Conference room badassery

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

I am more a hardware guy and know less about the software.

I have used a lot of Polycom equipment over the years. I know that their software can do what you ask though.

Here is a link to the products you would use -Telepresence Room - Polycom RealPresence Room Solutions | Polycom, Inc.

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Polycom is what you want. They are pretty much a market leader in this area.

Friday_sl said:

RR,

My President came to me with a new project. He wants a bad ass 60-70" TV mounted in the conference room of his new office with a camera so he can videoconference with other people (some within our company, some without). We have offices in several states.

He was pretty specific. He wants to see himself on the TV and the person / People he's talking to under his image. This occupies half of the TV. The other half would be dedicated to presentation material he can read and the other people/person can read along with.

The setup could laptop based through an hdmi cable, or a total conference solution.

I have an idea of what I want but I wanted to see if anyone wanted to chime in on this. He's willing to spend the money on a nice system and I'd like to present something to him before the end of Feburary. If successful we could roll it out multiple times to several offices. As it stands we do NOT do video conferencing well. We mainly rely on telephone conference calls and gotomeeting.

Does anyone use something really cool? Whether it's gotomeeting, Skype, whatever?

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Our courthouse has a multipoint video conference in place that ran about 9k. Ill pull the specs on it hopefully in the morning.

I work for Polycom, but not in sales. I'm trying to figure out off the top of my head what could do that. Probably one of our codec only products that comes with the camera but no screen so you can use your own (the mark up on the samsung or sharp panels is hilarious). Or maybe one of our newer software solutions that I don't have much experience with.

This was just announced today, and sounds like exactly what you're looking for. Up to like 80" 4k resolution touchscreen, fully integrated with Skype for business yadda yadda:


Microsoft reveals the 'Surface Hub,' an 84-inch 4K all-in-one

We do something similar with the company I work for, the TV itself won't display the webcam images but we use adobe conference rooms (flash based) where whomever in them can chose to share their webcam if they wish. The layouts are 100% custom so you can arrange them however you want, and its an easy thing to setup/run from a laptop.

^ That tv looks pretty nice though.

We use Cisco cameras/codecs for all our offices along with a document camera. Better then the Polycom stuff imho. If you are looking or a hassle free solution (no computer required) that just uses what looks like a TV remote to work, then a Cisco/Polycom solution is the way to go.

The problem with going for a Skype based solution, or a solution that involves a PC, is that you will constantly have fire drills where the user isn't able to connect because of some driver/pc/audio issue, or more likely the end user being a computer idiot that doesn't realize the audio is on mute or someone unplugged the network cable.

If it's for your business, you want something idiot proof that doesn't require constant IT intervention. This is particularly important for remote offices where you may not have an IT person.

Go for a stand alone Cisco or Polycom solution that does NOT require a PC to function. When one of our users wants to make a video call, he literally presses power on the remote, and then selects which office he wants to connect to from an on-screen list, then it connects automatically. Aim for that type of experience if you want to keep your users happy and avoid frustrating support calls.

It is very possible, indeed probable, to completely fuck up a Polycom implementation however. A few years ago the company I worked for at the time decided they wanted to ride out the financial crisis by going for smart conference rooms all over and emphasize telepresence... I'm not exactly sure whose fuckup it was, but the bottom line was that each room had a radically different mechanism to turn the whole system on, a network that was down more than it was up, and zero attention paid to mic placement / sound proofing the rooms themselves resulting in a chorus of "What?!?" which then proceeded to feedback echo through the system most of the time anyone spoke who didn't have a throat mic welded to them.

As a result no one ever used the damn things and because you could only use those rooms now if you needed them for a teleconference we ended up effectively losing a bunch of conference rooms. Regarding Polycom's dominance in this area I've always been mystified by that because I've often felt the quality of the product was extremely poor as compared to a bunch of people talking over Skype or Vent or almost any other VOIP technology.