RoomWizard Scheduler for Meeting Rooms
The "RoomWizard" from office supply company Steelcase is designed to make booking conference rooms easy, as well as alert passersby that a meeting is in progress. You can schedule an upcoming meeting right from the RoomWizard's touchscreen or have the unit sync up with your Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook server.
The functionality seems useful, but prices appear to be over $2,000 a pop, which is a daunting amount of money for a little networked touchscreen. I suppose that's what happens when you position something as high-tech office furniture and not a consumer good.
Product Page [PolyVision.com via Macromatic via OHGizmo]
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Guess we'll have to stick to the normal method of showing that a meeting is in progress: shutting the damn door!
The only other functionality this device brings is a way to book a room right then and there. Everything else is doable without it.
They are overpriced, hard to configure, and the hardware is unreliable. We have them for scheduling shared rooms at my university.
I've seen these at a hospital near me. I thought they were pretty cool until I found out how much they cost. They sure look slick, though.
Chumby on a stick.
This is a stupid as the internet fridge. Unless you can surf the web on it while waiting for the meeting to finish?
Most places would stick a paper calender print-out on the door. Some even hang a pencil on string for updates. And then spend the $2000 on something useful.
I saw this at the WB offices. It seems to be a good idea in a large office building (14 floors) with may different people setting scheduled meetings. You just send an outlook invite to it and it shows up on the schedule.
We have a bunch of these by my office.
Actually they're pretty neat. I can look down the hall at a bank of four conference rooms and see if any are available.
Also, I book my own conference rooms instead going to our administrative assistant. Which is nice because I can always take a peek at the schedule for the floor above if the ones I normally use are booked.
I haven't seen it but I think there is some conference room use report that it generates so that they can see if we need to add meeting space due to overbooking.
Lastly, They aren't cheap but I doubt we paid 2K each. No purchasing department worth anything buys stuff at list.
I worked for a Audio Visual System Integrator that was part of a furniture company that is a Steelcase dealer which owns Polyvision. The Room wizard is a great device in concept but fails in real world application. The Linux based OS is buggy to say the least and it has installation issues with regards to the powering of the device. IE it CAN NOT be remotely powered with out great difficulty. So you think the MSRP cost of 2,164 is a bit high add the additional labor cost to at least make the device NEC code compliant.
I could go on and on with the failure of execution in it's design. Hey I could even tell you of the UK based company that developed the product for Polyvision/Steelcase. Ok I will http://www.ambientweb.co.uk/about/clients.htm
We have 15 of these at my company. We DO pay over $2k per device, and they ARE a little flaky. They lock up quite often, and they tend to die after time (they have hard drives, which eventually fail). Support is hit or miss. I have never figured out how the company justifies the cost.