for a meeting will have an easier time finding one.
You also gain meeting room management capability without the expense of additional hardware in the room. By leveraging the Solstice display to communicate meeting space availability information, users can self-manage booking with their own devices, which eliminates the need for separate, specialized room tablets or panels: easier on the budget and less hardware to maintain (which means less internal support tickets!).
Finally, the agnostic nature of Mersive’s calendar integration brings an added level of flexibility to IT managers to leverage scheduling systems currently in use in meeting rooms. By leveraging our OpenControl API, no specialized training or proprietary scripting language expertise is required to support an alternative system.
We encourage those of you with Solstice-enabled rooms to take advantage of the benefits by configuring your Pods with the calendar integration capability. Please check it out and send us feedback!
More information about calendar integration can be found here
For detailed information on how to set up and deploy the calendar integration, please visit our Dashboard Admin Guide
About Mersive
Mersive Technologies is an award-winning wireless collaboration software company that facilitates productive and engaging meetings, conferences, and classes by providing intuitive wireless content sharing solutions that enable any number of participants to share content from virtually any device to any meeting room display. Trusted by more than 6,000 corporations and higher education institutions including many of the top Fortune 100 companies, Mersive is based in Denver, Colorado with offices and customers around the world. To learn more, check out The Mersive Advantage.
