Earlier this year, Poly’s partner LogMeIn rebranded as GoTo. The rebranding represents more than just a name change and new logo, it focuses on a new positioning of GoTo’s suite of products. Poly recently connected with GoTo’s Annick Mottard, Senior Product Owner, and Thomas Crist, Senior Product Owner UA/Hardware, for a brief Q&A session to learn more.

Congratulations on your recent company rebranding from LogMeIn to GoTo! What led your company to make this change?

We rebranded as GoTo to reflect our deep dedication to making IT easy, anywhere. Especially for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). The change goes beyond just our name and logo. We also launched a simplified product portfolio with a single application and two flagship products: GoTo Resolve, a brand-new IT management and support product, and GoTo Connect, a new experience for unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS). These products are now united by a single application administrative system and converging user experience.

This evolution comes from listening to our nearly 800,000 customers, over one billion people joining meetings, classes or webinars and half a billion connections on the company’s remote access and support tools. GoTo and the new portfolio better represent the company and our commitment to SMBs. We understand their challenges and have the focus and resources needed to address these pain points to better serve their dynamic working environments.

As part of the rebranding, you also focused your products around two lines of business: GoTo Resolve and GoTo Connect. Tell us a bit about each of these product lines and what’s changing with the product portfolio.

With GoTo Resolve, we’re providing IT admins with a powerful tool to support their businesses and employees in this new hybrid workforce world. The IT admin is at the heart of this solution, we’re solving for their everyday tasks and challenges.

With GoTo Connect, we have integrated voice, meetings, contact center and messaging together in one app. Now, you can see your contacts, place and receive phone calls and attend your meetings all in the same space.

This rebrand has unified everything in the GoTo app and admin system. We are the only company with both communications and remote support tools built for SMBs.

Poly and GoTo work closely on joint solutions for the GoTo Connect service line. How do the Poly endpoints integrate with and add value to the GoTo Connect services?

With the workforce moving toward a permanently hybrid environment, the need for physical communication devices is still strong. Businesses and their employees still need phones, headsets, webcams or videoconferencing devices for meeting rooms. Not everything can be done efficiently with a laptop and a cellphone. Thus, leveraging GoTo with Poly hardware provides our customers with a complete solution for their communication needs.

Our GoTo Connect solution fully integrates with the Poly VVX series and CCX series desk phones and Poly Trio 8300 and 8800 conference phones. Poly headsets can also be used with either a compatible desk phone or the GoTo Connect app.

With conference rooms being used again for hybrid meetings, GoTo Room is a great solution for collaboration between in-person and remote participants. GoTo Room runs natively on the Poly Studio X all-in-one video bars without needing a separate PC, making them easy to deploy and control in rooms of all sizes.

How is GoTo helping customers adapt to new ways of working, communicating and collaborating?

GoTo is about empowering businesses to get work done anywhere, at any time. We give customers the tools to empower employees so they can get work done on their own terms: from taking business calls on the go, to hosting virtual gatherings or webinars, to troubleshooting laptops. We ensure that businesses continue moving without disruption—your devices stay up and running while your employees collaborate seamlessly in the office, at home or on the go. We believe flexibility is all about employee empowerment and that means working when, where and how it’s best for them. We enable that with our unified portfolio.

Final question: why partner with Poly?

Poly has a long-standing relationship with GoTo and has proven to be an excellent strategic partner for over fifteen years. GoTo and Poly have worked collaboratively to build an extensive product line reflecting the needs of GoTo customers and partners. This complete line of products, including headsets, cameras, phones and videoconferencing devices for rooms, provides a unified experience for our users. Poly’s approach to the GoTo partnership has been one of hard work, creativity and understanding as the GoTo brand has evolved into the powerful suite of tools offered today.

To learn more about the full suite of Poly Solutions to support GoTo, visit Poly.com

Poly has been innovating in the video conferencing space for years with a long track record of being first to market with new features that deliver an immersive, engaging meeting experience. Over the past few years, we’ve introduced several innovative features to our video portfolio as part of our DirectorAI smart camera technology including group framing, speaker framing, presenter tracking and our recently announced people framing mode.

While these features help to deliver on our vision of Meeting Equality by ensuring remote participants have an engaging experience, it’s also critical that those who do come into the office have a seamless experience in the conference room. Today we’re excited to announce the availability of Device Mode on Studio X70, now available on the entire Poly Studio X suite, to provide our customers with the flexibility to use their PC or Mac to control the meeting experience.

