ClickShare to connect visitor laptops to meeting room monitors

Some firms are now using a device called ClickShare to connect laptops on wifi to audio/visual devices. This BYOM (Bring Your Own Meeting) technology works by inserting a small device called a 'button', into a laptop. It's a unified communications (UC) tool that combines different kinds of communication (voice, video, messaging) together.

So if one person is on a Zoom session in meeting room with a wifi network, and the ClickShare device is plugged into her laptop, they can access the meeting room monitor regardless of whether or not the a/v equipment in the room is configured for the same platform (Zoom, Teams, Skype) being used on the laptop.

The monitor and other a/v equipment in the conference room is connected to a base unit:

. . . which the 'buttons' plugged in the laptops synch with. The buttons will have to first be paired with the base units, which is accomplished by plugging them directly into the base units. It will be necessary to take some time to set up the base unit. It should be connected with a HDMI cable to the meeting room monitors, and it should also be connected with a network cable to the office's network.

When plugged into the laptop, after the button is clicked and shared on the meeting room's monitor, it should change from white to red.

Source Code and Object Code

When licensing software, it's helpful to keep in mind the difference between source code and object code. The developer's source code is an editable code which a programmer can modify. A license to use software will not give you access to the source code. This is proprietary information which the developer will want to protect. The source code will be translated into object code which is in a binary form that hardware can read, and then use to execute certain steps. A standard .exe executable file will contain object code. A programmer will often include notes in source to explain what each segment does. So, while a dev may compose code like the example shown on the left . . .

. . . .the object code will look like the ones and zeros on the right.

When making a major investment in software you may want to consider inquiring if the software owner will use an escrow service for the source code. You can gain access to the source code if the business you licensed the software from does not run necessary updates, or simply fails to provide the necessary support.

EDGAR Ban on Automated PDFing

Be careful when generating PDFs of company filings on the Securities Exchange Commission's EDGAR site. While all filings are publicly available without the need to have a registered account, the S.E.C. has measures which prevent the automatic collection of the filings of public companies.

Even if you attempt to create a PDF of a filing with an add-in tool in a browser, you may not get the PDF you thought you would.

Instead the resulting PDF will be a notice from the S.E.C. that the request to download the filing was made with a restricted automated tool.

While the FoxIt add-in for Chrome isn't really an automated tool (I was using it to generate a PDF one filing at a time) the EDGAR site determines that it is one.

Try writing the same filing to a PDF by going to File . . . Print instead.