Blog

Technology is constantly innovating and advancing and has become and integral part of any business’ success. Today’s workforce is becoming more mobile, and that makes simple, effective collaboration more important for today’s business than ever before. At LookingPoint we have almost a decade of experience designing and deploying different collaboration rooms. Our experience has taught us that every room is different and can fill different business needs. We have multiple collaboration rooms throughout our office and in this blog are sharing our experience upgrading one of those spaces. We decided to upgrade the room because new technology has evolved to provide additional features and capabilities since we originally deployed this particular collaboration room.

A few months of ago I was asked to help bring up a branch site for one of LookingPoint’s clients.   This was unscheduled work and it was the first time I encountered Cisco’s Mobility Express.   My previous projects have been enterprise deployments either using the traditional WLC or Meraki’s cloud managed APs.   With Mobility Express, Cisco allows an AP to run as a wireless controller.    Starting with 802.11ac Wave 2 access points, Cisco embedded a virtual WLC into the access point.  I was pleasantly surprise and thought this make perfect sense for branch offices or for small to medium-sized businesses.   No longer are branch sites tethered to HQ for wireless with capwap tunnels from branch site APs having to register with the WLC at HQ.   This can be a great solution for sites with limited IT staff. 

One of hottest topics in networking is SD-WAN. Being the latest thing, organizations are not always clear on how, or why, to deploy a solution like SD-WAN.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and while most of us are planning a special day with our special someone, here at LookingPoint we are thinking more about the technologies we are loving most this year! We want to share the love with our customers and blog subscribers, so we’re sharing the love with this list of the 5 enterprise technologies you are bound to fall in love with this year (if you haven’t already)!

How many times have you entered a conference room and walked out again because you KNOW that the meeting isn’t going to start for at least another 15 minutes, killing your day’s productivity? Maybe you saw:

This blog follows on from my last post and continues the discussion on how to integrate a single/pair of SD-WAN routers into our existing branch site topology. If you missed that last blog, then you can check it out here. Don’t worry I’ll be right here waiting for you.

The conference room video solutions have greatly improved and are simpler to implement, use, and support than ever before.  I see two major drivers for this trend.  First is the move to cloud for endpoint registration and video bridging in the cloud.  This move to cloud has lowered the entry point for many customers to enable video in the conference room.  The second driver is the decreasing cost for the video endpoint.  Video is now more affordable for all types of rooms including small huddle rooms, general purpose rooms, large training rooms, and executive conference rooms. However, there are still major differences between manufacturers when it comes to the way these solutions are installed, managed, and their usability.  For this blog I will be comparing the Cisco Room Kits and the Zoom Rooms.  I find it very interesting how both companies have taken a completely different approach enabling video in conference rooms.

Simple, effective collaboration is more important to today’s business than ever before. Today's workforce is becoming more mobile and video conferencing is becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity. Whether you’re hosting an all-hands meeting, collaborating with remote employees, or connecting with customers having the right space and solutions is essential for your business.

Santa’s done with his list, now it's time for IT’s! We are reminded throughout the year to check our technology hardware and our different policies. Our software systems remind us to update our passwords and even force us to if we go too long without it. Software licenses renew and if any of our technology is outdated our technology partners help us to update our environment. But, what about the things we may not think to check or push to the back-burner because something more important comes up?