The integration of Intel’s Unite collaboration software into ViewSonic ViewBoard units both expands their functionality and simplifies their installation.
ViewSonic has expanded its strategic partnership with Intel, with a new relationship which integrates the Intel Unite collaboration software with their ViewSonic ViewBoard interactive flat panel displays.
“We have been long-time partners with Intel, since back in the CRT days,” said Jason Webster, National Sales Manager with ViewSonic Canada. “This relationship around Unite is new though. With this, they came to us and said that they wanted to partner around our interactive flat panel displays – and we jumped at the chance.”
Intel Unite is a unified communications app that runs on Intel vPro-enabled systems. It combines visual collaboration, document sharing, and whiteboarding capabilities, while establishing wireless connections with projectors and other devices that can be notoriously hard to set up.
“Before this partnership, we could work with any collaboration software,” Webster said. “However with Intel Unite we have simplified the collaboration into an environment IT can manage. It’s now much easier to share.”
The integrated solution also makes setting everything up much easier than in the past.
“The easy part of the collaboration is what has been missing,” Webster said. “This simplifies the install.”
Through the collaboration, ViewSonic has preloaded the vPRO TPM chip along with the Unite app into their 55 inch, 65 inch, 75 inch and 86 inch ViewBoard displays
“Customers can register it on their Unite server and start using it immediately,” Webster indicated.
ViewSonic positions its ViewBoards in two key verticals – office conference rooms and education, with the latter being both K-12 and higher education. Webster, who focuses on the education market, says that the new collaboration will be especially popular there.
“Intel Unite has answered a lot of questions in the education space,” he said. “There are a lot of applications in the market from Asia – but they simply don’t do what Intel does, including the ability to do things like manage VLANs. It’s a perfect setup for us. ViewBoard now will allow not only users in the room and outside to share and collaborate but annotate on the board, screen capture it, and share it, This ability to capture and share that content is something that no other vendor making large format displays has been able to do before.”
Webster indicated that while customers had been able to use Unite on any existing projector or panel in a conference room or classroom, with the integration with the ViewBoard they can now re-imagine space.
“For example, school districts want to find an easy way to collaborate and control their data, and some have turned this into a hub, where the teacher can see what is happening on the device,” he said.
The ViewSonic displays with the Unite application are shipping now.
