GlobalMeet Collaboration (discontinued) vs. Polycom RealPresence Group Series

I would recommend the service to anyone who is in need of consistent, clear, and professional audio conferencing. I think PGi and GlobalMeet are clearly one of the leaders in the space. The only knock against the services are that they can be expensive long-term contracts where you're more likely to pay for more than you use. I believe smaller organizations or those with less of a need for audio conferencing may benefit by a pay-as-you-go plan which in my experience PGi has not offered.

While expensive, you can't compare the cost and time of people flying all over the globe to have in-person meetings when 95% of the time they can be done between a RealPresense.... even more so in today's post-pandemic world. You just get such a better video and audio experience than a Teams meeting. We were also able to connect our RealPresence to Teams so that you can join a meeting and choose whether to join it from your desk with Teams or from a conference room with a Real Presence. This solved 2 issues for us in that there's now a simple link on the Real Presence to join a meeting instead of making a direct phone call to another RP device, and for meetings with 1 or 2 people from a site, they can now join this meeting from their desk and free up the conference room for a large meeting.

Incentivized

• Setting up the meetings only takes a few seconds. I value this function.
• Global set works in conjunction with Microsoft office. This makes integration very simple.
• The system is user friendly and easy to understand...even for those without a lot of experience.

Incentivized

• Polycom are still a high-end videoconferencing manufacturer and it shows. The build quality is very high, with quality components provided. In the current environment where 'huddle-room' systems are taking over and are a mix of solutions from multiple manufacturers, you can tell the difference when you open the box and get dedicated hardware that is designed to work as a single package.
• The audio quality is very good. May sound like an odd thing to consider audio quality before video quality, but if the sound is poor, it doesn't matter how good the video is - you wont stay in the meeting.
• Great video from the dedicated cameras. The image quality is high and the camera is silent when it moves to presets.

Incentivized

• As I mentioned before, it is not as convenient to use when sharing data as Teams so we tend to use Teams for sharing presentations.
• On occasion, there is an echo which makes it hard to hear others.
• I have noticed that when I use my computer as the device rather than my phone, it tends to drop more often than my phone (may be my internet connection).

Incentivized

• Install was a bit fast with a tech that was not the best, this lead to a round of support issues, fixes, and training.
• Much of the internal learning was on our own with trial and error, and the Outlook integration was not really 100% (abandoned that as users could not understand and remember the shortcomings when meetings changed. Moved to reservation-less.
• Stability was better after a major upgrade(only 1 year old) and a better Polycom tech.

Incentivized

GlobalMeet is not a very good tool. There are better web meeting platforms available in the marketplace. The system is clunky, not intuitive, and experiences often technical issues. They have made updates recently but it is too little too late. It may be a good platform for smaller organizations with tighter budgets.

Incentivized

We love the product and is totally integrated in our company.

Incentivized

Interface is fairly intuitive. Ease of use is a big plus. Both presenters and users find it easy to learn, easy to understand and easy to remember. We've had very few issues with the system since beginning to utilize it.

Incentivized

The directory is slightly dated and unless you have a Skype for Business integration license, dialing users into a call is difficult. The Group Series Remote whilst minimalistic is actually more difficult to use than the previous HDX remote. Having to recharge the battery on the group series remote is both annoying and difficult as if you do not keep on top of it, you will be faced with a situation where the remote is not working and then have to try and find another one. Not ideal if you need to start a video call (assuming auto join has not been enabled in the admin portal).

Incentivized

We have never had an issue with the availability of GlobalMeet. It has always been available when we needed it.

Incentivized

For the most part GlobalMeet loaded everything quickly. The only problem that we had was when the whole company was on a training at one time, we had a hard time with screen sharing and the pages loading in a timely manner. Everything seemed to slow down when lots of people were on the system at once

Incentivized

As previously mentioned, I was in charge of facilitating a weekly meeting with 60 attendees. I had major issues with the screenshare crashing repeatedly during the meeting. I got in contact with a GlobalMeet Technician immediately. He was extremely responsive and worked with my technician to resolve all of the issues quickly. After his intervention, I never had the same issue again.

Incentivized

I can't say I've needed support more than a handful of times. One was for trying to connect a Polycom Conference phone and a Real Presence together. After a few months, we came to the conclusion it wasn't possible, that was the only frustrating occurance with support. Any other time if we needed to RMA a device, it was very smooth.

Incentivized

GlobalMeet was easy to get set up with the company and starting to use.

Incentivized

Our small non-profit organization appreciates the ease of use of the platform for conference call needs. Other platforms can be much more complicated for users unfamiliar with conference call technology. We use it several times a month for committee meetings, regional rep check ins, and meetings with our board of directors.

Incentivized

Polycom Group Series was very good for what it used to do for its time, however newer technology that provides a more simpler method to configure, join and host video conference meetings has come in the form of Zoom and [Microsoft] Teams which is hard to go back from and therefore means the Polycom codecs of yesteryear are rapidly becoming phased out. The Polycom Trio is a more forward thinking technology which can be configured for the likes of Teams, Zoom and Zoom Phone and with the Poly Studio X range of codecs, this is ultimately the way forward.

Incentivized

This product seems to be able to handle the growing amount of work within our company without any problems.

Incentivized

• The price for webinar for GlobalMeet is quite pricey compared to other similar vendors.
• GlobalMeet can be used for unlimited free calls and video conferencing, hence in our company with extensive global calls this platform is very cost-effective.
• Unlike most conferencing software. Other users don't have to download GlobalMeet App and therefore it is easy to send meeting invite to clients.
• Attentively support system that responds fast to queries and this saves time for us.

Incentivized

• We have been able to increase productivity by spending less time navigating through a phone directory to call someone, and to find out if and when they are available.
• We can determine if someone is available through the notifications on the phone screen itself or use the instant messaging function, which are both linked to our Outlook calendars.
• We are able to more quickly connect our students to resources and other professionals on campus by being able to anticipate who is available to meet with them or speak with them over the phone, before even having to make a call.

Incentivized