Poly & Microsoft Teams: How Hardware Integrations Make Teams More Collaborative Than Ever

Years ago, video conferencing had a bad reputation: it was grainy, lagged, and dropped. Today, video conferencing is being used with quickly growing frequency throughout many industries. Video conferencing makes it easier for employees to connect with each other, with clients, and with vendors, and it needs to be adopted by many companies. Poly RealConnect for Teams and Microsoft Teams for collaboration makes it easier than ever to embrace video conferencing.

The Importance of a Dedicated Conference Room

To streamline your company’s communications, you can create a dedicated conference room. Within this dedicated conference room, dedicated hardware can be installed to support your video conferencing. By using Poly RealConnect for Teams, you can ensure that your technology is consistent and well-integrated. Here are some of the advantages to a dedicated room:

• A dedicated conference room is easier to use and more reliable. Rather than having to set up and tear down your technology every time there’s a big conference call, you can instead just walk into the conference room and use it. Having to video conference directly from their desks can make it harder on employees, as they will need to independently wrangle their own cameras and microphones. Further, the equipment itself will be able to be set up in a way that makes it easier to use: webcams can be bracketed directly into walls, and microphones can be placed to reduce echo.
• Standardized equipment makes it easier to troubleshoot. When something goes wrong in a dedicated conference room, employees know exactly who to call. In the case of a room built with Poly technology, employees have a single point of contact for all their technological needs. Otherwise, they may need to juggle multiple technological contacts, which can include audio professionals, video professionals, and networking professionals.
• Dedicated conference rooms let you control the environment. A conference room can be kept consistently quiet, tidy, and professional. Otherwise, you may be interrupted during conferences, or may find it difficult to keep the conference room organized and clean. With the proper scheduling process, you can also ensure that no conferences conflict. With the right soundproofing in place, you can also isolate your conference room from the sounds around the rest of the office.

In short, a dedicated room makes it easier for a company to manage its video conferencing, making the entire process more stable and reliable.

The Advantages of Poly RealConnect

Poly makes it easier to develop unified, collaborative solutions. A few of Poly’s advantages include:

• Very high voice quality. Poly specializes in high voice quality, which is something that’s important during remote communication. Better voice quality leads to fewer misunderstandings, while also making it possible for listeners to interpret tone as well as words. When voice quality is static-filled or delayed, it’s more difficult for people to communicate, and it’s easier to get frustrated with the calls.
• Additional productivity features. Poly Trio turns a video conferencing solution into a collaborative solution, with a hub that allows for the sharing of content through the video conference. The Poly Trio can be used with small or large conferencing groups, to make it possible for people to speak while also sharing information.
• RealConnect interoperability. RealConnect works with Microsoft Teams to create an all-in-one collaborative solution, with Microsoft Teams as well as Skype for Business. MS integration makes it possible for meetings to be scheduled through Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business, after which calls are pushed through Poly-managed Microsoft Azure servers.
• Easy setup with Teams. RealConnect makes it possible to interact easily with Teams and Skype for Business, and it’s easy and simple to setup. Once consent is granted for RealConnect to work with MS Teams, conferencing will go through RealConnect-controlled Microsoft Azure servers.

Ultimately, Poly provides high-quality, convenient conferencing solutions, which can make it easier for employees to connect. By working with Poly, business owners can create a complete conferencing room, which has all the features they need to allow their employees to run quick conferences, whether scheduled or on the fly. But there are other options for Microsoft Teams for collaboration, too; a qualified partner can help walk you through them.

Like other solutions, Poly does require some setup, as it needs to be integrated into the company’s existing products and licenses, such as Skype for Business and MS Teams. It’s better to have an expert set up this network, as the strength and reliability of the network is going to be based on its configuration. A professional team will be able to come in and set up your conferencing room for you, to make sure that it has all the features that you need.

Interested in using Poly with Microsoft Teams at your business? Contact Red River to learn how to make your video conferencing better than ever before.