Why Personal Virtual Meeting Rooms (VMR)?

Does your workplace have the right technology solutions and services in place to ensure reliable and effective meetings for remote working?

With a number of solutions available for video conferencing in the cloud, at Kinly we believe personal virtual meeting rooms (or Kinly Personal CloudRooms in our case) stand out for a number of reasons...

What are virtual meeting rooms?

The term virtual meeting room (VMR) is used to describe a collaboration space that is hosted on a cloud service. In a virtual meeting room, multiple participants can join the same video meeting and participants can join with just access to a web browser and a webcam. Participants can join a VMR from a range of devices and via different platforms. And for most purposes, a personal VMR can host any number of people and participants.

Instead of a physical meeting location, a VMR has a virtual address in the form of a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), formatted just like an email address. This address is unique. A VMR is a personal static resource, just like your email address. So perhaps, if your email address is name@company.com, your personal VMR could be name@meet.company.com. Internally at Kinly we use this approach name@meet.kinly.com.

Virtual meeting rooms have alot of benefits, such as high levels of cloud security and interoperability (being able to access and connect a myriad of different devices and platforms together) and generally maintaining high levels of quality video and audio.

Most virtual meeting room service providers give the meeting organizer and attendees a variety of tools to enable an experience similar to in-person meetings, including screen sharing, chat, recording, whiteboarding and document sharing capabilities.

It is quite common that workplaces only have access to shared virtual meeting rooms, where several colleagues share one virtual space. This means that the room can be busy when you need to arrange a video meeting. This mirrors the common issue many workplaces have in terms of booking a physical meeting room – if there are limited spaces available then they will be in high demand and it can then be difficult to book that resource.

Benefits of a Personal CloudRoom for users

“One of the biggest benefits of a Kinly Personal CloudRoom for users is that you always have this specific resource available” says Thomas Edberg, SVP Kinly Meet.

With a shared VMR, one must first determine if the space is vacant. Then the room must be booked, and to send invitations all addresses must be retrieved. It can quickly get complicated and messy.

“With a Personal CloudRoom, however, it is as easy as it can be. Both will be able to invite participants and to have meetings without anyone occupying the room. The person who owns the room can manage the meeting as desired. For example, participants with background noise can be silenced, and the meeting can be recorded with both audio and video” Edberg explains.

Maybe even more important, joining and participating in the virtual meeting is easy. As a personal room always has the same address, from a meeting room video system or personal video endpoint all you have to do is type the person's name and join with one click. There are also various other ways to join which are also very straightforward.

This is also among the most reliable ways to ensure that the meeting actually takes place, with the desired people present.

“If you book a physical room in the workplace, one person may not have the time to travel, another will not arrive and a third will work from home that day. With virtual meetings, there is a much greater chance that everyone will have the time to join. A virtual meeting room, does not only allow you access from any location and saves you time, simultaneously it can be used to reduce our environmental impact! Even better, with everyone’s permission on the call the meeting host could even record the call for those who were unable to attend”.

Different working methods require different solutions

“One of the most important things our advisors do is to identify how the client works. At Kinly, we are very conscious that one size fits all does not apply” says Edberg.

For example, personal virtual meeting rooms can fit very well in the legal profession, he says. Due to sensitive information and intricate cases, attorneys are among those who may need to lock the room and place attendees "in the hallway" for a few minutes, in order to have private conversations with clients.

Personal CloudRooms are also a good fit for home office staff. Many people feel that they are not part of the community when sitting at home, but with personal VMR’s, colleagues can "knock on the door" at any time.

“Doing needs analysis to understand the customer's working methods, strategies and goals is essential to being able to offer the right technology and what the customer actually needs” says Edberg.

The success of the investment is very reliant on the users.

“ If users do not want to use the technology, our customer will not achieve success. Therefore, among a number of different solutions and practices, we must provide uncomplicated and intuitive technology in combination with good training.”

At Kinly, we lead with three market-leading VMR solutions, of which our teams have positive experience. These are Cisco Webex Personal Room, Pexip Virtual Meeting Room, and Kinly's own Kinly CloudRoom.

Wellesley Petroleum uses Kinly Cloud. Read their story here >

To make sure people can meet

Unlike a phone or audio-only conference call, seeing each other provides so much more value as you are able to take note of non-verbal communication elements, Edberg says. He believes video conferencing helps build trust and build quicker and stronger relationships.

“With video, we are more focused on the conversation, and we notice body language as affirmative nods and smiles or skeptical wrinkles in the forehead. This helps us further in the conversation. If you meet a person you have not met before, you will also recognize the face when you meet physically.”

Edberg says it's all about communicating and interacting - and doing this effectively.

“At Kinly, our primary goal is to make sure people can meet, wherever they are on whatever device they use. The main goal is an interaction that emulates the physical meeting experience as effectively as possible. For the simple reason, our recommendation is that everyone in the business get their own virtual meeting room” Edberg concludes.

Want to talk to our Kinly Meet team? Send us an enquiry and we’ll reach out to you with more information – and maybe even send a link to meet us in our own Personal CloudRoom 😊