Teams enabled conference room system.

Copper Contributor

Hello everyone,

 

I'm looking to replace our current conference system with a Teams supported Conference room system. We have migrated from Skype for Business to Teams. I plan on setting our executive conference room that is fairly large in size. I'm considering going with the Polycom 8800. I definitely would appreciate any feed back before I make this commitment, since they do not provide demo units. I demo'd the Lenovo Thinksmart 500 HUB and wasn't too fond of it. I'm open to any other suggestions for other brands.  Thank you in advance for your feed back. 

 

My conference room has two 65" Samsung displays, so the unit must support dual displays. 

This conference endpoint should support SIP as well as being O365 certified. 

Preferably supports local content sharing (any vendor can come in and connect directly to the unit to share content from their laptop) in addition to content sharing with the Teams app. 

 

 

5 Replies
What did you end up deciding on @Vinh0128? I am in the same boat and undecided between Polycom Trio 880 + HP SRS and Yealink MVC 800. Our requirement is being able to use Zoom natively along with SfB and Teams.

@Vinh0128 

 

Any of the dual-screen enabled MTRS should do what you're after I'm just not too sure on the native support for Zoom mentioned by @Abhimanyu Singh.

 

Your bigger challenge is the overall functionality you are after for your Executive Conference Room.  If you already have AV room control, it gets messy having a 7" or 10" screen for room control and then another for the MTRS.   For example, you may be using AV room control for managing lights and blinds or for managing different content to different screens etc. 

 

Some features to consider whether your business needs them or not that don't come with MTRS … in the Exec or dual-screen rooms that I have been involved in fitting out, we want:

  • To ensure that we can send any source to any screen e.g. HDMI to the left screen & Mini-DisplayPort to the right screen, the TV to the left and wireless (Miracast/ClickShare) to the right or any combination thereof;
  • To be able to use a Room or Resident PC so that presenters can send the Primary PC content to the left screen and the Secondary (extended) the right screen
  • To be able to ingest HDMI, MDP, USB-C or wireless into a Teams presentation
  • Decent sound pickup - depending on the size of your Exec conference room, the soundbars may not provide a good enough mic pickup so you may want to put a ceiling mic array in
  • BYOD devices to access the USB peripherals in the room to allow them to join Zoom, BlueJeans and other 3rd-party meeting requests as video interop is not supported by Teams

These, and many other, considerations need to be taken into account as to whether a native MTRS is suitable for your room fit out and which one to purchase.  

 

I have found that if you want to have the type of flexibility mentioned, especially around room control in the larger rooms (and rooms where you want to deliver more functionality to the end users) that the Crestron Flex is more suitable as it provides access to AV room control from the Teams touch panel.  The Logitech TAP is also working with Extron so would expect that they will have similar functionality.  Not too sure about Yealink.

 

regards

 

Did you make a decision @Abhimanyu Singh 

We don't have the same requirements, but I am undecided on the MVC800 and the Logitech Tap (large room).  I *think* the Logitech Rally camera is the better camera, but the cabling options (table hub, display hub etc) might be a bit messy.  Also the TAP controller appears to be more robust than the 8" M-Touch supplied by Yealink.  Does anyone have any real word experience of either devices?

Am still undecided @Paul Mitchell . Unfortunately, any of the certified MTR systems are not yet commercially available in India!

 

As rightly pointed out by @Lucas Hough-Neilson, our main look-outs are:

 

1. AV pass-through either by way of HDMI ingest or USB so that users can easily plug-in their devices to the room and use that for third-party services and/or in-room meeting content projection effortlessly. Yealink, Crestron, and Logitech sound good on that front. Polycom Trio doesn't allow that.

2. No cable mess. Yealink sounds promising on that front. For the rest, cabling is a mess.

3. Multiple registrations so that it is one-touch meeting join for users. Polycom Trio with Visual+ sounds good as the only one capable of multi-registration. Rest do not offer native multi-registration. But, from what I have read here and my conversation with Ilya, Trio/Visual+ combo is not certified nor supported and is known to have problems with SfBO. So something with AV-pass-through would be the next best choice. 

 

Our management is not ready to wait, so maybe we'll go with Trio/Visual+ as of now and later on add HP-SRS to the mix to enable native MTR when it gets launched in India.

 

Still trying to wrap my heads around it :(

 

@Vinh0128 just wondering if anyone had any updates?  I am going to try Teams Rooms and just now learning about how to get AV passthrough for joining other services.  I don't necessarily need to connect to another room system, but It would be very cool if we could still join our room to Zoom/GoToMeeting/Webex and share our video/audio when needed.  I just found the below article that mentions the logitech Smartdock Flex has a USB cord that you can connect to a laptop in order to use the room's camera and audio.  https://blog.logitech.com/2018/02/05/smartdock-is-now-better-than-ever/

This would work fine for us, but I was really hoping to use a vendor that had a wireless Mic option, like the Yealink MVC500.  How do I find out if other hardware has the same feature?  Is Logitech the only one to have the AV passthrough option?