Device Mode delivers on another crucial aspect of meeting equality by providing end users who do come back into the office with the flexibility and intuitive, familiar features and apps they’re used to on their personal laptops.

Connecting to the Room System with Device Mode

Poly Device Mode enables you to use the room system’s camera, speaker, microphone, and connected monitors from your computer via easy connection through the participant’s PC or Mac over a simple USB connection.

Once you connect the room system to your computer with a USB cable, you can benefit from the video system’s camera and audio features when using any video app from your computer. For example, instead of using your computer’s camera for Microsoft Teams calls, connect the Studio X30 and use its 4K camera. You also gain a Poly echo-canceling microphone and speaker technology during calls.

Poly Studio X video bars have built-in apps that provide native support to the top cloud video services. Now, Device Mode allows users to extend support to other cloud video services running on their laptops, providing a more interoperable experience.

For example, let’s say your organization uses Zoom for most of your calls but sometimes needs to connect to other platforms. Device Mode allows you to experience a rich, native full-featured Zoom Rooms experience for most calls, then quickly switch to nearly ANY other cloud video service for the occasional “other” or guest scheduled meeting.

On top of that, Device Mode is easily enabled on Studio X30, Studio X50 and Studio X70 (With an update to 3.12 release), and G7500, and can be selected on a TC8 touch controller from a right-side swipe.

Upgrade to Poly Video OS Version 3.12

In order to utilize these features and more, we recommend upgrading to the Poly Video OS version 3.12, which is now available and can be updated using Poly Lens or the system’s web interface. Read our Poly Video OS 3.12 release notes to learn more about what’s included in our recent software release.

For more information reach out to the Poly team today or visit Poly.com!

As organizations and businesses in China and globally navigate their way through adopting hybrid work policies for the long-term, there is significant room for growth when it comes to the availability of high-quality audio and video conferencing solutions to help enable a hybrid future. Research agency Oviyun reports that there are 20 million enterprise conference rooms in China as of 2021, of which just 10% have video conferencing capabilities, and less than 5,000 of these conference rooms can reliably manage video conferences in high-definition video.

Business leaders have come to the realization that video will be central to a hybrid future, and that having pro-grade technology and solutions will be essential. Tencent Meeting, a leading cloud conferencing solutions provider in China, has seen a dramatic acceleration in demand for its video conferencing platform recently. The number of corporate meeting rooms in China adopting the Tencent Meeting platform has increased four-fold over the past year, with at least 2-3 hybrid meetings in every one of these rooms daily throughout the work week.

 As one of the most popular cloud video conferencing platforms in China, Tencent Meeting offers a rich array of cloud video conferencing solutions, which include online meetings, webinars, Tencent Meeting Rooms, conference room connectors, as well as open platforms.

Tencent Meeting Room solutions are geared for conference rooms for the enterprise segment. The solution integrates both HD audio and video conferencing features, wireless screen projection, as well as a collaborative whiteboard function, all into a comprehensive software platform. Tencent Meeting is committed to working closely with world-leading hardware partners like Poly to create innovative video conferencing solutions ideal for the many ways and places where work can be done today.

Poly and Tencent Momentum

Recently on June 28, Poly and Tencent Meeting co-hosted a virtual launch event to announce the release of Tencent Meeting Rooms’ intelligent solutions powered by Poly. At the same time, Tencent Meeting also kicked off the “Thousand Perfect Meeting Room” initiative with Poly as its key hardware partner.

Tencent Meeting “Thousand Perfect Meeting Room” Initiative

What does the perfect meeting room look like? What does the ideal meeting experience feel like? To answer part of that question, Tencent Meeting is designed to deliver both crystal-clear audio and HD video in a package that is not only easier for the office worker to use, but also easy for IT teams to manage.

万室如意- The Thousand Perfect Meeting Room initiative was launched by Tencent Meeting in 2022 with the aim to redesign and build 10,000 intelligent meeting rooms over a three-year period, working in partnership with select world-class audio and video conferencing manufacturers like Poly. Tencent Meeting enterprise customers who apply for the program can get their existing conference room spaces upgraded to modern smart conference rooms outfitted with the latest collaboration gear at no charge.

The Poly Value Proposition

Poly’s extensive suite of innovative audio and video conferencing solutions can provide the right products for a diverse array of collaboration scenarios. And now, customers that select Tencent Meeting as their cloud communications platform of choice will now be able to select Poly as their preferred hardware partner.

