Video conferencing and collaboration technology is now a staple in education as K-12 and higher ed institutions adapt to modern technology to meet the changing needs of students and faculty. With an emphasis on capabilities like security, video quality, user experience, and integration with other education tools (including Microsoft Teams), schools have a unique challenge of empowering learning while also ensuring a safe experience.

Many companies are already experiencing the inconvenience of travel restrictions caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19). You’ve likely seen it on the news: event cancellations, travel bans, and more companies requiring their employees to work from home until the effects of this pandemic are under control. Maybe your company has already implemented travel restrictions. If that’s the case, or if you think it will happen soon, do you have a communication strategy in place to support your remote employees and keep the business running smoothly?

I attend a lot of collaboration conferences every year. Over the last couple of years, I routinely hear the same question: Is email dead? In this post, I hope to shed some light on the reason people are asking this question, and why it should matter to you.

Welcome to KegBot, Part 2! If you read my last blog, you know that we’ve set out to build the most awesome IoT device ever; an automated beer dispenser we call the KegBot! If you didn’t get a chance to read it, you can get up to speed on the first several hurdles we tackeled here.

For the last 5 years, IE’s invited customers to sample the latest technologies and some of the best local beer and food as part of our OktoberTekfest event. It’s a great opportunity to see the latest products and solutions offered by IE and our partners, to meet the IE staff and have some fun. As part of the planning team for IE, it falls on me to determine what Collaboration technology we’re going to present to give our customers a glimpse of the future and prepare their organizations for what’s to come. This is no easy task. There are so many technologies with so much potential. This year we thought we’d take a slightly different approach with one demo. We wanted to not only showcase our partner’s tech but also what creative things our technical team can do with them. We thought about what technology could we show at a German Oktoberfest-inspired event. An event with a fully functional beer garden, lots of beer flowing, and the smell of brats, pretzels and other great food. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could combine two of our favorite things, technology AND beer? And then it hit us, we’ll build a KegBot! What is a KegBot?

For years I’ve worked in the telephony industry, both on the customer and reseller side. While on the customer side, it was always a struggle to get my leaders to even accept the fact we had a contact center (call center in those days). They would respond, “No, no, no. We just need some people to answer customer calls. We don’t need a call center.”