Microsoft has just announced the Microsoft Surface Hub, a new device designed to replace your white board with a fully interactive and touch enabled screen. Powered by Windows 10, the device will be an 84 inch 4K display with built in touch support and a high performance screen.
PPI_4
The Surface Hub leverages Microsoft’s investments in collaboration technology with built in OneNote, Skype, and connectivity driven through WiFi. Offices have had video conferencing and interactive white boards for many years, but have typically required expensive proprietary networks and hardware to make them work effectively.
It will be interesting to see the performance of the video in particular. Lync running over Internet is somewhat variable performance running as a postage stamp video on my laptop – I wonder how an 84 inch 4K video stream will perform without dedicated networks between locations.
The coolest part of the device is that it is developer friendly – Microsoft has created a new surface to build applications. These applications could be specifically designed for the Surface Hub or be universal apps that scale up and down from deployment on your cell phone all the way up to a Surface Hub screen size.
For those of us building SharePoint sites, applications and apps this also creates some new possibilities for deploying team collaboration portals that can be leveraged in a team collaboration context.
