Meet Joan, she’s your digital room assistant. The Joan Meeting Room Assistant is actually a digital door label that uses e-paper (like the Amazon Kindle ereader) to post room reservation info outside an office meeting room. Joan links with your calendar so you when you schedule a meeting in a certain room Joan will display it at the door. This will prevent the horrible first world problem of meeting room squatters. You know how traumatic this problem is if you’ve ever wandered around the office trying to find an open conference room to hold a meeting, only to find rooms with people playing Pokemon Go or talking on the phone to their significant other about dinner plans. Joan solves those problems with her 6″ e-paper display, wireless connectivity and magnetic mount. The only downside is that she costs $349 each. Not a problem if you work at Harpo studios with Oprah, but for those of us in the real world, I think sticky notes are a cost effective alternative. For more info about the Joan Meeting Room Assistant, visit joanassistant.com
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$350 is not a bad price really, The trick to this will be the flexibility in the API to control them. I’m already thinking of things I could do this when we finish the remodel of our Administration office. I was briefly thinking of Android or iPad tablets running a web app. But this looks much nicer, and could conceivably be easier to integrate.
If you end up getting one, we will need a full report! 🙂
Will do, assuming construction starts soon. 😀
We used to schedule meeting rooms with a calendar for each one. There was one person assigned to be the admin for each one, and it was their job to accept invitations. If the room wasn’t available when you were setting up your meeting, you had to find another one with an open slot.
I our company, we are using touch-enabled devices from Crestron. If you look into a floor, you can quickly see, if a room is used or not, because the devices have a LED-segment on each side (red for used, green for unused). You can administrate this devices via the Crestron Fusion-server very easy.
But: The system is very expensive, but it can do much more: live of the beamer lamps, sync with outlook, and much more….