Intelligent Proximity –Pairing Room Collaboration with BYOD

Some of you may have heard of Intelligent Proximity from some of the recent conferences that have been going on lately such as Enterprise Connect. Its in a Beta phase right now but from the early demo’s and testing I have done of the feature its an exciting concept that users are showing a huge interest in.

Basically it’s the ability to pair a BYOD device such as a iPad/iPhone to a Cisco collaboration endpoint such as a MX300 G2 or DX650. depending on the device the features may vary but my post is focused on room based systems. The DX650 I will cover in another post. Right at this moment its available on iOS devices only. Android is planned for early 2015 as per the Cisco website.You can download the iOS app here.

PPT slide below can be downloaded from here.

So a couple of things people may not realize.

• The BYOD has to be in earshot of the Cisco room device for initial pairing.
• The BYOD and Cisco room device need IP connectivity to each other once the app has identified your Cisco device So basically your corporate BYOD Wifi SSID will need to allow connectivity back to the room device.
• The ability to control the snapshot feature cannot be controlled on a per session basis, it’s a beta feature so should be treated as such.
• You don’t have to be in a meeting/conference to have content displayed on the TelePresence device replicated on the BYOD device running Proximity.

The software requirements are a room endpoints running TC7.x although earlier versions may have it available I would recommend at least 7.x. Also the following feature needs to be turned on at the endpoint:

Last month I demoed this feature to about 400 people (give or take a few) using a MX300 G2. The demos where done in small groups of 5 or 6 so as you can imagine I got really good at the demo but the groups were small enough so I could see their reactions. While this is some what an informal survey as such a couple of things that people clung to were:

• The ease of pairing. Users really liked the way all you need to do to pair was just open the app in earshot of the Cisco TelePresence device.
• Ability to move backwards and forwards through the content which by the way is anything shared on the Cisco endpoint and not just a PowerPoint deck. So it could be any application or desktop.
• Taking a snapshot there an then and not having to wait for a email post meeting with required content.

This highlights the importance of content intermingled with other UC features such as video and voice. I think people have come expect that these things are just there now and on their own are not that exciting. Its when we start combining these features in new ways that brings the story together in a seamless easy to use manner that draws attention.

References

Intelligent Proximity on CCO

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collaboration-endpoints/intelligent-proximity.html

Community Support forum

https://supportforums.cisco.com/community/12156681/cisco-proximity

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