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Carlos Soto is an award-winning reviewer and journalist with 20 years of experience covering technology and business within various sectors and industries.
Carlos Soto is an award-winning reviewer and journalist with 20 years of experience covering technology and business within various sectors and industries.
Most state and local governments quickly embraced remote work during the pandemic, and many retain strong and productive hybrid workforces where some employees come into the office a few days a week while others are always remote. The Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro platform can bring all of those people together as easily as if they were sitting around the same table.
And in my testing, that goal was not very difficult to achieve over multiple meetings and collaboration sessions.
When connected to video and audio hardware, the platform does a great job of enhancing individual feeds and optimizing bandwidth so that everyone can be seen and heard. This was true even when some people were using professional conferencing equipment in a dedicated environment while others where just doing the best they could with a laptop camera and a standard headset. And because of robust data loss prevention technology, there were very few issues with lag, even when some participants used slower networks to connect.
In fact, I hosted over two dozen meetings using the Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro platform, and they were all highly professional, with AI-powered features ensuring there were no technical hiccups.
Beyond basic meeting functionality, the variety of Teams video layouts enables optimized configurations for different kinds of meetings, from full collaboration sessions where everyone participates to those with an expert speaker sharing detailed slides and videos with a group.
Collaboration is great in government, but only when it can be done securely. Sometimes agencies need to meet to talk about sensitive issues before sharing them with the public, so the ability to restrict access only to authorized personnel is paramount. The Teams Rooms platform achieves this using multifactor authentication for participant logins and end-to-end encryption of all data, audio and video feeds once a meeting is established.
It’s also extremely easy to manage meeting scheduling, invites, planning and participant tracking right from the platform. A government agency could also set up communication channels so that public meetings follow certain presets while private collaboration sessions are automatically configured differently.
As a final advantage for agency users, Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro seamlessly integrates with the complete Office 365 application suite. That means sharing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files is effortless. The tools open up and are available for collaboration during meetings whenever they are needed.
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PRODUCT TYPE: Meeting planning and collaboration tool
PRODUCT LINE: Microsoft Teams
MODEL: Rooms professional version with enhanced management
LICENSE TYPE: Subscription
Anyone can use collaboration platforms, but not all of them are designed for government service. For example, if a program is easy to use but has weak or nonexistent security, most agencies won’t touch it. And if the platform can’t optimize connections to compensate for remote workers in far-flung places, it might not be the best choice either. With that in mind, here are the most important features for agencies to have in any collaboration platform.
Access control and security are probably the most critical factors for government users. Platforms should be able to enforce multifactor authentication so that only authorized users and devices can join meetings. And like Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro, it should use strong encryption to protect audio, video and data while in transit and at rest.
Beyond security, the ideal government collaboration platform should be able to optimize audio and video feeds for remote workers connecting from home networks or even public spaces. This is especially critical today, with so many government agencies using a hybrid workforce. While it might be difficult to fully compensate for truly poor connections, platforms such as Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro that use artificial intelligence technologies can ensure everyone’s feed is as optimized as possible.
Finally, collaboration platforms are complex, almost like command centers that pull in audio and video feeds from around the world and display them in a way that fosters seamless communication. As such, the easier they are to use, the better — for both administrators and users. Setting up policies and even dedicated channels, each with their own rules and capabilities, is extremely easy with Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro. And once configured by administrators, users can connect to the platform in just a few clicks.
If agencies concentrate on the three key areas of security, connection optimization and ease of use (for both administrators and users), then picking a great collaboration platform such as Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro will be a much easier task to bring hybrid workforces together in government service.
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