Poly has the right audio and video tools for employees whether they’re working from the office, home, on the road or anywhere in between. Especially with features like DirectorAI, NoiseBlockAI and Acoustic Fence which work together to capture each speaker’s voice with crystal clear sound, as well as to block unwanted background noise and distractions.

Learn More

Poly has an extensive range of Tencent Meeting-certified products, from video cameras to headsets (like the Voyager 4320) and speakers (like the Poly Sync 10) to video and audio-conferencing solutions, covering small, medium, and large meeting rooms, as well as the demands of personal communications. Poly and Tencent Meeting will continue to work together to introduce intelligent hardware and software features that will help all participants feel engaged and empowered on every call.

To learn more visit, Poly.com

If your organization has been searching for a DECT^TM mobile handset that works with Microsoft Teams, the wait is finally over. Poly Rove is a wireless IP phone solution that delivers the freedom to connect to your Microsoft Teams environment thanks to the Teams SIP gateway. Poly and Microsoft’s collaboration on the SIP gateway integration opens the Poly Rove offering to small businesses and shift-based workspaces that rely on Teams with the additional benefit of end-to-end encryption to keep conversations safe and secure.

The Poly Rove family is comprised of two wireless DECT^TM handsets, Poly Rove 30 and Poly Rove 40 that are deployed with dedicated base stations, repeaters and charging stations to provide a rugged wireless phone solution capable of scaling to cover your organization’s entire physical footprint. Poly Rove handsets are simple to use with a large 2.4-inch color display, and dedicated keys for push-to-talk, volume, and mute. Using Poly Rove 40, you have the ability to go hands-free with your favorite wireless Poly headset via built-in Bluetooth^® or use a 3.5mm wired headset on either the Poly Rove 30 or Poly Rove 40.

Mobility? Rove Understood the Assignment

Poly Rove was designed with mobility in mind, meeting all the mobile CAP (common area phone) needs across verticals like healthcare, retail, manufacturing, warehousing, hospitality, etc. The scalability of the Poly Rove platform enables you to deploy up to 254 base stations with various combinations of handsets, repeaters and charging stations depending on how much area you need to cover. With integrated Microban® antimicrobial product protection and dust-tight, water-resistant technology, you can trust that Poly Rove can handle even the toughest physical environments.

Use Cases Now Open to Microsoft Teams Environments

Microsoft Teams provides a great platform for collaboration and Rove is the ideal solution to provide wireless flexibility in various work environments. Let’s look at some of the benefits that wireless handsets can enable, when using the Teams SIP gateway with Poly Rove:

Healthcare: Hospitals and clinics need to streamline communication so they can respond quickly to patient needs, which in turn improves patient satisfaction. The efficiency gained from deploying mobile wireless solutions helps to address the shortage of trained health workers and improve working conditions, which is key to retaining staff.

Retail: Managers and shop floor staff need to be mobile, visible, and able to spend more time in front of customers. With the mobility enabled by Poly Rove headsets, these teams can provide better customer service and respond much more quickly to in-store incidents, such as spillages and theft.

Manufacturing/Warehouses: Wireless handsets eliminate paging delays, improve operations, and enable faster responses to problems and emergencies, thus reducing downtime and production slippage.

How Does the Microsoft SIP Gateway Work?

The Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway was designed to let users connect their Teams account with a traditional phone line, enabling you to use your handset to dial into a meeting or make calls using Teams. The SIP gateway also allows users to route incoming calls from Teams to a traditional PBX system, providing next-gen calling capabilities within a legacy on-prem phone system.

Benefits of using Teams SIP Gateway with Poly Rove:

• Sign into Teams remotely via Teams Admin Center
• Make, receive calls with hold/resume
• Transfer calls, forward calls
• Local Conferencing
• Voicemail and message waiting indicator
  • Listen to electronically stored voice messages left by callers
  • Receive notifications for new voicemail messages
• Manually dial into audio conferences
• Static emergency calling and location support with dynamic Emergency 911

FOMO?

With Poly Rove running on Teams, you ensure your organization has the secure mobile phone solution they need to get their jobs done and stay connected to remote team members. The Teams SIP Gateway will be available for the Poly Rove Products by the end of July 2022, allowing you to optimize your legacy phone systems with a future-proof solution designed to scale as you grow.

Visit Poly.com to learn more about Poly Rove family solutions.

