Last week a friend and I went to check out Taco Tuesday at a new hotspot down by my favorite watering hole in Lauderdale by the Sea.  I expected to enjoy dinner and a drink surrounded by sunshine and music at the open-air bar.  I did NOT expect the chance to geek out after hours with an AV/how to create stress-free collaboration chat, but that’s just what happened.

He’s a sales rep for commercial grade office furniture, and had a big meeting coming up that week.  “You work in PowerPoint, don’t you?” he asked. Ah-ha!  An ulterior motive!  I fully expected him to ask for help with his transitions or animation.  He followed up with, “how do you show your PowerPoint on a TV in a conference room?”  I ignored my initial instinct to correct him on the term “TV” and instead reveled at the chance to talk shop.  He rattled off the familiar complaints about meetings we are all familiar with. People unengaged and even checked out. Meetings can never start on time because it takes too long to set up presentations and project to the displays or screen.  And on and on.

Well!  Isn’t this right up my alley?  As the resident Barco ClickShare expert for the Florida office I am a big fan of the simple technology that makes sharing content and collaborating easy for anyone in any meeting.  I was more than happy to launch into the features and benefits of ClickShare, and how Barco has been changing how meetings are conducted for the past few years with full BYOD support and zero obstacles for downloading software.  IT departments pretty much anywhere can jump on board thanks to the 3 levels of security built into the technology.  And now that they have the CSE-200+ and CSE-800 that does touch back, annotation, and blackboarding for touch panels, the sky’s the limit when it comes to presenting and collaboration.

My friend was intrigued. One device that can easily alleviate all the meeting issues he described?  Not a mythical unicorn!

Unfortunately the company my friend was calling on did not have a ClickShare-enabled conference room, so he was left tethered to the display via an unattractive HDMI cord draped from the conference room table.  Great for impromptu limbo parties, but cumbersome and awkward for presentations and sales pitches.  Fortunately, he still landed the sale.

If he keeps inviting me for dinner on Taco Tuesday I’ll invite him into our office for a personal demo.  In the meantime, he’s going to have to keep wowing his customers with his winning personality