The Cisco Board Series offers room devices for hybrid teamwork. Its latest generation models, the Board Pro 55 and Board Pro 75, bring video conferencing and co-creation to small and medium-sized workspaces, conference rooms, and ideation spaces. These room devices feature an AI-powered chipset, a responsive, 55- or 75-inch touch screen, speaker-tracking dual cameras, built-in speakers and microphones, and a versatile set of mounting and peripheral options. Users can join any video meeting,…
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Cisco Room Series
Score 8.8 out of 10
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The Cisco Room Series is a video conferencing solution that wakes up when users walk into a meeting room where it is installed and provides theater-quality voice and video, as well as content sharing from personal devices. For small to medium rooms with 6-8 people, there's Cisco Room 55, and for larger rooms of 7-14 people there's Cisco Room Kit (camera and codec in one device) and Cisco Kit Plus (separate codec plus and quad camera). Any of these systems can be run in the cloud or on-premises.
It is best suited for video\audio calls and meeting use. you can easily connect to the meeting with an ID or your laptop and also share content easily in a couple of ways. It's less useful for large-scale meetings as attendees seem to get lost as their video can get shrunk or hidden offscreen.
Its a fantastic software and hardware. However from time to time as tech improves, these may require a facelift. Maybe a subscription based model could work better so that it can be used widely instead of purchasing it at a full price. It may not be easily customizable for smaller businesses. It is very useful for large scale organizations that are spread out and need live meetings with a better video support.
Cisco Room kits, it's a video conferencing system, so it has the, compared to the old systems where you use a webcam in a conference room, we don't see the person, the participants in the room. So with the installation of this kind of devices, it has a speaker fracking. So you can see the person, it clearly captures the speaker, whoever. So let's say that are 15, 20, people are sitting in a room if someone is speaking among them. So this camera is actually focused that person, so we can see that person. And it just shifts from one person to other based on the speaker and the webcam. If you're going back in the old days, like a webcam, using a webcam, it just gives an overview of the room. If someone is speaking, you don't know who is speaking unless you know the voice. So this is much greater. And you have so many other features like digital signage, you can display signage on the, so there's a lot of other features out there. So those are cool features I would say.
Perhaps any downside I might see is not necessarily with this product, it's more interoperability with other products. And I think these are all roadmap items that are being addressed. For instance, when you're in a Cisco meeting, it's not as feature rich as it might be as if you joined from a computer. However, as I said, these seem to be roadmap items which are coming along soon. Things like integration with the text or chat rather in a meeting, and also whiteboard integration.
By leveraging the features of the Cisco Board, sales teams can deliver more engaging, interactive, and impactful presentations to clients, whether in-person or remotely, potentially leading to improved client relationships and increased sales effectiveness. We can easily train internal employees across multiple offices without the need to have them come into one site for training
By the time we are up for an upgrade, this particular series of products might not even been in the market. The typical product cycle for such products in the market are about 5 years. More importantly, the codec supported by such devices may also change by the time we are up for an upgrade. Even so, getting this system to a level of functionality we require was a frustrating ordeal that I do not look forward to during the next cycle.
Cisco Webex Board Series has great UI. It's very compelling to use. Touch controls are great and have never had any trouble navigating. However, screen mirroring can be laggy sometimes and frame drops are seen quite often while mirroring. Overall it's a great device to use with many useful features and optimized UI.
With the recent updates to Microsoft Teams interoperability, commitments to enabling more features over WebRTC for better Zoom and Google Meet interoperability, and the enablement of USB Passthrough mode on select models there isn't really any situation where you can't use a Webex Room Kit. Paired with the Touch 10 control panel and the Webex App, the device is also incredibly easy to use.
It's honestly hard to tell since we haven't had many hiccups, if any at all! We have used Webex support for other situations and it was great, but for the board itself, we only had one issue, when we received it, a pixel was broken and Webex replaced it. Fair to say they lived up to our expectations.
Cisco has always stood out for the excellent support and documentation on its products, this is one of the reasons why they are so well positioned. The means by which you can create a case and the response times are very good. I especially like the support through the Webex teams.
Comparing the interactive displays from Avacor, GoTo Meeting, and Zoom Workplace, it is possible to note that Cisco Board Series is equipped with AI and has the integration opportunities. Although many other displays provide touch capabilities similar to those of the Cisco Board Series Pro, this one has the NVIDIA AI chipset and the two camera setup for attendees. Other factors that informed the adoption of the product include this regarding the ability to link with other meeting solutions as well as the integrated sensors for environmental monitoring.
Cisco has and is the only vendor currently doing native MTR integration within the video collaboration space. No other vendor stacks up against Cisco as you are getting all of the value that Cisco provides such as noise cancellation, cinematic meetings, cross view, intelligent framing. The other competitors don't stack up to Cisco from a reliability standpoint and a compatibility standpoint.
Not sure about ROI because I get a lot of the, I suppose, investor's side of it all, but we have it integrated with just about everyone in the business as well as having devices everywhere. So to be able to just press a button and ring somebody, it's almost invaluable.
