As companies rushed to implement remote work plans in 2020, use of Microsoft Teams skyrocketed, with approximately 115 million active daily users logging in to the conferencing and collaboration platform as of November 2020--a whopping fifty percent increase from earlier in the year. Now, as companies plan for a future that will find many employees opting for hybrid work plans and full-time work-from-home arrangements, organizations will be looking for ways to make Microsoft Teams a permanent fixture, both on-site and in home offices. So let’s look at a few ways you can optimize Teams performance to get the most out of every employee, no matter where they’re working. 

Pexip, provider of enterprise-wide conferencing solutions, has announced Pexip Private Cloud, a new cloud-based conferencing option that combines the flexibility of a traditional cloud solution and the security of a self-hosted conferencing set-up. With Pexip Private Cloud, customers can take back control of their data and decide where they would like to host it.

Effective team management often comes down to identifying work styles and implementing practices that accommodate various methods and approaches. It can be a bit trickier to negotiate these various styles in these work-from-home times, so here is a quick breakdown of four remote work "types" and how to handle them.

As more employees transition into remote working arrangements, the demand for versatile and compact on-premise collaboration solutions has increased. 

Video conferencing solutions have become the tools of choice for staying connected with friends and family during the COVID-19 pandemic. For casual users,  FaceTime or Google Hangouts are simple and accessible platforms that keep distant loved ones a mere click away. Remote workers, however, often need complementary hardware and an advanced video meeting platform to work efficiently and effectively. With temporary work-from-home arrangements turning into long-haul situations, employees need enterprise-grade solutions. And that’s where Poly comes in. Already a leader in video conferencing and telepresence solutions before 2020 came along and changed the way we work, Poly has cemented its trailblazer status this year, with a host of room solutions optimized and certified for Zoom.

Many people around the world are working from home and making do with new technology and makeshift home offices. While traditional office life may be forever altered due to COVID-19, some businesses will require employees to return to the office at some point. Here's what to expect if you're called back. 

Although folks might be trickling back into the office to work on-site at least some of the time, large scale gatherings continue to be absolutely off-limits due to COVID. Which means events, conferences, trade shows, holiday soirees and the like must be limited to the virtual realm. This makes it a bit more difficult to pull off an event that people will remember, but that doesn’t mean you can’t show your attendees a good time. Here are a few tips for making a virtual event nearly as unmissable as the real thing.

Poly used the occasion of Zoom's all-virtual Zoomtopia 2020 to unveil the Poly Sync Family, a brand new line of smart speakerphones that leverage proprietary microphone technology to more effectively track the talker instead of the noise.

StarLeaf, a global provider of innovative meeting room solutions and video conferencing services, has been named a “Visionary” in Gartner’s annual Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions. This marks the second year in a row that StarLeaf has landed in the vaunted “Visionary” category, which honors companies that “understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules.”

With schools across the U.S. reopening in the midst of the COVID pandemic, administrators are doing everything they can to keep students safe during a time of uncertainty. As a part of their technology plan, school districts should consider implementing a district-wide digital signage solution to keep students and employees informed and engaged. Let’s take a look at how that might work.

According to a new poll conducted by University of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, one in four older Americans had a virtual medical visit in the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with most of those virtual visits being conducted with videoconferencing technology. This signals a precipitous rise in telehealth tech usage. In a similar poll conducted just last year, only 4% of people over fifty said they’d ever had a virtual visit with a doctor.

Students around the world had to transition into online learning mode in March, and fall finds many of them continuing to learn via video. It’s not only school-age children, though. New hires are attending virtual trainings. College students are logging in to online lectures. All manner of continuing education has moved to remote communication. We might not all be in school, but many of us are now learning online. This poses a great challenge to teachers, who are adapting their lesson plans to an entirely new learning context. Here a few tips and tricks for those among you who have been tasked with teaching in these unprecedented times.

If you’ve been paying even a little bit of attention to communication trends over the last few years, you’ve heard this time and time again: huddle rooms are the future! And this: huddle rooms are the now! Let’s briefly sketch how we got there. As more and more companies embraced flexible work models, fewer and fewer employees worked in offices full time. The age of jam-packed conference rooms was nearing its end, and the new era of collaboration favored small groups and video-assisted meet-ups. Big rooms were no longer necessary. What these mobile workers needed were more intimate staging areas outfitted with collaboration tools that allowed them to connect with distant colleagues and clients. And thus, the huddle room was born.

Recruiting and hiring is difficult in the best of times. Same goes for job hunting. During a pandemic, though? Talk about a headache. But using video conferencing solutions wisely can make the process a whole lot easier for companies and prospective employees alike. Let’s take a quick look at a few methods for making this all go smoothly for everyone.

As work-from-home arrangements have become the norm, Zoom’s daily participant count has increased by over 2,000 percent, while total meeting minutes have increased by 3,000 percent. Those numbers may drop when offices reopen, but many companies have realized something important: remote work, works. Even when it is no longer required due to COVID concerns, employees will continue to push for work-from-home options. Which means manufacturers of video conferencing and collaboration solutions have to step up and remove as many barriers to communication as possible.