The Cisco Room Series is a video conferencing solution that wakes up when users walk into a meeting room where it is installed and provides theater-quality voice and video, as well as content sharing from personal devices. For small to medium rooms with 6-8 people, there's Cisco Room 55, and for larger rooms of 7-14 people there's Cisco Room Kit (camera and codec in one device) and Cisco Kit Plus (separate codec plus and quad camera). Any of these systems can be run in the cloud or on-premises.
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Neat Board
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Neat Board is presented as a complete meeting room package in a simple and elegant all-in-one device. Boasting an immersive 65-inch multi-touch screen, audio system and versatile wide-angle camera, Neat Board is designed to give the user a collaboration experience beyond video meetings and wireless content sharing by enabling annotations and whiteboarding.
We were using Polycom group series and poly studio earlier for P2P meetings but after covid scenario totally changed, we are using MS Teams as a main platform for meetings & messaging. Now, the challenge for us to join teams meeting from VC devices. Gradually online meetings …
We had a conference room with a Radvision board that needed to be replaced. Our HQ is not fully Cisco but rather a mish mash of different products such as Rally bars, Poly, Radviison and Cisco. Putting Cisco into the conference room allowed us to have a single pane of glass for our needs.
If you are looking for zoom or teams room solution then Neat Board is great product. It has native zoom and teams functionality so that you can directly join zoom and teams meeting from Neat Board with native application experience. It has USB passthrough option for BYOD. HDMI out for second screen and sensor helps to maintain room quality.
Perhaps any downside I might see is not necessarily with this product, it's more interoperability with other products. And I think these are all roadmap items that are being addressed. For instance, when you're in a Cisco meeting, it's not as feature rich as it might be as if you joined from a computer. However, as I said, these seem to be roadmap items which are coming along soon. Things like integration with the text or chat rather in a meeting, and also whiteboard integration.
By the time we are up for an upgrade, this particular series of products might not even been in the market. The typical product cycle for such products in the market are about 5 years. More importantly, the codec supported by such devices may also change by the time we are up for an upgrade. Even so, getting this system to a level of functionality we require was a frustrating ordeal that I do not look forward to during the next cycle.
A lot of the features are really easy. You can just click connect and you're in. But using all of these other integrations and all these other features that are there, it's kind of the blind leading the blind as to how we use it. So it's probably the downside of it.
Cisco has always stood out for the excellent support and documentation on its products, this is one of the reasons why they are so well positioned. The means by which you can create a case and the response times are very good. I especially like the support through the Webex teams.
As a partner, I always used mainly Cisco products and offered them to my customers. I have personal experience with Avaya, Team and polycom but non of them provided me with the Premium feelings which Cisco does. Even the product quality and look of the product by itself gives you the premium experience. But I want to mention that Polycom has some features and easy setup which Cisco lacks sometimes. It is mainly 3rd party integration.
We have used cisco board before we evaluate Neat Board. In cisco board we are not getting native teams meeting experience. We need CVI license to join teams meeting from cisco board and the quality and experience is not up to the mark in CVI calls. Live power point presentation is not working on CVI calls.
The Cisco MTRoA solution has reduced the time it takes for our users to join their meeting and spend more time concentrating on business rather than the technology.
It simply works.
Ease of support.
We also appreciate the great support we get from intelligent folks in Cisco TAC organization.