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.
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Sennheiser ADAPT series
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Sennheiser's ADAPT series are mobile headsets for enterprises.
We had a conference room with a Radvision board that needed to be replaced. Our HQ is not fully Cisco but rather a mish mash of different products such as Rally bars, Poly, Radviison and Cisco. Putting Cisco into the conference room allowed us to have a single pane of glass for our needs.
Perfect for use in a noisy environment (i.e. an internet cafe/outside whilst walking) as the Active noise cancellation blocks out the noise from around you, allowing you to HEAR and crucially for far end to hear you. The base sound in the headset is particularly good for music with better capability than some more expensive dedicated music headsets (like BOSE). Battery life is exceptional and if you do end up running out, you can plug in the USB cable to your laptop and charge whilst using the headset which is super useful. Where you have BACK TO BACK meetings, long periods of use will mean you do get hot so this must be taken into consideration
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.
As these are over the ear/enclosed, they are very effective, but long periods of use can end up meaning you can get sweaty/uncomfortable. Difficult to improve on this situation other than to switch between using these and an external Epos desk speaker.
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.
A lot of the features are really easy. You can just click connect and you're in. But using all of these other integrations and all these other features that are there, it's kind of the blind leading the blind as to how we use it. So it's probably the downside of it.
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.
As a partner, I always used mainly Cisco products and offered them to my customers. I have personal experience with Avaya, Team and polycom but non of them provided me with the Premium feelings which Cisco does. Even the product quality and look of the product by itself gives you the premium experience. But I want to mention that Polycom has some features and easy setup which Cisco lacks sometimes. It is mainly 3rd party integration.
Jabra is one of our other main headset suppliers, and their Evolve and Speak range are regularly used within our organisation. Sennheiser ADAPT series comes down to personal choice from users, much like how there are iOS and Android users, but the Sennheiser ADAPT range (particularly in the case of the MB660) is one of the premium headsets that users have expressed an interest in for its overall capabilities.
The Cisco MTRoA solution has reduced the time it takes for our users to join their meeting and spend more time concentrating on business rather than the technology.
It simply works.
Ease of support.
We also appreciate the great support we get from intelligent folks in Cisco TAC organization.
For production/broadcast users, this compares favourably with dedicated music headsets but is more reasonably priced.
For staff on regular VC/AUDIO calls, this has been seen as a very capable premium headset that pays for itself in terms of build quality/audio quality and battery life.
