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Serious question, given that this solution appears to be: 1) based around Google Hangouts, and 2) targeted at enterprise customers: Does using it require Google Plus?
It requires a Google account. There is no such thing as Google Plus account.
As a remote worker, I could see getting something like this for our central office. I need an almost frictionless solution and this sounds pretty close "walk into the room, click the remote once and you’re instantly in the meeting." My coworkers aren't interested in walking into a conference room with their laptop and sending a hangout. It would be useful if it supported multiple cameras somehow - which might break t…
We've got a Mac Mini in every conference room, and every conference room represents a "room" in Vidyo. The whole thing is really frictionless. You open the app on your desktop, say you want to join the meeting in Room XYZ, and next thing you know you appear on the TV in there. Everyone also gets a personal "room" so if you're a remote worker and want to call a meeting with people in an office, you can just tell people in a physical conference room to join you by name.
The desktop client is implemented in Flex so it's a little ugly, but still works pretty well. I've been doing several meetings a week over Vidyo for the last six months and it's been pretty seamless.
It sounds like this is the same sort idea, except with Google Apps integration.
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Exactly my question. I could do away with some awful solutions, but I don't want to merely switch to different awful problems.
My company has been using Google Apps for a while, uses Hangouts for videoconferencing, and the worst problem I've had is getting (1) a reminder to add a profile picture and (2) a pointless "What's Hot" email. So not really sure what awful problems you expect to pick up.
I love Google Apps, don't get me wrong, but it wouldn't be fitting in my current environment. :-)
(We might just be able to set up "dummy" accounts that nobody ever notices or deals with directly; still very intrigued by this)
What would convince an organization to switch for something like Cisco's webex? $999 seems like a lot when I can just use my current laptop with a VGA/HDMI cable plugged into the TV and then share over webex. And I am not really sure about using hangouts. For video conferencing the price is probably a steal over what the cisco telepresence costs.
After one year you are a bit ahead with the Chromebox (~$1200/WebEx vs $1000/Chromebox) but I totally agree with your questioning of hangouts as a proven tool in an enterprise environment. Dedicated Cisco telepresence is in the magnitude of $15k to $150k depending on the feature set.
I wonder how well this works over T1's. We have 5 offices that this would work great for, and would be far, far less than the $10k/site we paid for LifeSize video conference systems (excellent, by the way) at the last place I worked.
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Minor point, but note that video with >2 people on Skype requires a premium account ($10/month). I'm not sure if you also need a subscription to Xbox Live ($50/year/Xbox).
Sure, but Chromebox requires $20.83/month for its service, and with Skype, you have the option of buying a day-pass for $4.99 if you only use the service occasionally.
Of course, it's also a matter of business models and how each company earns its revenue. However as the end user, "free" is better than $x/month
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Then I think that would be better explained as saying "meetings with particularly sensitive information." The size of the company would not dictate that policy.
Not to mention that if you are afraid of Google exploiting your data, you'd probably have the same problem with the NSA so cisco, juniper and almost all other US-based vendors (and why not Chinese/Russian?) are out of question. You're left off with XAMPP and OpenSource tech?
At a previous job the building next door was a remote office for a non-IT part of a large non-tech company. They spent the money to get some kind of carrier line (maybe EPL/EVPL?) solely for teleconferencing.
While the system is almost certainly not difficult to compromise for TLAs and others, they get assurance that the data hasn't left "their" network,
I personally don't think there's much rhyme or reason to that particular permutation of those policies, but there is certainly a large group of buyers who are fine with potentially backdoored commercial products as long as "the data doesn't leave our network" and hence would not be OK with Google's solution.
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Then I think that would be better explained as saying "meetings with particularly sensitive information." The size of the company would not dictate that policy.
Not to mention that if you are afraid of Google exploiting your data, you'd probably have the same problem with the NSA so cisco, juniper and almost all other US-based vendors (and why not Chinese/Russian?) are out of question. You're left off with XAMPP and OpenSource tech?