Have you been hesitant to start a large upgrade of your conferencing and collaboration? It's a big job, and it can open up a lot of hidden issues in a company. However, the rewards can be amazing.
At Vyopta, we are a SolutionsPlus partner that provides monitoring and analytics software to help companies make collaboration a competitive advantage. Our #1 case is customers who are either about to start or are currently in the middle of a large scale technology upgrade. We get pulled into everything from infrastructure rip-and-replace to multi-year endpoint refresh programs, and we have found a few best practices from helping to usher a couple hundred customers through these projects.
We decided to team up with our friends in the Cisco CMS team (since we have been on more than a few of these customer projects together) to help share the best practices we see so that other customers can benefit from those experiences.
We will be sharing these in a Webinar on February 28th at Noon Central (US). Register now to book the spot on your calendar.
For now, here are a couple of the best practices to get you started.
Get Buy-in from Above, Early
One of the most important and earliest steps you can take to ensure a successful transition is to secure executive sponsorship. Not only should you secure an executive to support you financially, but you should make sure to get this executive excited and bought in. One easy way to do this is to make them an Alpha user. The risk of a bad experience is actually pretty low with today’s latest collaboration technology. And the experience provided by top end systems (that you can get for less than $10K today) is pretty remarkable when compared to technology from just 5 years ago. What you want to do is get them talking about the impact in their day and the potential for the entire company as early and often as possible. Investing some budget here will pay huge dividends later.
Do the Best your Network Can Afford
One of the best quotes I heard recently was from a partner who said, “It’s great if you can afford a Lamborghini, but you still can’t drive it 200 miles-an-hour if you live on a dirt road.” This is a funny way to say that everyone would love to have an immersive experience in every conference room, but unless you have unlimited bandwidth in every building, it probably won’t work how you want. Coincidentally, there is not a lot of difference in the price tag between an immersive conference room and a luxury supercar.
What else can you do?
These are just a couple of the best practices that should be considered for a collaboration upgrade. To learn the rest, join our webinar on February 28th at Noon Central Time US.
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