Polycom RealPresence Trio 8800

[James Stewart]

I'm looking at using the Polycom RealPresence Trio 8800 as a replacement for some of our smaller conference rooms. We are currently using a combined traditional conference phone with a Surface tablet with SfB connected for video and chat. It is messy and people cling to their dialtone devices.

The goal would be to eliminate the surface tablet and phone for the RealPresence Trio 8800.

Is anyone using these who would be willing to share their experience?

[#2]

We have one installed with the 2 remote mic pods.  The sound quality is phenominal. When first installed about a month ago people loved it. 

We may need to change the way we use it because we have been experiencing very long sign in times.  Sometimes it takes more than 3 minutes to sign into Skype.  I have read some arcticles saying it could be DNS config issues that cause this but I have not done more analysis on the delayed sign in yet.  We could eliminate the sign in completly by assigning a user license to the phone and leaving it signed in.

  I have trained users to use the web interface to sign in because the touch screen keyboard is very small and you have to put your username in 2 times and then enter the password.  It is very difficult to sign in accurately using the touchscreen.

[#3]

Forrest, while sign-in times should be short than that the inteded use case for the Trio is not for it to be constantly signed in and out of during the work day.  Normally the setup and provisioning is handled by IT and would be registered using a dedicated conference room account (either a standard SfB user or a MeetingRoom type can be used) and users should be including the room on meeting requests in Outlook.  This is the same workflow as the CX3000 or LRS or any other number of current and upcoming SfB meeting room solutions.

If someone is going to be working in the conference room for extended periods of time then they can leverage the standard USB port to use the Trio as their SfB audio device, just like any other supported USB speakerphone.  This retains the phone's own registered identity but also allows it to be used as the audio device for a Windows SfB user.

[#4]

James, the Trio was designed for exactly that.  A smaller, simpler footprint in the conference room focused on common tasks like joining an SfB meetings with one touch, sharing content to a screen or adding video to SfB meetings and calls when appropriate.  The Visual+ companion module lets you easily add content/video capabilities to the base audio conferencing phone in the desired rooms.

[#5]

Jeff and Forrest, thanks for the feedback.  Quick question, for PSTN dialing using SfB (we have numbers assigned), does the Trio provide a dial pad option when we are not hosting a SfB meeting but rather simply dialing into another conference bridge, (a client, funder, etc).  I envisioned setting this up as a dedicated room account that is added to the meetings but also need to dial into other third party bridges.

[#6]

I really want to like the Trio, but my experience with it has been hit and miss. Sound is definitely fantastic. I like that it's very configurable (although it needs better documentation, there are things like removing the sign-off button that weren't in the docs). I didn't get the long sign in times, but if you're going to use it in a conference room, and if your organizational policy allows it, why not leave it signed in as the conference room account? Then you wouldn't have that issue. Getting the Trio and Visual+ pairing every time on the same network, even the same switch, without breaking was challenging. It doesn't consume uploaded PowerPoint presentations. Video tiling isn't the same experience as a Skype client.

[#7]

James, yes you can select your desired actions right from the home screen.  So either "Place a Call" which brings up a standard dial pad, "Calendar" which you can use to locate and join SfB meetings, or even "Meet Now" which functions just like the Meet Now action in the SfB client to start andimmediate ad-hoc meeting and then select intended participants from contacts and the SfB address book.  You can also go right ot the contacts screen to place peer SfB calls, view recent calls, etc.

[#8]

We (Microsoft and myself) could never figure out how to get a Skype license assigned and working for anything other than a standard user when using Office 365 E1,3.  According to the documentation I read the Calendar (sharing and delegation) and Conferencing and PSTN calling only works for full user license on 365.  On-Premise can be configured for Meeting Room but not the SfB Online.  I heard there is some work going on to allow Meeting Room to have a Skype license but when we tried it never worked.  That being said, I am leaning toward assigning a standard user license for Skype for Business with Conferencing and PSTN calling and then making a group of many users delgates to the Trio user so they can plan meetings.

[#9]

hi,

we are testing those phones right now, setup with just the phone, and collaboration kit. (conf phone + camera+ Visual+ puck?)

anyway, audio quality is excellent. (comapred to our old polycom cx3000 which were fine to me,) i think Trio's support all s4b audio codecs..

