Home /Featured Articles / Saving Vital Resources with the Google Jamboard
You have already successfully migrated your company to a G Suite-based architecture. Now you, as an IT manager, are wondering what other Google tools are available to further enhance productivity, innovation, and save company resources.
Enter the Jamboard, Google’s G Suite integrated whiteboard designed to simplify and improve collaboration between teams, thereby saving time and money while increasing business opportunities.
In this article, we have organized the top five ways integrating Jamboard into your G Suite infrastructure helps your company save precious time and resources.
Remote collaboration is the one of the most important steps a company must take toward a digitized workplace. However, making it both effective and efficient requires IT managers to find advanced tools that make the entire process seem as though distributed team members were in the same space.
As a collaborative meeting room solution, Jamboard can save company travel expenses by making remote collaboration practical. The digital whiteboard not only allows remote teams to see and hear each another, it also allows participants to share images, text and drawings in real-time during presentations from anywhere in the world for a completely integrated experience.
Additionally, all jams are automatically saved to the cloud, which not only makes them easy to share, but also means that they will never die (unless you want them to). Even in case of a power outage, every stroke made before the board goes dark will be saved. Basically, this board has a better memory than anyone else in the office and will help employees get back to where they left off before the candles went out.
You also won’t have to pay for expensive servers or hard drives for data storage. Google uses redundant servers around the world are protected with 2,048 encryption to ensure that no information is ever lost or put at risk. Employee files and your company’s information will always be safe and available no matter the location.
Using cloud-enabled apps such as Google Hangouts Meet, the Jamboard possesses all the technology needed to collaborate anywhere, anytime. Instead of spending company time and money on the road, team members can use their hours more productively to collaborate on tasks and expedite deadlines.
Save on employee travel expenses by taking the place of in-person meetings.
Companies constantly need to prepare presentations that can help increase new business opportunities. In such situations, technical difficulties are the last thing an employee needs to encounter during critical moments. Jamboard has the ability to take presentations to a whole new level, reducing these inconvenient problems and saving time.
For example, Jamboard can be paired with Hangouts Meet Hardware. Every meeting room participant receives a notification to join the meeting. Simplifying things as much as possible, there is no need for a conference code and everything happens automatically, leaving no room for human error. This helps prevent technological embarrassments that often accompany the beginning of a meeting.
Even on its own, Jamboard makes a good impression every time. Apart from the ability to display slide decks saved on Google Drive, presenters can use impressive, Jamboard-exclusive machine learning features like handwriting recognition, shape recognition and AutoDraw. These tools allow employees to quickly design diagrams, explain ideas, and create big concepts in a format everyone can understand.
The presentation can also be interactive, with customers or audiences participating from their own devices. Up to 50 participants can join a single jam session. The jam session owner has complete discretion over privacy settings that control which individuals can view, edit, and share the jam. This creates a highly collaborative but security aware environment for brainstorming and sharing ideas.
This kind of technological enablement of staff makes a good first impression and goes a long way to convincing potential partners of your company’s commitment innovative technological solutions. By avoiding complicated setups and minimizing the possibility of mistakes, investors will not be distracted by costly interruptions.
Thereby, they will focus on what your business has to say, opening new paths for better business opportunities. This kind of behavior demonstrates your ability to problem solve within your own company and builds confidence with new investors from the moment they step through the door.
Software upgrades periodically require hardware refreshes to keep pace with newer features that need more computing power. These upgrades are costly both in terms of hardware costs and downtime.
These challenges are a non-issue with the Jamboard. It receives automatic updates every four to six weeks, preventing expensive business interruptions. Thereby, you can be sure that you always have the latest software version with the newest features and the powerful hardware ensures that hardware upgrades won’t be needed.
With easy out-of-the-box setup and automatic updates, it does not take much to make the Jamboard an integral part of the office, especially if you are already an existing G Suite user. Employees will instantly start collaborating and taking advantage of the approachable technology, ensuring that your office has not just procured an expensive coat rack.
One of the most difficult problems companies encounter is that employees do not adopt the new technologies that management has invested in. What seems simple to IT may be difficult for non-technical staff, who may require hours of training. Ultimately, creating training materials and walking employees through the process of using new technological can be frustrating as it disrupts the workday and takes time away from other tasks.
Jamboard completely simplifies and reduces this tedious process. The Jamboard's intuitive design allows employees to walk up to the board and start using it. Also, Google users would already be familiar with Google interface designs.
Allowing employees to learn on their own gives staff more space for ideation and IT managers more time to focus on other duties. Ultimately, the Jamboard is an obvious workplace solution that will not only save on up-front training costs, but also continue to pay for itself because of its low need for maintenance and minimal workflow interruption.
According to The Opinium Workplace Productivity and Communications Technology Report performed by Mitel, inefficient communication and collaboration alone is costing more than £4 million annually to UK businesses with around 500 employees. That’s around £8,000 per person. A high proportion of this is attributed to technological hiccups during meetings.[i]
Usually, it is up to IT support to prevent meeting interruptions, especially just after implementing a new technology. This is because staff may not have had time to adjust to the new equipment and IT will need to troubleshoot, answer questions, and try to predict anything that might go wrong. If by chance, something still goes awry, they will need to be called back in during the actual meeting, taking valuable time away from employees.
Jamboard minimizes the need for IT intervention because it is built to work right out of the box, allowing teams to run meetings without interruptions with nothing but electricity and a reliable Wi-Fi connection. In the long run, the user-friendly interface ensures that staff will be quick to incorporate it into their weekly routine, adding more variety to ideas and making meetings more engaging for everyone except the IT department.
Choosing to procure a Google Jamboard will save both expenses and dividends in the long run. While you can opt to mount the Jamboard on a wall, many companies start by purchasing a few Jamboards with rolling stands so that teams can easily share the devices. Employees can wheel it between rooms, floors, and even buildings. Unlike a fixed device, teams will not have to fight over rooms just to use the hardware.
Additionally, Jamboard’s ability to update itself combined with its low opportunity for technical issues means IT will rarely be called in to troubleshoot, allowing you to dedicate your time to more pressing issues. This is a tool that IT managers can introduce to company leaders and staff with confidence, knowing that it will add value to your company from day one.
Reference:
[1] https://www.raconteur.net/sponsored/counting-the-cost-of-inefficient-communication
