Webex Room Series: a lot of potential, but still needs some work with documentation and codec efficiency

We use the Room Series for bi-directional remote classes and webconferencing. We currently have a single 4K camera above the two TVs connected to the Room Series, but this will be upgraded to two cameras and 4 TV in the near future. The system works very well currently in its limited use case but I suspect that for true remote classroom experience, the single camera system will be found inadequate. The reason for this is because it is incapable of display the instructor, the classroom with students and the annotation board at the same time. We have had some compression issues in the past with video streams when the connection becomes slower but this is to be expected. Finally, when we use this system as a SIP to connect to the zoom service, while it works really well, the dial interface incorporated with the Room Series is arcane and difficult to master. For example, sometimes we need to be able to change the view to gallery instead of active speaker. To get this to work, we have to go back to the dial menu and punch in a bunch of options to make it work. This is very cumbersome.

We found most of these features to be a detriment than a benefit. For example, the speaker tracking was very distracting to our audiences on the other side. It was much easier to leave the view focus on the room overall. The microphone detection for speaker view was not very accurate and more importantly responsive. Because of the time lag present when switching between speakers, it creates rubber banding that ends up being very distracting.

We have used Zoom meetings, and Microsoft Teams. Both of these see extensive usage with our organization.

I think the Webex portal is useful for communicating with different departments within the same organization. Webex Teams module is very useful to create purpose built teams on the fly. It is very flexible and versatile for management of and communication within teams in rapidly evolving environments and goals.

I would change to a product that interfaced better with our room scale audio solution. The microphone systems constantly interfere with each other on this Room series and it is not capable of intelligently adjusting levels of audio feed across our microphone array. I would probably go with a system that is capable of true bi-directional classroom scale solution

Yes, and I regret doing so. I am glad it was only for one year. It was complete waste of time and money to opt for Cisco's premium support. The level 1 techs (the first tier you connect to) are not very good at conceptualizing the problems we try to communicate to them. So, escalation is almost a necessity. It is easier for us to troubleshoot by doing our own research and reading forums of other users with similar configurations and problems.

There was a time when one of our creston HDMI multiplexers failed to replicate signal to our repeater TVs. The support correctly identified the problem and provided the solution in an uncharacteristically rapid fashion.