Collaboration Squared launched something called Video Window today, which the company is marketing as the world’s first immersive, always-on video conferencing portal for teams. Install and connect two or more Video Window devices in the common areas of your offices for up to 24 hours a day connectivity. The goal of Video Window is to remove physical boundaries, and make you feel as though you are looking through to the other locations you are connected to hence, “window.”

With patent-pending technology, the Video Window software was developed to ensure the devices are permanently connected to their assigned groups for the hours of the day the administrator sets e.g. 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., Monday to Friday. If you lose an internet connection or an error occurs, the devices will automatically reconnect.

No scheduling; no URLs; no app downloads, no user logins, no addresses to type. Just walk up and press the big button to join audio. This is instant communication.

Here’s a video to explain how it works:

Additional features include:

• Opt-in audio – Employee privacy is extremely important, so by default the audio is off at each location for both microphone and speaker, meaning the only time a site can hear and be heard is when someone is physically standing at the device and have pressed the join audio button. We’ve also included a timer so if someone forgets to hang-up the audio, it will default back to audio off after the timer expires.
• Knock to far site – You may be unmuted, but what if the other site isn’t? How do you get their attention? To solve this problem, the company built a feature that allows you to select any site, then simply tap on the screen and it’ll make a tapping noise through to the other side to get their attention. People love this.
• Overnight sleep mode – To save on power and bandwidth when the people are not in the office. There is an overnight sleep mode that can be configured by the administrator so each device will automatically turn itself on and off at set times.
• Privacy mode – On each device, you can manually set a privacy timer that will turn off all video/audio in all directions for a set time. Once the time is up, it’ll automatically reconnect.
• Whiteboarding, but different – any active device in the group can initiate the digital whiteboard and collaborate on the canvas with the other active devices. However, we wanted the experience to remain immersive, so like a real window we made our whiteboard semi-transparent so you can still see your colleagues in full-screen goodness.
• Join external meetings – 95% of the time this device will be in window mode, but there will be times when you need to join another video conferencing meeting service from the device, or you may want to have a guest join into the platform. So we’ve built a SIP video dialer into Video Window that will allow you to leave window mode and make an external call to whatever meeting service you want e.g. Cisco Webex, Zoom, BlueJeans, Pexip, Cisco Meeting Server, Ubiety etc.
• Dependant on the gateways an organization uses Video Window can even connect to Skype for business, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts / Google Meet.

Collaboration Squared is currently welcoming Video Window beta requests with the full product being released in June globally. rAVe is on the beta test group and we will let you know what we think!