Earlier this year, BlueJeans by Verizon announced its new BlueJeans Rooms-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering in partnership with Poly, transforming conference rooms into hybrid meeting spaces by bundling BlueJeans Rooms software, Poly video hardware, maintenance, and support into a monthly service with predictable costs. We’ll talk about the benefits of deploying rooms in an “As-A-Service” model shortly, but first let’s delve into what’s included in the BlueJeans offer.

BlueJeans Software

BlueJeans’ video conferencing meeting software is at the core of the bundled offer, allowing both in-room and remote participants to join and have a consistent meeting experience from any device. BlueJeans has long been recognized as a leader in video conferencing for the digital workplace, and its Rooms service offering is specifically designed to address the needs of the conference room. Features like one-touch join and seamless calendar integration to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace simplify the user experience. Centralized room management and real-time room analytics are provided through BlueJeans’ Command Center.

Poly Video Hardware

Poly’s Studio X30 and Studio X50 run the BlueJeans Rooms software without the need for a separate PC. These all-in-one devices combine cameras, speakers, and microphones into a beautiful design that looks good in any conference room. Paired with the Poly TC8 controller on the table, meeting controls are just a touch away. The meeting experience is elevated with Poly’s advanced speaker tracking and audio enhancements like Noise Block AI and Acoustic Fence. Management of the video hardware is simplified with secure, over-the-air, automatic software updates.

Support and Maintenance

With the BlueJeans RaaS offer all your support and maintenance needs are handled by one vendor. Whether you have an issue with hardware or software, BlueJeans covers it for the lifetime of the relationship. And if the issue is with the Poly Studio X hardware, warranty services with advance hardware replacement are included as part of the monthly fee.

RaaS Model Benefits

One of the biggest advantages of the RaaS model is that it provides a complete video conference room solution for a predictable monthly expense. There are no large upfront capital expenses (Capex), since the charges for hardware and software are treated as an operating expense (Opex). Because there is no ownership of physical or virtual assets, there is no need to track the asset value, calculate annual depreciation, or dispose of the asset at the end of its lifecycle. With RaaS, you simply return the hardware at the end of the service period or when upgrading to newer hardware.

Another benefit to RaaS is that you always have the latest software and hardware firmware updates available. The monthly subscription model supplies maintenance, support, and warranty replacements over the life of the service. You get the latest features and peace of mind!

How to Leverage RaaS for Hybrid Meeting Deployments

Many businesses are making the move to a hybrid workplace, where workers split time between a remote location (such as a home office) and a company office. While going hybrid brings many benefits, it also has challenges, such as ensuring that all conference rooms are video-enabled to ensure an equitable experience for all participants, regardless of whether they are in-office or remote. Providing a level playing field ensures everyone can be fully engaged and productive during meetings.

However, it’s estimated that only about 10% of meeting rooms globally are equipped to support video meetings. Therefore, businesses must ensure their conference rooms are video ready as part of the move to hybrid work. RaaS can help enable all meeting rooms by providing a complete turnkey solution that’s easy to deploy while eliminating making a large, upfront financial commitment.

Many businesses that already had video deployed in conference rooms have found their legacy solutions either no longer met their needs or are not compatible with new video platforms. RaaS can ease the upgrade of rooms to new services and hardware by providing predictable low-monthly costs as well as the peace of mind in knowing the entire solution is supported and upgradable in the future.

Whether you choose BlueJeans as your video conferencing solution or one of the many other platforms that Poly supports, be sure to ask about Room-as-a-Service options. Video consumption continues to grow, and employees will expect a seamless, equitable experience regardless of work location. RaaS will make it easier to meet these demands by easing the upfront roll-out of video and providing comfort that the solution is supported as it’s used over the long term.

Visit the BlueJeans website to learn more about the BlueJeans Rooms-as-a-Service offer.

The pandemic has undoubtedly shaken up the workforce. We’re continuing to live through the Great Resignation, which reached a high point in November 2021 as the US Labor Department reported that 4.53 million workers left their jobs. This has created a tight labor market, where employees have new expectations of how they work and what they need from an employer.      

It’s not a secret that many employees who started working remotely during the pandemic want to continue working outside the office with increased flexibility. As Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neely told The Boston Globe, “Employees are not only requesting that there is an adjustment to the return-to-the-office policy, but they’re also resigning.” And employers are listening, with Gartner reporting that 82% of company leaders plan to allow employees to work remotely some of the time.   

This pressure complicates planning for the IT professionals supporting a company’s return to work.    

