Barco released a new range of projectors 15^th May 2013 – a series of projectors named Collaborate, targeting businesses, governments and educational institutions that wants to share information more efficiently.

The products are developed and manufactured in Norway, marketed from Belgium and sold, deployed and serviced globally. This clearly indicates the need for cross geo and discipline interaction (operations, service, manufacturing, marketing, sales).

To be able to release the product family, the various disciplines needed to – collaborate! Since Barco (www.barco.com) has offices in multiple locations around the world, we really got a perfect opportunity to see how well we can take advantage of our own tools for collaboration. I helped creating the value proposition, competitive documentation, marketing collateral, channel training and channel marketing material – before our Corporate Marketing team took over and finalized it.

Leading the way

Fortunately, Barco has a number of products well fit for data sharing and easy collaboration. Some of these products are;

• High Resolution Projectors
• ClickShare
• XDS – a multi display large desktop system

In a large number (75+) of meeting rooms a combination of these solutions are installed. There are also a large number of meeting rooms equipped with high audio & video quality teleconferencing systems.

Taking our own medicine

I think the investment in meeting room technology for collaboration has paid off. In almost all meetings where more than two people participated, we used high resolution projectors, ClickShare for content sharing and the sound and video conferencing features. We could always get better, but my personal experience is that it saves time, money and travel hassle – it’s like “just get connected” and we can take joint decisions based on the same knowledge base.

Efficient collaboration is indeed extremely valuble and businesses that does not invest properly will not be able to unleash their potential of their organization. If the competition does?

Did we succeed?

That is not in our hands, really – as we now are relating on a great sales team to quantify the success…