Barco ClickShare - Taking the time-wasting out of meetings

Meetings are the biggest bugbears of many office employees, and are frequently viewed as one of the most irritating time-wasters of the modern corporate world. Rather than being a hub of ideas and collaboration, we've all been in meetings where multiple participants attempt to share presentations and information, and the presenter is then upstaged by a technological problem. Cue a flurry of screens, wires and red faces as the speaker restarts the process of plugging in and fiddling with the configuration.

With the advent of BYOD, these meeting challenges have further increased, as people also want to share and show information from a range of devices with different operating systems and software. What is needed is a simple, wireless display sharing technology.

The Barco ClickShare system is effectively a bridging technology that claims to have the potential to make meetings more efficient and productive. This type of wireless collaboration technology for meeting rooms and boardrooms has apparently gone from being an emerging to an established trend in the last couple of years, and is cropping up everywhere from hotel conference rooms to sales meetings and corporate boardrooms. Using Wifi, ClickShare automatically understands content on any device, and ensures it is displayed correctly without the hassle of setting up a physical connection.

The device has a premium price point at around £3163. It is true that there are cheaper technologies on the market, generally using Bluetooth, which allow users to connect devices to a main screen wirelessly. However, these technologies have invariably been developed for home entertainment, whereas ClickShare is unapologetically designed for collaborative business applications. While the initial investment may be weighed up against the potential of saving a few minutes' frustration during meetings, Barco is keen to point out that a unit will pay for itself over time by reducing the inevitable IT support call-outs so commonly associated with meeting room AV.

All of those wasted meeting minutes can certainly add up. Past surveys, such as one by officebroker.com, have calculated that a whole year could be lost in the average office worker's life. Aside from the measurable ROI, the less tangible benefits promise to improve the quality of meetings and promote collaboration among workers.

ClickShare's real differentiator is that it allows up to four people to share the content from their respective devices on a single screen, switching between devices at any time with a single click. The most obvious use case for the boardroom would be presentations, but it would be equally suited to sales meetings, training and planning sessions, or whenever more than one person turns up with something to show on screen.

So what do you get for your money? Out of the box, there is a base unit, a burnished steel box around the size of games console, with a matching holder to fit four "buttons", Barco's name for the USB device that plugs directly into laptops. A free app is also available from Apple's App Store and the Google Play store for iOS and Android devices respectively, giving the same level of connectivity from mobiles and tablets.

Setting up the box is straightforward. The base unit is connected directly to a screen using the DVI to HDMI converter supplied. There is also a VGA output for projectors. Once you pair with a "button" by inserting it into the USB socket at the front of the box, you simply plug it into your laptop and an automatic pop-up offers the option to install a programme for posterity or configure the button for one-time use.

At this stage ClickShare may not be something the average small business could budget for, but for a larger enterprise it is a user-friendly and elegant solution to the jumble of wires that often constitutes multi-device support in meeting rooms. BYOD has become a staple part of corporate life, and this sort of technology could prove invaluable to businesses who embrace the concept. And save the red faces of presenters now, and in the future.