Vision and Overview

• Some of the most productive work happens when you can harness the collective knowledge and skills of a group.
  • When you bring the right backgrounds and experience together, suddenly the most challenging problems feel like they can be solved.
• But the way employees work is changing:
  • Teams are more global, more dispersed and more mobile—80% increase in mobile workers since 2005; 54% of meetings include remote participants
  • Workspaces are shifting, becoming more open and more densely packed to encourage collaboration: From 2010 to 2012, the average ft²/ person dropped from 225 to 176; predicted to drop to as low as 100 ft²/ person by 2017
  • Collaboration isn’t just limited to meetings—new workplace design elements like huddle spaces allow a brainstorm to happen anywhere, any time
• While your average office has great tools for individuals, the tools and technology available for groups has not evolved to address the needs of the modern workplace
  • When people come together, it is hit or miss. Not often enough does it feel like everything just clicks, where ideas flow freely and everyone feels fully engaged.

Unlock the Power of the Group

• That’s why Microsoft created Surface Hub—to unlock the power of the group
• Microsoft set out to create a brand new collaboration device to re-imagine the way people work together. It believes that Surface Hub can be as transformative to group productivity as the PC was for individuals

Integrated design: Hardware + Software + Services

• To achieve this, Microsoft realised that the device needed to be simple and intuitive enough for anyone to feel comfortable walking up and using it
• In order to do so, it created an experience that integrates the best of Microsoft hardware, software, and productivity services in a single package—the Surface Hub

Hardware Overview

• The hardware, manufactured in Microsoft’s state of the art factory in Oregon, has its origins in Perceptive Pixel—an industry leader in pen and touch display technology that Microsoft acquired in 2012
• The innovative display technology allows the pen and touch experience to be as natural and responsive on a large screen as you’ve come to expect from a smaller device like a phone or tablet
• Designed to be inviting: Built-in sensors enable the device to light up when approaches it at the start of a session

Software Overview

• Surface Hub features a new Windows 10 experience designed with group productivity at its core
• This allows Surface Hub to be a shared device across multiple individuals, where anyone can walk up and use it—unlike a PC, where you need to log in and where your data and content is stored
• welcome screen designed to be simple and intuitive, featuring key experiences that groups do together: call, whiteboard, connect content

Services Overview

• Surface Hub features versions of Microsoft’s top productivity services like Skype for Business, OneNote, and Office that are optimized for groups and the large screen
• Services are integrated directly into the OS for seamless experience—for instance you can join a Skype for Business call directly from the welcome screen

Make meetings engaging and productive

With Surface Hub, Microsoft’s goal is to make meetings more engaging and productive.

Meeting pain points

• Meetings are often a frustrating, painful experience where not enough actually gets done—many people consider them the biggest waste of time in their work week
• Takes too long to start a meeting (12 mins on average)—time is wasted trying to get complex technology to work
• Flow of discussion is interrupted when someone tries to share content or bring in external data
• The first person to connect to the projector “drives” the whole meeting—harder for others to share content
• Ideas can be lost at the end of meeting—action items and content aren’t always shared with participants
• Remote experience is very frustrating—meaningful collaboration often requires travel in order to be there in person:
  • Audio/video quality is often poor—difficult to see and hear the room
  • Can’t automatically see content—need to ask “can you share your screen”
  • Any analog content such as Whiteboards can never be seen
  • Often forgotten—on many setups the remote participant isn’t visible on screen (hidden behind content)
  • When you can’t see participants or content, it’s easy to disengage from the conversation and start to multitask

