Polycom GroupSeries and Lync2013

[Anonymous]

Can you tell me whether content sharing works with the group series and Lync on LyncServer 2013? When I installed group series lync interop license option, is it works ?  Thanks, mahfud

[Anonymous]

Hi mahfud,

You might want to check out my post for a few days ago - http://community.polycom.com/t5/Video-Endpoints/Lync-interoperability-with-Polycom-Endpoint-HDX-and-... I have yet to see a response, but at this moment in time, I don't think there is one.

In my opinion, content sharing between Lync and a Polycom HDX or Group Series device when a Lync Interoperability licence is installed does NOT work:

• From the HDX to Lync, the content channel would be transmitted as your main video, so the user would only see a single video feed. For us in education where studios are designed with multiple screen specifically to display both the speaker and their content, this is not an acceptable solution.
• However, what's worse is that the Lync client is unable to send ANY content to the Polycom device at all, meaning that if a remote lecturer wished to present to a class and they use Lync, it simply would not work.

The content sharing streams between the standards based videoconferencing device and Lync are different - The VC device will use a one way video stream (either H.264 or H.263), whereas Lync uses and interactive RDP channel. In most cases, whilst the interactivity in Lync (or for that matter, an other web based content collaboration tool) is nice, a single video content stream is pretty much what is required 95% of the time. The VC device would nee to transcode between RDP and H.264 and vice versa, however, I would have though this would have been something that an HDX or Group Series device could do once the interoperability licence is installed.

As mentioned in my previous thread, the Polycom solution looks expensive and complex, especially if you have only a small deployment. As mentioned above, whilst web conferencing collaboration tools are also nice, they bring and additional layer of complexity that often simply isn't required.

You may find that that a third party solution from the likes of PEXIP (or possibly Acano - but I'm not even sure how they handle two-way content sharing between standards and Lync world) to be the most comprehensive, economical and technically proficient solution at this point in time.

Considering the Polycom's own 'Executive Vice President of Worldwide Engineering' feels that their solutions need to be "Pervasive", "Interoperable" and says that Polycom will "make it work.", and also considering the partnership between Microsoft and Polycom, it seems a little odd that in this case, it isn't and doesn't.

Cheers

Chris

[Anonymous]

With Groupseries and the Skype interoperability licence, be SURE you enable "Visualboard/RDP".....as stupid as it sounds, the RDP protocol and Visualboard are tied together in a check-box.  If you dont have RDP enabled, the groupseries cannot share local content with Skype for business clients and vice versa.  Its really a pain to see "Visualboard" show up on your Realpresence touch if you have them like we do, when its not used and confusing to users...but if you dont enable this, you wont ever have SFB people view your content.   Trust me this is bizarre