This article was written by Marco Ventura, T1V's VP of International Sales.
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For those of you that “LinkedIn-Know-Me”, i.e. don’t actually know me, I work for an American tech company called T1V. I’m based in Amsterdam and interact daily with teams distributed across 16 different time zones.
Like so many others, I’m working from home these days. Compared to people that suddenly find themselves in the same situation, I have one unfair advantage: my company just so happens to specialize in state-of-the-art visual collaboration software.
The concept of an unfair advantage is often thought of as a skill that’s your unique talent. It’s equally true, however, that we can leverage tools that also give us such an advantage. Think of Superman being able to fly vs. Batman having a Batplane.
My daily workflow has actually always included the use of a 55” touchscreen installed in my home office running T1V’s flagship ThinkHub software. This is my Batplane.
Here’s a quick scenario illustrating how I work. Let’s say I need to start putting together a customer proposal. I often begin by reviewing written project requirements and/or technical specs which could be in a Word doc. My application engineering team typically prepares a system design drawing, which I’ll cross reference. Inside sales begins preparing a quote in Google Docs.
Sometimes I’ll have a bunch of notes, photos on my phone, and hand drawn sketches from customer meetings. Basically, I end up with several disparate pieces of information on all sorts of devices and platforms. Seeing all of this in one place becomes very useful, particularly as I need to share this content with people inside and outside my company.
This is where the magic happens. ThinkHub allows me to visually aggregate all information onto my ThinkHub Digital Canvas. I just “toss” documents, websites, notes, images, live screencasts, etc. and intuitively glide and resize content in my workspace, placing everything exactly where it’s needed. Being able to visualize all my stuff in one place is such a game changer. It’s truly the stuff of Minority Report (Business Edition).
You can think of the 55” touchscreen that physically hangs on my wall as a sort of portal giving me a view into a part of a much larger total workspace— effectively it’s like having a resizable desktop that’s about as large as the side of a 40 foot shipping container.
Sharing everything in my workspace (or part of it) in real time with a coworker is as easy as having them connect to my ThinkHub Canvas from their laptop using T1V’s free AirConnect app. Not only can they see what I’m doing, but we can both interact with the Canvas in real time. When / if I need to have a few more people weigh in regardless of whether they’re in the same room or across the world is no problem, multiple people can join just as easily.
For years this is basically how I’ve worked. I cannot imagine doing things any other way. With millions of people now working from home, using a single collaboration tool to communicate, visualize, present, teach, share, sell, engage— you get the idea—is unbelievably powerful.
Here’s a quick snapshot of what my Digital Canvas looked like at one point last week:
…and a few things that I actually did during the week:
- Zoom video call. This is not just any Zoom call with a bunch of people talking over video. My company's entire sales team reviewed quarterly KPIs shown on a massive six panel interactive video wall from our U.S. headquarters. 80% of the team was remote. During the call, some team members shared live content from their laptops. Q1 sales data, all camera feeds, and laptop screens could be viewed by all simultaneously.
- Remote teaching. A potential European customer offering CAD software training classes was looking for a way to virtually conduct classes. One of the core requirements was allowing instructors to teach classes, demoing their CAD software while seeing live screencasts of all students learning/using their design software. My colleague and I remotely demoed how this was entirely possible with ThinkHub.
- ThinkHub MultiSite design review. I went over a System Line Drawing with an operations team in the U.S. Before the meeting started, I placed the project requirements documentation, a hand drawn sketch sent by the customer, some site photos, and hardware specs on the canvas and saved this as a session. When the meeting started, I recalled the session and joined our Canvases via ThinkHub MultiSIte. This allowed us to interact on the same shared Canvas in real time.
- Virtual Sticky Notes. I create these throughout my day and group them according to priority and geography. I can copy/paste any content onto these stickies easily from my laptop. Having these notes posted right in front of me at all times is an excellent way to keep important tasks top of mind. Needless to say, this is an amazing tool for teams using lean-agile / design thinking processes.
- Microsoft Teams video call. I had an MS Teams call with a new customer in Asia. During the VC call I shared my entire ThinkHub Canvas and went through a presentation. At one point the customer asked for some very specific product details that were not included in my deck. No problem. I found a perfect video that T1V’s crack marketing team put together and pasted the YouTube URL onto the Canvas. I played the video for the customer, grabbing and annotating a few snapshots while we watched together.
- Some fun. My 6 and 8 year old daughters watched Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems and sketched giant pigeon drawings. Kind of cool on a giant touchscreen. Did I mention that I work from home?
Again, remember that I did all of this using a single platform without ever leaving ThinkHub. Who needs a Batplane?
One more thing. Although having a touchscreen to physically interact with is a pretty awesome experience, T1V also offers a way to use ThinkHub virtually with nothing more than a PC. ThinkHub Cloud Access allows users to create virtual rooms to accomplish everything I described above.
If you’ve never experienced ThinkHub before and are looking for ways to truly Collaborate (with a capital C) with your coworkers, customers, and partners please reach out. You’ll never look back.
For more information on ThinkHub collaboration software, schedule a virtual demo today.