What you need to know
- The newly announced Crestron 70 Series Scheduling Panels integrate with Microsoft Teams.
- The scheduling panels allow organizations to manage and monitor room availability for in-person meeting rooms.
- The panels can show room details, reserve rooms, and view upcoming reservations.
While many people and organizations use high-tech solutions to hold meetings, record notes, and communication with each other, it's still relatively common to use low-tech solutions to manage and schedule in-person meetings. Pieces of paper and sign-in sheets are still used by many organizations, which can create scheduling conflicts, double bookings, and cause other issues. In comes Crestron, a popular workplace technology company, which has a new solution that integrates Microsoft Teams with meeting management.
Crestron recently announced the Crestron 70 Series Scheduling Panels, which allow people to manage and monitor in-person meeting rooms. The Crestron 70 Series Scheduling Panels are digital screens that you can place on the outside of meeting rooms. They can display information such as upcoming meetings and details about a room. When set up correctly, the panels can show a room's status in real-time, including occupancy, availability, and cleanliness.
There are options for 7-inch or 10-inch panels in either black or white. You can add an optional RFID indicator to the panels that can control a badge to let people know how many people are in a room.
You can pair the Crestron 70 Series Scheduling Panels with occupancy sensors that update the display to show when a room is at capacity. In the past, people might not mind if a room was completely full, but in a world that prioritizes social distancing and safety measures, having a simple indicator for room capacity is quite handy. If you're in a building with several meeting rooms, having a green or red indicator that lets you know if a room is full can save quite a bit of time.
Crestron's announcement focuses on the integration between Crestron 70 Series Scheduling Panels and Microsoft Teams, but it's important to note that the panels can work with other services as well. If your company or organization swaps over to a different back end for meeting management, there's a good chance that you can still use the Crestron 70 Series Scheduling Panels.
The panels work with Exchange, Office 365, G Suite, Ad Astra, CollegeNet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, EMS, and many other services.
The Crestron 70 Series Scheduling Panels are available for order starting today, and a Microsoft Teams firmware upgrade will be available in Q1 2021.
