Interfere No More: Barco Clickshare Steps to the Plate (Again)

Inside the collaboration solution that makes it easy to keep up with BYOD.

As the BYOD trend continues to establish itself in the workplace, IT departments must be prepared to accommodate any and all devices.

The growing prevalence of wireless devices combined with the surge of mobile applications requires network admins to be diligent in managing their airspace. Connection issues and signal interference can no longer be chalked up to the kitchen microwave – managing the complexity of wireless performance has been proven to be difficult.

The Clickshare units are designed to enable quick, effortless collaboration from multiple devices. VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI – doesn’t matter. Scrap the mess of wires under the conference room table and plug a Clickshare button into your USB port, or, connect to the base unit via its wireless access point to share your content.

You can watch an overview of the Clickshare system here.

Barco has stepped to the plate, now with their CSM units, releasing a firmware update last week that allows you to disable the WAP of the base unit itself and instead connect it to an existing corporate network (the larger, 4-button CSC units have had this capability since December 2014).

This is important for two reasons. First, you are not forced to create an additional WAP (or multiple, depending on the number of base units in your deployment) to allow for mobile devices and tablets to connect. Creating an array of access points increases the amount of “airtime” of a network, specifically, the bandwidth consumed by management traffic such as beacons and probe responses.

This may not be an issue if your infrastructure is small (say one centrally-located AP), but in a large office building or congested area, there will most likely be a dense number of SSIDs up on the usable 2.4GHz channels. Beacons are used to announce the presence of an SSID and consume some bandwidth of a channel.

The more airtime that is dedicated to this management traffic the less there is available for actual user data, which can result in poor TCP throughput and packet loss. Allowing the Clickshare units to connect directly to an existing network helps eliminate these concerns.

Second, users will no longer have to switch SSIDs on their mobile devices before sharing content via the Clickshare. They will most likely already be connected to an existing network anyway. This eliminates the potential to lose network shares while further streamlining the connection process to the base unit.

Also included in this firmware update is side-by-side functionality on the CSMs, which allows two users to simultaneously share content on the screen, as well as the ability to modulate the strength of the WAP signal coming from the base unit.

You can download the update here.

If you are interested in demoing a Barco Clickshare unit, fill out a demo request form here and an Almo representative will be in touch! Or click here to see more.

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