The Polycom RealPresence Group Series is a video conferencing codec that connects to a standards-based video conferencing infrastructure to allow users to make video conference calls. There are three products in the series – RealPresence Group 300, RealPresence Group 500, and RealPresence Group 700. It is certified to use with Office 365 and Skype for Business.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
