5 Reasons You Need a BYOD System

Yeah, I know—here’s your first answer. BYOD stands for Bring Your Own Device. In today’s micro-miniaturized, office-space-at-a-premium fast-paced collaborative workspace, office managers and creative personnel are always looking for a way to integrate, multi-task, and share information. It’s what the Internet was created for. One way to do that is to minimize large-footprint equipment like TVs and hefty desktops. You’ve seen the stock photos; happy young executives sitting around a mahogany boardroom table, chatting with their tablets and sleek laptops out, acting like they’re not dead inside.

In most scenarios, they’re crowded around a large conference-room projection screen or TV watching a PowerPoint presentation or some sales graph that’s either cheerfully scaling upward or worriedly spiraling downward (depends on what you search for in the stock photo search bar, I guess). But what many people don’t realize is how much work is involved in pre-planning a presentation like this. The work that goes into preparing the TV or projection screen or laptop or computer system that will host the presentation, the incompatibility between all of the products involved, or the sheer horror experienced when you get to a meeting space and the screen doesn’t work, or you have the wrong cable, or your presentation software is incompatible with your meeting-space computer—the horror.

So, what do you do? You could have everyone crowd around your tiny laptop (which has happened far too often in real-life situations), you could wait around while the IT department of your host fumbles with their equipment, or you could haul around costly and bulky monitors and screens, because everyone can fit a full-size projection screen into their carry-on luggage—right?

Or you could invest in a BYOD system for your office. How does a BYOD system work? With a Kramer VIA system, it works like this: You connect the wireless VIA Collage (for larger auditoriums and conference rooms) or the VIA Connect Pro (for smaller meeting rooms and huddle spaces) into your network and everyone in the room can now instantly show their screens on the main display. Using the Step In command, you can have meeting participants share their information and switch between presenters. People can connect from a variety of devices including PC and Mac laptops, Apple (with real iOS mirroring) and Android phones, and tablets. Need more convincing? Here are five reasons you should be using a VIA wireless presentation and collaboration BYOD solution.

1. Simultaneous Edit

True collaboration puts an end to messy back and forth (how many times have instructions gone from a boardroom back to an office and had key elements lost in the transition?). Multiple users can simultaneously annotate, illustrate, and edit shared documents. They can then save and share those files to one or all participants instantly; everyone walks away from the meeting with actionable items taken care of in real time.

2. Less Setup, More Productivity, Cost Effective

Without all the incompatible product glitches, fumbling around for the right connector, or hauling in IT techs to figure out why your laptop won’t connect to the conference room screen, you can focus your energy on what’s important.

3. Run Third-Party Apps

Want to teleconference—using your own screen and not the conference-room TV? With VIA Collage, you can do that, as well as run other apps like Microsoft Office, GoToMeeting, Lync, and WebEx.

4. No Video Stuttering

You get real-time HD video, uninterrupted by the glitches and lags that you experience with products that use “screen scrapping” technology to send video over Wi-Fi. VIA lets you stream video up to 1080p resolution at up to 60 fps.

5. Ease of Use

Connect any HDMI source to the unit and use it as your main display. This allows you to commandeer the nicest display in the room as the main display. Love your colleague’s 17-inch, high-end gaming laptop? Use it as the main display. You can also connect and share your own devices wirelessly, and with true mobile mirroring of your iOS device, this means that whatever you have on your iPhone can now be shared with colleagues.

Also, with the addition of the VIA Pad, it is truly a plug-and-present solution. Just hand a user a VIA Pad—they plug it in to their USB port and the VIA Pad identifies the proper network and places the user on that network, making sure the latest version of the VIA software is in use and, if not, downloads and installs it and then allows the user to simply tap the Pad to “Step In.”

So there you have it. Why bring more problems to the table, when you can bring solutions? With the Kramer VIA system, you can bring your own device, and bring more to the meeting than technical problems.