Dell calls them the “world’s first video conferencing monitors certified for Microsoft Teams,” but there’s an even more important point here. Big manufacturers are making it much easier to work from home, and to stay connected. And with an all-in-one solution like this, you no longer need to call the IT department to help set it all up.
Home + Work
More of us work from home than ever before thanks to the pandemic, and we might stay that way afterwards. This means we’ll need to upgrade our home office spaces to match our actual office spaces. Part of that is making sure our ergonomic setups are good enough to keep us healthy, but another part is ensuring our technology is suited for the job. “Since [remote workers] will be on laptops, you must separate their keyboard from their screen,” James Olander, founder and designer of The Roost Stand, told Lifewire in an email. “You can do this by either: A) provide employees an external monitor for eye-level viewing, and they can continue using their laptop’s keyboard/trackpad, or by B) get their laptop screen to eye level and provide them with an external keyboard and mouse/trackpad.”
Dell’s Displays
Microsoft Teams is a rival to Slack, and features video conferencing, like Zoom. If you’re using a laptop on the kitchen table, then you already have everything you need to stay in touch with work colleagues. But while laptops are fine for short bursts, they’re an ergonomic nightmare. The laptop itself is fine, but you really need to get the screen up to eye level. The least messy way to do this is via a dock and an external monitor. Least messy, that is, until you try to connect a webcam, microphone, and speakers to your setup. Dell’s all-in-one displays are a very smart solution. They need minimal setup, so you can (in theory) get up and running just by plugging them in.
BYOD IT
This bring-your-own trend has been steadily growing for years. It used to be that you’d take whatever work laptop and phone you were given. This might be picked by the IT department for ease of administration and repair, or by the purchasing department because it was the cheapest option or the vendor offered the best kickbacks. Then came the iPhone, and people wanted to use their own devices for work. If you love your iPhone or Mac, you really don’t want to slum it at the office. This is called BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, and it’s now a pretty normal practice. Home working brings some technical challenges, though. Assuming you can find a workspace, you’ll still have needs that differ from those of the office. Gear should be very easy to set up so you don’t need the IT person to do it for you. And equipment should be designed to fit better into the home environment. One answer, of course, is consumer tech, which is designed to be user-deployable. But here comes Dell with an in-between option. An all-in-one device designed specifically for remote use. This might be just the kind of product that we see more of in 2021.
