Category Archives: Product Review

Introducing the Plantronics Voyager Focus UC

15 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Product Review, Product Review

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Voyager Focus UCPlantronics have done a great job in creating anticipation for the Voyager Focus UC. I have been waiting to get my hands on this little beauty for almost 3 months.

First impression is that its Voyager Legend UC meets Blackwire 720.

Handling the unit I niticed how it looks and feels like a quality product. No cutting corners to save a few dollars on inferior plastic etc. On closer investigation I was very pleasantly surprised by all the additional innovations that have been included.

My Favourite Features include:-

  1. Left and Right sensed based on direction of the boomSkype for Business Bluetooth headset
  2. Active Noise Cancelling (ANC)
  3. Incredible battery life, I had almost 2 full days – and I listen to music 95% of the day
  4. USB Pairing to my mobile phone, PC and tablet simultaneously without any issues.
  5. Presence updated to In a Call when I am on a mobile call (Yaya!) – not new but very useful
  6. Love the music control buttons (Track Backward\Track Forward\Play\Pause)
  7. Rotating Wheel for volume control
  8. Great sound quality
  9. Mute On\Off when you take off\put on the headset (thank you active sensors), and a notification toast (mute on reminder) to tell you that its happened
  10. Also, a screen toast that tells you that you are on mute if you forget and start talking while on mute
  11. OpenMic – When not in a call, mute (Red so you cant miss it) button becomes OpenMic on\off. You can adjust the amount of ambient noise to allow with the volume wheel
  12. Familiarity – since the buttons\controls are in exactly the same place as my Voyager Legend, operating this beauty is already second nature.
  13. Bluetooth range beyond any of the devices I have tested before
  14. The pouch has a separate compartment for charging cable and USB adapter, I have lost a few of these little adapters so am rather happy with this little inclusion.

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Comfort

Once I found the proper adjustments for my melon it was great. Managed to wear it for a full day without any discomfort. Its rather light and the ANC works fairly well for a headset that doesn’t totally encapsulate your ears.

Headsets often start to agitate me if they are too tight, partly because my radars get squashed. But wearing spectacles is also a discomfort when the headset is competing for the same real estate (over the ear).  No such contention between my spectacles and my Voyager Focus UC.

Suggestions

  1. I wish the Charge stand was also a Bluetooth receiver, I am often handicapped with only one USB socket
  2. Using the Plantronics Hub Software, I can set the Media Player Action on incoming calls. I would love see Spotify on the list
  3. Also the music control buttons don’t work with Spotify
  4. Taking the headset off while music is playing pauses the music, cool BUT (see a theme developing here?) not working with Spotify
  5. The USB receiver is very active, flashing bright blue all day long. Its a bit distracting and I would love to see an option to disable this altogether.

Overall I think this is a fantastic headset. Dare I say, its the best headset I have had the pleasure to use.

NOTE If you somehow missed it, this is a Bluetooth headset, not DECT

User Guide

Product Review – ConferenceCam Connect by Logitech

09 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in Conferencing, Product Review, Product Review

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I must say its rather exciting to see products evolving in the “huddle room” space. Its been one of those areas that has been catered for by DIYers for some time now. Of course its difficult to justify spending thousands of dollars on gear for the huddle rooms especially when many organizations have so many of them.

Thats why we have seen devices such as the Jabra Speak 510 and the Plantronics Calisto 620. To prove the point just look at the sudden birth of Polycoms RoundTable 100, its targeted at the huddle room space and that all for around $1000 (US).

Logitech ConferenceCamSo the stage is set for functional, easy to use, sub-$1000 huddle room solutions. Exciting!

The Logitech ConferenceCam falls into this space very well (at $499.99 (US). Its great for Huddle rooms (1-6 people).

Logitech have done a great job covering off the details in their  Datasheet found here. Also you can view a YouTube video of it in action.

My first impression was that its aesthetically a beautiful product.

A quick overview of the product is as follows:-

It offers 3 connectivity modes:

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  1. USB – as a Cam, mic and speakers
  2. HDMI (& WiDi) – Screen extend\duplicate (and mic & speakers if present). Wirelessly stream content to the ConferenceCam
  3. Blue Tooth – mic and speakers

Switching between connectivity modes is done by simply touching the mode you want on the top of the ConferenceCam.

The camera is superb!

  • It supports HD Video 1080P
  • 90 degress field of view with both digital and mechanical tilt
    4x digital HD zoom
  • The Lens is Auto focusing

The Audio is great provided the room isn’t too large, it provides:-

  • Speaker phone has 360 degree sound with a 12foot range from the unit
  • Full Duplex sound
  • Acoustic echo and noise cancelling

What I really enjoyed is the inclusion of NFC. I paired my Nokia Lumina 920 (I know its older..) using the NFC and it worked very smoothly. Entering the huddle room while on an active mobile call, I was able to flick the call over to the ConferenceCam by simply placing my mobile phone next to the NFC tag, that is awesome!

