MS's previous enterprise offering in this space was the SMART Room System for Lync. It worked really well...as long as your collaborators were also on Lync. No standards based video conference connectivity, and good luck if you tried to use the system for an external collaboration/training/demo (pick your flavor of WebEx, Google Hangouts, etc.). With Lync being absorbed into Skype for Business I hope they will approach these new offerings with less of a silo type mentality. The tight integration with a Surface looks great, but what happens when someone brings in an iPad?

I don't know about the newer smart boards but the old ones sucked hard. This windows surface device seems like it will be using an actual digitizer and it wont be using a projector.

Smart boards are nice but they're not collaborative right? That's the killer app with this.