Surface Hub meetings solution

• Surface Hub enables workers to walk up and instantly start a meeting–whether scheduled or ad hoc
• Scheduled meetings show up on the welcome screen
  • Surface Hub is bookable resource in Exchange, so device is automatically booked when you reserve the conference room
  • With a single tap, you can join the meeting—no need to log in or connect any equipment
• Microsoft are looking to improve the remote experience, so you can have a productive, engaging meeting without getting on an airplane:
  • AV experience designed to make meetings engaging:
    • Cameras are side mounted, with a wide field of view, so they capture the room and the person at the board
    • Onboard cameras are placed at eye level in order to allow in room participants to make eye contact with remote participants when talking
    • Mic array built on Kinect technology to detect speakers and eliminate background noise
  • Remote users have on-screen presence–not hidden behind content
  • Screen is automatically shared so remote users are seeing the same content, unlike most VTC sessions where they can’t see the whiteboard
  • Remote users will even be able to ink to be a part of the brainstorm
• Microsoft are making it easier to share content: wireless and wired connect so anyone can share content
  • Surface Hub connect experience is not the standard projector experience:
    • You can see remote attendees side by side with content
    • Multiple items side-by-side, so everyone can share ideas and content to help drive the discussion—without the disruption of disconnecting cables from one user to the next
  • Touchback allows you to control content from the Surface Hub, so you can lead a discussion from the front of the room rather than walking back and forth to advance slides
  • Inkback allows you to annotate on content, even though the content lives on your connected device—and when you disconnect, you can take the annotations with you
  • Great experience on wired and wireless
    • Wireless is enabled via Miracast—open standard supported by Windows and many Android devices
    • Wired supports many platforms and device types—Windows, Mac, iOS, Android
  • Walk away with confidence: when you click end session, content is sent to meeting attendees, and then wiped from the machine
    • Ensures that you don’t leave sensitive content in the room
    • Returns the device to its original state for next user so everyone has the same consistent experience

Best digital tools to create and brainstorm

Brainstorming pain points

• When people come together today to create and brainstorm, they often use simple analog tools like whiteboards, easel charts, and sticky notes to organize their thoughts
  • These tools are reliable and easy to walk up and use—that’s why they are so popular
• But these tools have limitations:
  • Hard to share the content with remote users
  • Hard to take ideas with you after you leave the room—people snap a photo of the whiteboard with their phone
  • Only way to have iterative brainstorms across multiple meetings is to permanently reserve the room and leave your ideas on the wall
• Digital tools have been created in the past to help solve these problems, but none of them have been as simple and intuitive to use as their analog counterparts

Surface Hub brainstorming solution

• Surface Hub provides the best tools for creating and brainstorming
• Easy to use—pick up the pen and the OneNote whiteboard automatically launches
• The ink is natural, fluid, and responsive—feels just like a pen on paper
  • And it’s smart—knows the difference between a pen and a finger
  • Virtually no latency– 120Hz display and pen/touch input, so your brain never perceives a lag
• More powerful than a traditional whiteboard:
  • Infinite canvas—scroll or pinch-zoom if you run out of space
  • Lasso lets you rearrange content as ideas evolve
  • You can clip content and insights from other apps and annotate it in the whiteboard
• Bring everyone into the collaboration:
  • Up to 3 people can write simultaneously, side-by-side
  • Remote participants can automatically see the whiteboard—and even add their own ideas—from the other side of the world
• Take your ideas with you:
  • You can save your whiteboard as a rich OneNote file and email it to meeting attendees so that your ideas don’t disappear when you leave the room

Platform for amazing large screen apps

• Surface Hub provides a platform to build amazing large-screen apps for group productivity
• Surface Hub is powered by Windows—it is a Windows 10 device
• You can run any Windows 10 Universal App natively from the Surface Hub, without authenticating or needing any other device in the room.
  • Universal Apps can run automatically without new coding needed.
• You can share any Windows application (including desktop apps) from your personal device to the Surface Hub
  • With touchback and inkback, anyone can walk up to the Surface Hub and control it.
• Comes with powerful, familiar Microsoft applications like Skype for Business, OneNote, PowerPoint, Word, and Excel
• Access to the hardware—with native support for touch, ink, and sensors—will also enable third party developers to develop beautiful, powerful, immersive applications
• Very excited to see the developer community design brand new experiences for groups to be productive together, that could only take place on this beautiful large screen

Integrates beautifully into the modern workplace

• Any room:
  • Surface Hub will transform the conference room, but ultimately it was designed to turn any room into a collaboration space.
  • Microsoft have different sizes and mounting options to fit a wide variety of rooms
  • Integrated design combined with rolling stands makes it mobile enough to move it from space to space, wherever people want to get things done together
    • Only need to plug in power and network and you’re up and running
  • Any user: Communal, walk-up and use design means that users don’t have to login to start using it, allowing it to sit in shared spaces
  • Designed to scale with your enterprise: A set of Surface Hubs across many offices can be centrally managed by IT, remotely customizing for the needs of the room and remotely deploying updates as needed
  • Connected Device: Surface Hub is designed to integrate with your existing conference room infrastructure, making it easier to deploy in a wide array of existing spaces.
    • Inputs like HDMI, Bluetooth, NFC, and USB, making it easy to connect it with the devices and peripherals that your business already uses