How NOT to deploy video conferencing in the enterprise

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Technology

June 30th, 2008

This post is better suited for our Video Over Enterprise blog, but this should be a good lesson to all of us in the VoIP market.

For the past several years, our company has been investing in VoIP infrastructure. Today, I am capable of making video calls and joining audio and video conferences from practically everywhere - from meeting rooms to my work station, my laptop and even my mobile handset. Or as Sagee would say - “The shoe-maker does not go bare-footed.”

Still, there are some things I have learned about what one should NOT do when deploying a video conferencing solution in an enterprise, at least from my past experience:

1. No complex dialing plans, please. Ordinary users do not make video calls every day. If they did, they might remember those complex dialing plans (a prefix for dialing multipoint video calls, a number for dialing out through a gateway, etc.). Presence based dialing can be a good solution here.
2. Take care of the bandwidth. Video calls take up bandwidth. A lot of it. Make sure you have enough to go around - especially between your corporate branches. Don’t forget to make sure it is reliable. Between offices, a private network or an MPLS is necessary to ensure sustained quality. Inside the office, a dedicated VPN is usually required in order to ensure file transfers on the network won’t interfere with the video and audio flows.
3. Don’t force all calls to be video calls. Allow users to select audio calls if they feel like it.
   1. Don’t assume everybody wants to participate in a video call. Allow users to use audio only for incoming calls and the option to add the video later if they wish to (or remove the video at a later point during the call).
   2. Don’t have an inclusive “logic” that prefers all calls to be video (or audio). My suggestion would be to make all calls from the same subnet/location/office/region/country audio calls and all “long distance” calls video calls by default.
   3. Don’t assume that if you have “logic”, users don’t need options. Let users decide and change the defaults. The best way is probably to learn what the user is doing and change the “logical” behavior accordingly.
4. Don’t limit video to meeting rooms. People tend to join meetings from different places and not only participate from meeting rooms. In order for video to work for you, make sure you have it accessible from the desktops of employees and allow them to join video sessions from their homes or on the go as well.
5. Don’t make an island out of your video system. Doing video? Make sure it can do voice calls with regular phones as well. Connect it to mobile handsets. Connect it to your enterprise email and presence systems. In a word - Unified Communications. Well, that’s two words.
6. Don’t forget scheduling. When doing multipoint video calls, you should make the scheduling part a breeze. This is true for scheduled sessions and for ad-hoc video calls. The best way is probably to integrate with your calendar’s scheduler (be it Microsoft Office or IBM Lotus Sametime or other).
7. Give proper feedback. This one is tricky. You do a transatlantic call between several branches of your company, and lo and behold - video doesn’t work that well. And yet answering the simple question - where the weak link is - is quite hard. If different systems along the way can provide proper feedback to the lay man, it might actually work.

Bonus points for those doing video calls using their PC:

1. Don’t eat up the PC resources for video calls. You should remember that the person using that PC might want to do other things besides watching the incoming video, so clogging up his system is not a good move.
2. Leave the webcam alone. Not in a video call? Leave the webcam so that other applications may use it.