Polycom endpoint managment & scheduling solution

[Toney]

Hi all,
It's been awhile since I've been on the site. Having switched jobs, industries, countries and VC vendors recently, I haven't had the time to catch up the latest and greatest...Anyway, my current gig with a university has given my my first proper exposure to Polycom. So since I've worked for 4 years with Tandberg, I'm out of my depth a little.
We have a bunch of Polycom endpoints, ranging from older viewstation FX's to the current VSX8000's. Up till now, they haven't done anything more complex than making IP calls into a bridge.
But I'd like to change that and add some infrastructure behind these endpoints. I'd really like to add a solution/system to do admin/management as well as scheduling.And perhaps purchase a bridge. I know that during my time managing Tandberg, all I needed to do was use TMS and I had both the management and scheduling looked after. But after looking thru Polycom's literature on their website, it doesn't seem like there's a 'one stop' solution for Polycom endpoints. They have GMS for management, then something else for scheduling etc.
Can any suggest a solution or ideas on this? What do you all do to manage Polycom endpoints at an enterprise level?
Thanks in advance!!!!

[Entropy3XD]

Welcome back Toney. Are you in D.C. now? If so send me a PM and we can get together for lunch or a beer sometime. I am not familiar with the Polycom management software myself, but some of the guys I work with are. I am sure they have a contact at Polycom who would be happy to demo their offerings for you. You can also use TMS to manage Polycom equipment, but there might be some limitations if you are managing a Polycom bridge. If you are looking to purchase a bridge you can always go with a Tandberg MPS and TMS, which would integrate nicely with the Polycom endpoints. I have a customer who is doing this now as they like the Polycom endpoints but they prefer the power of TMS for scheduling, management, and reporting. They also like the ease of use of the MPS over their old Accord/Polycom MCU.

[tom9933]

We currently use GMS and PathNavigator (GK) and while GMS does a pretty good job with managing endpoints it does not offer any scheduling. At this point I think your best option would be to either get the new SC200 product (all in one appliance from PCOM) or to use TMS. I’ve not used either one in house, but I’m told with all the updates (very new product with typical growing pains) the 200 works pretty well.

[Sean Lessman]

..get the new SC200 product...

Correction! SE200 :)

Sean

[tom9933]

Opps sorry about that :ponder:

[Toney]

Thanks guys...
I'm going to take a look at the SE200. Does anyone know whether it has been reviewed by anybody? I'd like to get some opinions on it, other than the vendor's...

[VideoMan]

Well Polycom has tried removing the cost of the Microsoft Licenses which you would need to buy for deploying individual GMS,Path Navigator,Web commander and PCS (Polycom Conference Suite).It integrates all of those in either a stand-alone SE 200 blade server with its proporietary XPEK OS or as a IAM(integrated application module).The IAM occupies a slot ion the MGC+ chassis.(have made the size of the slot of the controller half of the previous configuration in the traditional MGC)

However since they have just started this kinda application before some months i am sure it would have lot many bugs.But it looks like they are moving in that direction of integrating almost 70-80 percent of the features of the individual applications on a single platform.It should resolve all issues of managing different applications on different servers.

[VideoMan]

ALso one should take note that you should use MGC manager only as a config tool and not as a reservation tool since the Databases of the SE2000/IAM and the MGC manager are different.So in the case you overbook the conferences on the MCU it would behave erratically and in the case of a conflict it would give preference to the conferences being booked through the MGC manager as it directly reserves on the database of the MCU unlike SE 200/IAM.

[Burt.Kloppers]

Hi,

I have installed TMS in a Polycom install base, and it works perfect.

The only part that does not work very nice is the CDR doawnload from a Polycom system.

The Polycom SE200 also works very nice since the last software release.

[I, Brian]

The SE200 is a pretty nice machine - maybe it's different here in the UK - but I'd be surprised if it were. :)



Glad to hear you got the issue resolved, though - had no problems with any of my Polycom gear so far. :)


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