A meeting room built the traditional way is four or five separate purchases - a display, a
camera, a microphone array, a speaker, and a PC to run the software - each with its own cable,
its own power and its own firmware. It works, and the reason it so often does not is that
nothing in it was designed with the others in mind. Cables get unplugged, the camera and the
microphone disagree about where the room is, and someone has to know which input the display
should be on.
An all-in-one collaboration display collapses that into one object. The MeetingBoard MB86 is
an 86 inch panel with the camera, microphones, speakers and the conferencing software built in,
so the room has one device on the wall, one power lead and one network connection. Yealink rate
this size for medium and large rooms with a capacity of twelve to twenty people.
What arrives is worth knowing, because it is more complete than most: the MB86-A001 kit
comprises the 86 inch display, its power adapter, a wall-mount bracket, cables, and four stylus
pens, with a two-year hardware warranty. The wall bracket being included matters - on a panel
this size the mount is not a trivial accessory, and having the manufacturer's own removes a
compatibility question.
The four stylus pens point at the other half of what this device is for. It is a touch
display as well as a conferencing endpoint, so it works as a whiteboard: people in the room
write on it, and remote participants see and contribute to the same surface. Four pens means
several people can work on it at once, which is the difference between a whiteboard feature and
a whiteboard.
The optics are the one place an all-in-one has a real limitation, and Yealink address it with
an option. The built-in camera is fixed and wide, which is right for a room where everyone sits
within a few metres. In a large room the far end of the table is small in frame, so the
MB-Camera-12X extended PTZ camera module adds a 12x optical zoom PTZ camera to the same display.
On a room at the upper end of the twelve-to-twenty range, that module is usually what makes the
system usable rather than merely working - and it is easier to specify at the outset than to add
later.
Yealink publish these as room designs rather than parts lists, with the service provider
named, so a Microsoft Teams room and a Zoom room are configured explicitly rather than assumed.
Which platform the room is being built for is the first question, since it determines the
software build and the licensing.
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