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Used for: 6–12 months
One slot, no tower, no cables on the table
The price
Slides in, comes up with the panel, and the room is finally tidy
Used for: 1–3 months
The tower under the table disappeared entirely
Our boardroom used to have a small tower on a shelf under the table with an HDMI lead, a USB lead and a mains lead running up to the panel, and every one of those was a thing that could be kicked, unplugged or borrowed. This slides into the slot on the back of the IdeaHub and all of it is gone. It comes up with the panel, so somebody walking into a meeting presses one button and gets a Windows desktop on the screen with the touch and the room camera already working. No pairing, no dongle, no cable on the table at all. Fan noise is the only thing anybody has commented on. In a quiet room with nobody talking you can hear it faintly, and in an actual meeting you cannot. For a boardroom that was previously a nest of cables and a tower cooking itself behind a cupboard door, this has been an easy sell internally!
Used for: 3–6 months
Teams runs on the panel with nothing else in the room
Runs Teams on the panel itself, so the room has no laptop in it at all unless somebody wants to share something of their own. Camera, an 8-microphone array and screen all come up as one machine, which is what makes the difference: no picking a webcam out of a dropdown, no audio going to the wrong device. Joining a call is one tap on the panel, and people who hate technology have stopped complaining about that room!
Used for: More than a year
Two years on and the room has needed nothing doing to it
Expensive next to a small PC on a shelf
Yes, you can bolt a mini PC to the back of a panel for a fraction of this. We did exactly that in two other rooms and both of them have had cables pulled out, the wrong input selected and somebody's laptop left plugged in overnight. Two years on, this room has had none of that.
Used for: Less than a month
Would not seat in the slot on our older panel at all
One star because nobody anywhere in the buying process told us that the OPS slot on the older IdeaHub generation we have is not the same one. The connector lines up, but the module will not go home, and no amount of pushing was ever going to change that. Check your panel model number against the compatibility list before anybody signs anything.
Used for: 1–3 months
Fan is audible in a small quiet room
No complaints about how it performs. It drives the 4K panel, runs Teams and a browser with a dozen tabs without stumbling, and it boots straight into the room account with nothing to type. The fan is the one thing I would flag if you are putting it in a small room rather than a boardroom. In a room for four with the door shut you can hear it between people speaking, though nobody in the big room has ever mentioned it. Worth thinking about which rooms get one.
Used for: More than a year
Two years in a daily-use room without a single failure
Goes into a room that is booked from 8 in the morning until 6 at night and it has not missed a meeting yet. Two years of that. Windows updates itself overnight the way any other machine does, our estate team manage it like any other PC on the domain, and nobody has ever had to crawl under a table to reboot anything!
Used for: 3–6 months
Fast enough once it is actually running
Quick enough in use, but it takes the better part of 2 minutes to come up from cold and the booking is usually already running by then
Used for: 6–12 months
Managed like any other PC on the domain
Getting at it means taking the panel off its bracket
The reason IT signed this off rather than a consumer stick is that it joins the domain and turns up in the management console like every other machine we own. No special tooling, no separate agent to look after. The one drawback is physical: the slot is on the back, and on a wall-mounted panel that means lifting the whole thing off its bracket to touch the module. Nine months in we have not had to, but it is clearly a two-person job when it comes.