A boardroom is named for the room where an organization's board of directors meets. A boardroom is often called a conference room or meeting room. Company boardrooms are usually used for many different types of meetings and training purposes.
In large corporations, a boardroom may be large with large windows and a view. In smaller companies, a small boardroom may not even have windows. Some companies have more than one boardroom and require the rooms to be reserved by staff in advance.
All boardrooms have a conference table and chairs. Small boardrooms may only seat six, while larger boardrooms may seat fourteen or more. Boardroom chairs may be covered in leather or upholstery material and are not usually bare wood or bare metal, even in smaller boardrooms. Conference tables may be any shape such as round or square in smaller boardrooms and rectangular or oval in larger boardrooms. A boardroom table may also be u-shaped or be built with a split section to allow for training equipment and/or video conferencing equipment.
Video conferencing equipment allows people that aren't physically present to participate in the boardroom meeting via computer. Boardrooms often have storage cabinets to store different types of audio-visual equipment when the equipment is not in use. Fancier boardrooms have high quality wood cabinets that look like furniture more than storage units. Most boardrooms also have a coffee cart, air-conditioning and Internet access ports.
A boardroom may have projection equipment installed in the ceiling. The equipment can often be lowered during presentations and raised out of sight the rest of the time. Microphones may be placed in the ceilings of larger boardrooms so that speakers don't have to raise their voices in order to be heard by everyone in the room.
Most boardrooms have some form of white board, or dry erase board. Fancier boardrooms may have camera-controlled interactive white boards. This equipment allows anyone in the boardroom to write on a screen with a camera in it and have his or her notes transferred to the white board in the room. A document can also be placed on the screen to be transferred to the white board so that everyone in the meeting can see the document.