Its also rather cool that you can connect to the unit over WiFi to stream content to the HDMI connected monitor. I used my Surface Pro running Windows 8.1 to test this functionality.

Once the HDMI monitor is connected, on screen prompts guide the user through the connect steps

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The Remote functionality includes:-

  • Camera – Pan tile Zoom
  • Volume control Mute Call answer
  • It also doubles as a privacy mode as it covers the cam lens and sits in place magnetically

The remote is also very responsive with little delay.

Caveats

  •  Unfortunately the ConferenceCam doesn’t do WiDi\Screen-cast (Transmitting screen to HDMI) and USB for AV at the same time.Lync meetings often have content as well so the only way to get content and audio is to split the audio off to Bluetooth, of course that leaves video out of the equation.
  • The WiDi\Screen-cast does see the HDMI monitor as a mic and speakers, the speaker component works but my test monitors don’t have mic inputs and yet the application seems to think its there (default HDMI behavior). This results in the plug and play behavior having no audible mic input. This confuses the user and in my experience, if its not plug-and-play its considered broken or too hard to use.

Overall I think this is a great idea and believe it will make a very positive impact in the huddle room space.

Product Review (and setup) DECT Phone for Lync 2013 – SNOM m9

21 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by in Product Review, Product Review, Product Review (and setup) DECT Phone for Lync 2013 - SNOM M9

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The old DECT question seems to come up time after time. Having worked on many PABX systems in the past I can say that DECT always comes across as an afterthought. With that in mind I wasn’t at all surprised to see the Lync-DECT solutions mostly required some sort of SIP server.

Then I came across the SNOM m9.
 

Plus points

  • As a Lync device it makes use of the assigned Dial Plan and Voice policies, unlike other DECT for Lync solutions I have come across
  • Its easy to setup, no SIP trunks to Lync etc.
  • You can access voicemail from the handset
  • CLI is displayed on the handset for incomming calls
  • missed calls also show on the screen
  • It supports Presence!!! You cant set presence from the handset, but it will display Online, Offline, In-call, Away, Busy and Do-not-disturb – where detected
  • The m9 supports DECT GAP or “Generic Access Profile”, this means that other GAP compliant handsets can be used to register to the base station
  • The m9 base can also be configured as a repeater to extend the range of the DECT handsets

Negatives

  • The SNOM m9 is voice only! No IM or video 🙂
  • If you need to roam across multiple m9 base stations then each base station will need to kow the identity information for the user involved
  • No seamless handover of active calls
  • The SNOM m9 handset could be more rigid (other GAP compliant phones could be used to circumvent this)
 

What is it?

Its an IP – DECT base station that allows up to 9 identities to be configured to it. Each identity can be configured for a single Lync user. The base station then fires registrations to the Lync Front End Pool using each of these identities.
The DECT handsets are registered to the base station and each handset is then associated to an identity.
 

NOTE

With some of the other SNOM endpoints I have tinkered with the UC Edition software was needed to get the devices talking to Lync. This is NOT the case with the m9, at least not with version 9.6.1-a which I was on.
 

How to setup SNOM m9 to register with Lync 2013?

 

1. Get the IP Address of the m9 Base Station

The base station is set to DHCP by default, connect it to your network and boot. Also power up the DECT handset. Initially the handset will display “searching for base”, once it finds the base you can use the handset to determine the IP address assigned to the base station. Press the right key on the circular menu button on the handset

 

 

– scroll to System Info and select OK, the IP Address should be shown on the display

2. Log on to the Base Station

Browse to the IP Address as seen on the handset from your web browser to connect to the base station for Web Based Management
 
The default login is as follows:
Username: admin
Password: password

 

3. Configuring the Base station
I wanted the config to work both on the internal network as well as from externally (over my edge servers). SInce we use internal certs internally and public certs externally we need to tell the base station not to validate the certs as it wont trust our internal CA.
This is done from the Security tab, select “Don’t validate certificates” and save.
 
 

4. Configuring the Lync identity

Mostly this is self explanatory. I did find that leaving the outbound proxy field blank meant that the legacy (to pre Lync 2013) auto discover method was attempted

  1. SRV _sipinternaltls._tcp
  2. SRV _sip._tls

 In my case however it was less successful in determining the outbound proxy from external since I no longer use those records.

 
To manually specify the Outbound Proxy use the following format:
 
sip:sip.domain.com:5061;transport=tls (where sip.domain.com is the access edge FQDN)
 
 
 
That’s it! You can check the status to ensure that the Lync registration was successful and that the DECT handsets have registered with the base station, however once the handset is logged in the Display Name will appear on the display of the handset.
 

Final comments

I do like the simplicity as well as the price. Its really cool how presence is included, many other solutions with gateways having DECT hanging off the gateway exclude presence.
 
I am not a great fan of solutions that feel as if they have been forced to fit. This is not one of those IMHO.
 
If you are deploying a dozen or so DECT phones in a warehouse then this is your solution.
If you need a DECT solution that allows roaming across multiple sites with large floor coverage, then keep looking.
 
Sorted 🙂
 
References