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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GlobalMeet Collaboration (discontinued)
Score 9.7 out of 10
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GlobalMeet Collaborationiwas an audio, web and video conferencing solution that is designed to make global communication easy from anywhere using any device. As of 2023 the product has reached EOL and will no longer be sold.
Firstly from well suited: I have implemented Codec Device and Room Kit Pro in governmental place and it suited very well. It was again on Prem solution working with Cisco Meeting Servers and different countries were connected to the meeting. Network quality was perfect and Video quality voice quality were above the great. Everybody asked about the device which we were using after the call. Mainly the IT guys. For not so well experience I can say the place where we used Board Pro 55 but we have faced with the microphone problems. For the solutions we used wired Cisco SX20 devices microphones it solved the problem. But Board pro 55 itself made our experience little bit bad.
GlobalMeet is well suited for an organization that wants a simple web conference platform with no added features. It seems like this is the way to go if you want to not spend a lot of money for a service. GlobalMeet is not well suited for large organizations, or someone who needs to host multiple meetings and needs robust features such as attendance tracking, presentation sharing, and ease of use.
Probably one of the best ones we had recently was using some of the new layouts within the room kits. We've had some kind of hybrids of large groups on site as well as individuals connecting through WebEx and being able to display things out properly and have the presentations easily visible as well as still seeing the presenter. It just makes things a lot easier to work with.
Recording feature useful to playback information from the meeting
Accessibility of domestic and international call in numbers make it possible for participants to call in no matter where they are traveling or located.
There is a cost for the conferencing services unlike competitors like FreeConferenceCall.com or Skype which have free options. However, you pay for what you get and the audio/connection quality can and has been an issue for us with other vendors.
There are a lot of shortcuts that can be used on the line to mute/unmute lines, record the audio, request operator assistance, etc. However, these are difficult to memorize so we end up forgetting or relying on a print-out of the shortcuts that we keep near our desks. I wish there was an easier way to use these such as voice commands.
In the post-conference email recaps you get the phone numbers of those who dialed in. However, it can be difficult to know who these numbers belong to unless you remember the direct #s for the participants. I wish there was a way to save contact info for certain phone numbers within the system and let GlobalMeet add the names to the numbers for all future post-conference emails.
We like our Cisco endpoints a lot. However, the technology is getting better in the Zoom room market and we are interested in exploring those options. I'd really like to see some new improvements in the room kit series such as wireless controllers and the ability to mount the room kits in multiple configurations. I would also like to see the Room Kit and Room Kit Plus series standardize their audio line inputs to accommodate 3rd party microphone and DSP solutions.
GlobalMeet is not a very good tool. There are better web meeting platforms available in the marketplace. The system is clunky, not intuitive, and experiences often technical issues. They have made updates recently but it is too little too late. It may be a good platform for smaller organizations with tighter budgets.
There is a considerable amount of tech know-how needed to really make the Room Series work for most scenarios. This might be a due to the stark increase in remote based productivity as a result of COVID-19 and quarantine protocols. But CISCO support and documentation have not caught up the increase in adoption of these technologies. As a result, only personnel with substantial technical expertise are able to really make these systems work for the use-cases that is most relevant to our setting here at Clemson University.
I have provided such a high rating because setting up the meeting only requires a few clicks. Within a couple minutes of telling my team that I will set up a meeting and send an invite, that invitation is already sitting in their inbox. I move at a fast pace and GlobalMeet is keeping up
For the most part GlobalMeet loaded everything quickly. The only problem that we had was when the whole company was on a training at one time, we had a hard time with screen sharing and the pages loading in a timely manner. Everything seemed to slow down when lots of people were on the system at once
With our Cisco service contract, NBD replacement and 24/7/365 support are included. We have not had any issues with trying to get a replacement for defective parts or for support (ie: software or troubleshooting). Very satisfied with the level of support available.
As previously mentioned, I was in charge of facilitating a weekly meeting with 60 attendees. I had major issues with the screenshare crashing repeatedly during the meeting. I got in contact with a GlobalMeet Technician immediately. He was extremely responsive and worked with my technician to resolve all of the issues quickly. After his intervention, I never had the same issue again.
The Webex Room Kit is without a doubt a much higher quality experience with audio and video. Especially with the recent enablement of USB passthrough mode in certain models, there is almost no comparison. Cisco has committed to the Room Kit being an open solution that will work in any use case on any platform. To get the best collaboration room experience there is no better choice.
I was not involved in the purchasing decision, but choose GlobalMeet over Skype in some situations since not all organizations permit their colleagues to join other Skype environments. WebEx is not widely deployed in the organization. I have just started using Teams, and I am not as familiar with using it yet. However, I have had success with joining other organizations that use Teams on a call. It is disappointing that functionality such as the whiteboard is not mutually available in those situations (yet).
The price for webinar for GlobalMeet is quite pricey compared to other similar vendors.
GlobalMeet can be used for unlimited free calls and video conferencing, hence in our company with extensive global calls this platform is very cost-effective.
Unlike most conferencing software. Other users don't have to download GlobalMeet App and therefore it is easy to send meeting invite to clients.
Attentively support system that responds fast to queries and this saves time for us.
