One of the necessary evils of doing work for corporate clients is that you often have to have in addition to all your own equipment a client’s laptop or PC. This is for obvious security reasons and is just how corporations work, but that does mean that often what is bought out of convenience for the corporation is not best of breed, and in fact, sometimes awful or missing entirely, headsets and decent keyboards are two of the most obvious examples.
Thankfully, while most corporations obviously ban you from installing your own software on their laptops, they have no objection to USB keyboards or the like. This is where programmable media keyboards come in.
Dedicated media keyboards are very useful. Particularly functions like “mic. toggle” and “camera toggle”. but I would not advise you use ones that have dedicated buttons that don’t need drivers, I’ve never had any luck with them as they are either very generic in the functions they trigger or don’t cater to the many different types of conference kit you might use {{,Microsoft teams, Slack etc etc}}.
So it’s much better to have your own programmable one that you can adjust to any need, but most of the time you are limited by the inability to load the driver software. However, good makes such as Vaydeer get around this. You actually flash the keyboard with the functions you want to use using your own computer, they’re stored permanently on the keyboard and then you can plug them in elsewhere driver free. This means that you can build up exactly what you want the keyboard to do. configure it and set it up on your laptop. Then, disconnect it, plug it straight in to your clients laptop simply as a standard keyboard which works on 99% of them.
As you can see on the above screen shot I have flashed the 2 left buttons on this keyboard with macros that work for Microsoft teams, and they work perfectly, you can also just swap keycaps for media ones, the two on this keyboard were stolen from a cheap dedicated one that didn’t work before I figured this solution out. Obviously, you can do sticky labels or what have you, for any kind of keycaps.