- very easy to use; 1 click conf join from calendar option is there.

- phone interface itself is very responsive.

- i didnt have issues with long sign in.

if your going to get the Visual+ Camera

- video quality is very good.

- desktop sharing - were looking into this right now, but so far , this just doesnt work very well. low frames, it looks like it has issues with devices sharing desktop with resolution higher than 1080p.

- it only displays 1 feed to the monitor, so if you start a video call, and a desktop sharing session, then you only see desktop, no video.

[#10]

I liked it so far, worth of investiment. But few things i can re-call now is, CAC on-prem needs to be modified if our bandwidth session set to very minimum, and other issue or caveat at this time is Content Sharing, you need to be in a Skype to share the content not in room content sharing. 

[#11]

Logitech has a "Smart Dock" that uses a Surface Pro I want to check out an compare with.  Because we've already purchased a couple Logitech video conference units, this option may work better as we can keep the existing hardware in place.  I'll be looking forward to testing the SmartDock  to see how it delivers on usability for our users. Logitech SmartDock

[#12]

Any good document sources for initial configuration?

[#13]

Give this one a try - 

http://support.polycom.com/global/documents/support/setup_maintenance/products/voice/rp_trio_ag.pdf 

[#14]

Hi,

I agree with David - "I really want to like the Trio", but when we tried it some 8 months ago, during my previous employment it was far from complete. We were testing with software version 5.4.1.17597 so maybe some issues are corrected in never revisions? As a phone when it comes to voice and the design and price tag, the Trio is very good, but the issues we ran into were:

1. Picture-in-picture. While running a video meeting we got the active speaker displayed fullscreen, but we could not see our own picture being broadcasted. We heard this should be fixed in a future release - anyone knows?

2. Slow swapping of active speaker. Since the Trio is only displaying the active speaker we felt it took too long time for the video feed to change as a new speaker became "active". In some cases we had to talk for around 20-25 seconds before the video feed changed. It does not seem to be a setting in Lync or the Trio to make this switching more responsive / faster. (Since regular desktop clients have the gallery view this is not an issue for them.)

3. Video resolution. Trio to trio calls were great running in 1080p, but as soon as a client using VGA only the Trio started to send VGA only to all connected users. So as soon as one desktop user were in a meeting the experience was not nice.

4. Documentation. We had issues with the addressbook search, loading of root certificates and the login process which is really the Lync 2010 way of doing things. These features were not very well documented. We could not get the DHCP option 43 override to work which had been nice in our Cisco DHCP environment, but we heard others managed to make it work.

5. We could not get the Trio to play nice with a hosted Acano system, video was one-way only, and we could not resolve it after contacting both Acano and Polycom support.

With this said I still think the Trio can be a good device for some scenarios, but make sure you review and test it technically.

/mk

[#15]

Regarding the Trio 8800 and Acano.
Acano have fixed the issue with video just being presented on the Trio device and not the other way around.
This is fixed in version 2.0 and later.
/M

[#16]

My view on the Trio has changed dramatically now that I've taken Visual+ out of the equation. I read recently that Visual+ isn't Skype certified, and with the imminent release of the new Skype Room Systems, the decision is farily easy for me. In fact, I'm hoping to position it as our conference phone of choice for rooms that don't require any kind of visual interaction.

[#17]

Didn't know until now, on the solution catalog only the Trio is listed.
http://partnersolutions.skypeforbusiness.com/solutionscatalog/cloud-ip-phones/polycom-realpresence-t...

[#18]

I finally broke down and purchased one of these and after spending a few hours trying to get it updated and will say that this is not an easy connection to S4B... it should simply login with credentials and it doesn't.  I sense an RMA in the next 24 hours if it won't connect.  It just isn't worth my time trying to make something work at this price point.

[#19]

Smartdock or Trio ? We installed 5 SmartDocks a couple of weeks ago and the user feedback has been great. We had no great issues getting the Surface Pro's built and the accounts configured, but you do need to do it all correctly, like the SurfaceHub.

[#20]

I purchased the Trio and will attempt to get it connected to S4B again today.  If that works, we'll test it out for disconnects and user adoption.  Executives need to be able to simply start a meeting or dial out on this device without the need for technical support.