Welcome to Our Smart Home Technology Blog

Install a System that Simplifies Video Calls 

While virtual meetings have become second nature to hybrid companies, there's undeniable value in face-to-face interactions. The question is, how can you ensure that remote participants don't miss out on the richness of in-person meetings? 

If your organization conducts video calls in conference rooms, you need the right technology to bridge the gap between in-person and remote attendees. Otherwise, remote colleagues find themselves staring at a wide-angle view of a conference table, straining to catch fragments of the conversation in an echoing room. 

Discover a more effective approach to video conferencing systems for your Dallas meeting rooms. Here's a fresh perspective on optimizing your conference room design to foster superior communication practices.

Bring Your Teams Together with High-End AV Solutions in Place

Creating spaces for meetings and collaboration among your employees doesn’t have to be a hassle. No matter the size of your Dallas, TX office building, you can bring the right video conferencing solutions to any room and set up a space dedicated to productivity and efficiency.

DeVance Electronic Lifestyle brings high-end technologies together to bridge the gap between your remote and in-office employees, ensuring everyone stays connected throughout the workday. 

Want to learn more about upgrading your AV equipment and elevating your conference room design and setup with the proper tools? Keep reading below, and keep daily operations on track! 

Maximizing the Potential of Your Office’s Video Conferencing Capabilities 

No matter what business you are in, it is crucial to be a good salesperson. We sell ourselves every day to clients and employees alike, so they will either do business with us or help our business succeed. And to make good sales, you've got to have good communication. So much of business is automated through eCommerce that it doesn’t appear that personal connections drive profits anymore. 

Still, personal relationships are the foundation for any business, which means you need to communicate through many mediums. Sometimes, it’s just not possible to meet your Dallas customers face to face. But with video conferencing, you’ve got the next best thing to meeting in person. 

Proper Network Design and Crestron Flex Tech Can Simplify Your Remote Workday

If you’re just now starting to work from home, it can feel a bit overwhelming to get used to a brand-new routine. Or even if you’ve been in this setup for a while, you might still find difficulties pop up from time to time.

Are you finding it hard to keep in contact with your coworkers? Do your video meetings often lead to frozen screens and delayed audio? It turns out that you can bring top-notch video conferencing solutions to your Dallas, TX home office to make your remote work a breeze.

In this blog, we’ll dive into what makes up a proper home network design and how Crestron Flex products can elevate your office setup. Find out more by reading on below!

Have meetings in your Dallas, TX, office been less productive or engaging than you would hope recently? Your audio might be to blame: Sound issues are one of the most distracting issues you can face while video conferencing, but we have a few solutions to try. Keep reading to see how to mitigate audio setbacks and engage your staff with the help from the DeVance Electronic Lifestyle team.

SEE ALSO: Winterize Your Office With Motorized Shades!

Maximize Your Microphones

You want everyone on the call to hear your message, loudly and clearly, but you’ve probably experienced poorly installed incoming audio that sounds garbled, quiet or staticky. Figuring out exactly where to place your microphones often requires a professional audio-video integrator’s skills, so that’s where we come in.

Have you ever asked someone to speak up in the conference call, only to get louder volume with more distortion? When we perform video conferencing equipment installations, we place microphones close to the people speaking so that sound quality doesn’t depend on volume. Digital sound processors, or DSPs, can distinguish between people speaking and noise, while automatic gain control can fine-tune your sound so that your microphone balances both your louder and softer-spoken participants.

Also consider whether omnidirectional or directional microphones work best for you. Many people think omnidirectional microphones at first because they pick up sounds from multiple directions: This effect captures audio from people speaking all around the room. However, omnidirectional mics pick up ambient noise, too.  Directional microphones target the meeting participant close by, and many microphones include DSP processing capabilities to clarify incoming and outgoing audio alike.

Right now, working from home is more common than ever before. Keeping up with your employees at home or across the globe is a key component to your company’s commercial automation now and for years down the road, providing your offices with incomparable flexibility and efficiency.

So how can you bring your whole Dallas, TX company together with video conferencing solutions that tie a bridge between all your employees? Zoom is the answer, and it’s growing more popular every day.

In this blog, we’ll dive into what Zoom setups in your conference rooms entail and how your entire business can benefit from one. Keep reading below to learn more!

SEE ALSO: A Closer Look at Microsoft Teams and Zoom

What Can Zoom Do?

What to close the gap between where all your employees are? Zoom makes it easy to host a multitude of video conferences a week, or even a day, with as many employees as you’d like – no matter where they are in the world.

If you’ve been in the business world for a while, we’re sure you’ve experienced the wonders of video conferencing firsthand. Remote employees depend on it for a connection to in-office teams, and clients and prospects rely on webcams when doing business with you.

Are you using the platform and technology that fulfills your attendees’ various needs? In this article, we’ll explore some key differentiators between two of the most popular systems, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Plus, we’ll show you how you can take full advantage of Crestron Flex – the next generation of boardroom technology products from the business automation leader. Curious to see what we might recommend for you? Read on to which one you need to start using in your Dallas, TX, office.

SEE ALSO: 3 Commercial Audio-Video Trends That Hospitality Business Owners Should Know

Microsoft Teams

If you’re a devout Microsoft user, we think you’ll enjoy the flawless integration with programs like Outlook that will let you find and share emails and group chats in lightning speed. You can start a discussion, via chat or video, right from the Teams platform, or host a meeting that takes only seconds to create. Users enjoy the platform’s intelligence, which allows them to find resources -- from transcriptions of recorded texts to relevant, searchable chats and files -- to bring to any discussion.

Microsoft Teams is free to download, with partial functionality and no commitments. For a more robust experience, Teams is available as part of Office 365 Business Premium for $12.50 per user, per month, or Office 365 Enterprise E3 for $20 per user, per month, which unlocks the full range of features.