Many companies have invested in the high end telepresence video conference rooms that allow attendees to feel as if they are really there while saving millions on travel and expenses. But the additional cost and effort of coordinating these “you’re virtually there” meetings has been daunting… until OnBoard 5.3 and its new Multipoint Reservations.

Driven by specific customer requests to improve their telepresence savings, AgilQuest built new capability into OnBoard so users can request and schedule a meeting that will take place in several locations at the same time… a multipoint video conference. We integrated the scheduling system inside OnBoard with the top-of-the-line Tandberg video telepresence system from Cisco to yield a familiar tool that users can access to create meetings that span the state, country or world.

With OnBoard 5.3 Multipoint Reservations, you can now use the Windows-based Navigator or the web-based Mobile interface to find a date and time where video conference rooms are available in each of the multiple locations you choose. Once you’ve found an available time, you can book those resources and send invites to all the attendees. The various time zones are calculated automatically, the resources are booked in both OnBoard and the video conference room scheduling system, and OnBoard manages the extra equipment, catering and services requests.

As with all AgilQuest products, Multipoint Reservations was built to customer needs and to handle real world situations. You can specify which users are allowed to make multipoint reservations, which are allowed to reserve the classroom-oriented video conference rooms, and which users should get higher priority in requesting resources. Setting up a meeting is as easy as following a web page and the resources and availability come directly from the Tandberg system. Tracking chargebacks is built in as are questions like “did this meeting save travel time” so the real value of the telepresence rooms and infrastructure can be measured.

The new reports add new dimensions to the value of Multipoint Reservations, too. Designed for both operators and managers, these additional reports show the current and upcoming events as well as stats on how much the system was utilized and how well the video conferences are contributing to reducing travel and expenses.

We made it to sync with Cisco’s Tandberg (TMS) system, but we specifically designed the integration to work with other high end telepresence systems. Every company examining the utilization of their collaboration tools and measuring their ROI needs the easy reservation tool that OnBoard 5.3 provides and the tracking and reporting we added to support VNOC and operations teams.

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