A conference room is a specially equipped room for various corporate events: negotiations, conferences, trainings, seminars, and festive events.

Conference rooms are usually used for:

  • Holding a classic (voice) meeting, a meeting followed by an exchange of views;
  • holding a meeting, the meeting with the viewing of video materials;
  • speaker’s speech with the presentation and video clips;
  • holding a meeting in a conference room with registration and electronic voting;
  • holding events using remote audio and video conferencing (videoconferencing).

What are multifunctional conference rooms?
As a rule, this is the name of the halls when it is difficult to identify one of the predominant tasks that the equipment of this conference hall performs. Such conference rooms can be used both for ordinary voice meetings, and for listening to a speaker with simultaneous viewing of video materials, and for organizing video conferences, and even for watching movies, like in a regular movie theater.

What is the optimal number of seats in a conference room?
There is no universal figure. It all depends on the size of the room, the financial capacity of the customer, as well as the functionality of the future conference hall.
Based on our long-term experience of engineering solutions and integration we can say this: the cost of equipping of a conference hall depends not only and not so much on its size but on the level of its flexibility and automation: the more functional a hall is the more equipment is installed there and accordingly the sum of expenses is higher.

What are the schemes of arranging the audience in the conference room?
There are a lot of variants of placement of participants and audience in conference halls, but all of them are special cases of five main variants: T-shaped placement, round table, conference table, school classroom and theater.
Let’s look at each of them.

T-shaped seating.
The leader (event host) is at the head of the table and leads the brainstorming session, taking turns listening to reports from subordinates or speaking himself.

Round table
The most appropriate option for “peer-to-peer” negotiations. In this layout option, the emphasis is on the discussion component, as all participants can constantly be in the focus of each other’s attention. The table does not necessarily have to be round, it can be composite – in the form of a square or rectangle.

A negotiation table
This method of placement is similar to a T-shape in many ways, but nevertheless it has a number of features which distinguish it as a separate type of a conference room organization.
This variant is well-proven in meeting rooms of the largest companies from all over the world. It combines the convenience of communication between the participants and work with visual materials: the long elongated table allows placing video panels on both sides of the table or even fixing them to the ceiling and dividing the meeting room in two.

Schoolroom
This layout is suitable when it is necessary to deliver the material by one or several presenters for an average number of listeners – for example, when conducting training sessions, briefings, lectures, trainings or press-conferences.

Theater (or classic conference format)
If a big number of listeners is expected during the presentation, this way of seating is the most appropriate: not having tables and other furniture, additional space is freed up, and chairs of participants are placed one behind another in rows, what lets everybody see and hear the speakers.

What systems should be obligatory in a conference room?
A negotiation room becomes a conference hall if it is equipped with:

an information display system;
sound system;

If at least one of these systems is absent, it is not a conference hall, but a simple conference room again.

More and more often to the above systems is added a system for controlling the equipment of the hall.

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