The team at Seon Solutions are often asked about the differences between Zoom/Teams Rooms and BYOD setup. Our response is often to investigate several things, the field of work they are in, the users experience with technology, the size of your business and if an IT team is part of that business. All these questions are very important in understanding if Zoom/Teams Rooms or BYOD is the most suitable setup.

What separates the conventional office space of the past with todays thriving flexible working space is the sheer number of people from different businesses, fields of work and walks of life all working out of the one space. This presents with so many amazing opportunities but also requires you to consider what technology will suit your customers. Both Zoom/Teams Rooms and BYOD have their advantages and disadvantages.

Some of the advantages of the Zoom/Teams Rooms are you can setup and participate in a meeting without the need for a laptop, it’s extremely easy to start and run a meeting, the relevant software and hardware to operate the meeting is already installed in the room. Essentially the brains of the conferencing equipment is ready to go, whereas with BYOD the brains of your meeting is the laptop you bring along.

While you might be thinking Zoom/Teams Rooms sounds great, there’s also a lot of disadvantages. Software updates often happen at the worst time and if you haven’t prepared for that through scheduling it can cause havoc on the system. Occasionally the NUC (brains) of the Zoom/Teams Room can lock up and require a restart, the last thing you want when you’re about to start a meeting or already in a meeting.

A way around this that we have seen great success with is scheduling a daily restart of the system to keep everything functioning correctly. Now you might be one of the lucky ones who have avoided this, and if so, you are lucky! Another factor to consider is the cost of the system to install and maintain. To have the full functionality of the Zoom/Teams Room you require software and licensing, while its not a huge expense it is an expense that is continuous in the form of a subscription.

A BYOD setup has a number of advantages particularly in the flexible workspace. Flexibility being one, any one member can simply grab their laptop, walk into a room, plug in the fly leads and setup a meeting. This leads to one of the biggest differentiators between the two systems.

In a BYOD system, a meeting is simply scheduled by either the user or they’re invited by another participant. Another big advantage of the BYOD system is that it’s significantly cheaper to install and maintain verses the installed Zoom/Teams Room. If you’re running the meeting out of the Zoom/Teams Room, the person organising the meeting will be the one sending the invitations to each participant, and an invitation will need to be sent to the room in which the meeting will take place. The Zoom/Teams Room has its own calendar and email address to send and receive meeting invitations. While this sounds great, it’s often not practical for an office that has several businesses running out of it. It can also get quite confusing for users that are not technically savvy.

These are some of the disadvantages facing the BYOD installations that we have found; nearly all meeting rooms require different adapters for different laptops. With a BYOD system in a flexible working space, you can’t control what laptop your clients are using. With Mac, PC and Chromebook all featuring within the flexible working space, the BYOD rooms must be equipped with appropriate adaptors to enable anyone to be able to use the room. There is also a level of technical knowledge a user might need to have when entering a BYOD meeting room.

At Seon Solutions we avoid the unpredictability by our personally designed user and troubleshooting guides that work through all possible problems. Another disadvantage of the BYOD system is if your laptop is tied up in the meeting or if you’re the person hosting, what happens if you need to leave early the meeting early? Are you able to hand over to someone else to take over, leave your laptop behind, or simply just end the meeting early?

As you can see, BYOD allows for more flexibility with the ease of meeting creation, but it does have its limitations too. There is a time and a place for both the Teams/Zooms Rooms and BYOD systems. From our experience, installing this technology in the flexible working space one room design remains supreme. That is the BYOD, as its often more reliable, cheaper to install and operate, requires less training to use and simply more practical in the flexible working space. Now that’s not to say that Zoom/Teams rooms should exist in the flexible working space but rather you need to consider what equipment will work best for your situation.

This article was provided by Seon Solutions.