EXISTING COMMUNICATION TOOLS MAY NOT WORK IN THE LONG RUN 

It’s tempting to think that your remote workers can continue to use the communication tools that got them through the pandemic but that may be a bad idea, especially if it means remote employees are joining meetings using the video camera built into their laptops and the same headphones they use to listen to music.  

 While these devices are fine for entertainment or connecting with family and friends, standard-issue webcams and consumer headsets keep remote employees from projecting a strong virtual presence at work, which can reflect poorly on them and your business. 

In a work environment, people joining meetings remotely with these devices are hard to see and hard to hear and because it doesn’t feel like they are in the room, people on-site repeatedly talk over them. On their end, remote participants feel less important than in-room participants when they can’t hear well enough to follow the conversation or they get lost if someone’s writing on a whiteboard because they can’t see what everyone else is talking about. People in the office feel left behind if they aren’t clearly seen on screen or heard by all participants. 

Ensuring that every employee can maintain a professional presence in virtual meetings requires professional equipment.  

HOW CAN YOU ACHIEVE EQUAL FOOTING?  

Select audio and video solutions that make everyone feel like they’re together in the room, no matter where they are. Remote workers need to be able to eliminate background noises and distractions and focus on the meeting, so they can see and hear clearly, and be seen and heard at their professional best, from any location.  

There are three major considerations for making sure your remote employees have what they need to fully participate.  

Understand the roles and workstyles of remote employees. Your remote workers aren’t a single homogenous group. Everyone has a different role and their own way of working, so one style of workspace or technology setup isn’t going to work for all employees.  Using workstyle persona research can help you avoid problematic “one size fits all” strategies. 

Understand the dynamics of the workspaces used by remote employees at home and on the go. Your employees may be working from a bustling home kitchen, a quiet spare bedroom or an echoing basement office, a noisy hotel lobby, an open mobile office, or the back of an airport shuttle bus. The technical requirements to make each space one where an employee can successfully be seen and heard in meetings are very different.    

Understand the technology that enables effective and professional collaboration.   

Just having a camera and microphone built into a laptop or smartphone doesn’t mean that’s all you need to provide to employees. Understanding key features of professional-grade audio and video technology for individuals will help you create solutions that match workstyles and workspaces.  

Successful remote and hybrid work means enabling employees to do their best work, no matter where they are doing it. Download our eBook for a deeper dive into these considerations and other details to help you attract and retain the best talent for your company. 

Over the last few years, the workplace has undergone a fundamental shift, transforming where professionals work and what they expect from workspaces. As many businesses prepare their return-to-office plan, they are redesigning collaboration spaces to better meet the needs of a post-pandemic workforce. Meeting rooms, especially, no longer follow a one-size-fits-all formula. These collaboration spaces must provide a flexible yet consistent experience for every user no matter how or where they join meetings. To meet this demand, businesses will find ways to provide equitable access to premium video and audio and integrated systems that power meaningful, collaborative experiences.

A Climate of Transformation

Recent data on industry trends showcase the workspace transformation. According to Frost & Sullivan, “Three-quarters of organizations expect more than one-quarter of their employees to be working remotely part-time or full-time in 2025.

This indicates just how important it will be to ensure remote workers don’t feel a difference between in-person or remote presence during important meetings, especially now in the return-to-office era. Further findings from Frost & Sullivan predict that by 2025, the conferencing devices market will grow about five times higher due to the
need to better enable remote workers and the increase of small to medium-sized conference rooms.

So how do you support your organization?

Defining the “Just Right” Room Size

In a recent Poly research report, findings indicated that 77 percent of organizations plan to rethink or redesign the office space for new ways of working, including options for more quiet and open-plan areas, collaboration spaces and places to socialize. Most new rooms will be small conference rooms, as team sizes may have diminished, or individuals are only onsite certain days of the week. To encourage productivity, businesses will offer employees a space complete with advanced technology that helps minimize distractions and supports effective collaboration.

Finding the Perfect Mix

Start with room size; The key to finding the perfect technology fit will be heavily influenced by the size of the collaboration space and the number of people within it. Small to medium size rooms, for example, function and are used differently than large conference rooms. Focus Rooms are small spaces designed for individual work or attending virtual meetings. Small to Medium Rooms allow a group of three to five people to gather and collaborate comfortably. When designed and outfitted with the necessary solutions, both room types provide teams with a quiet place to work and leverage advanced technology that helps foster wider communication.

Defining Working Styles

Once space size is considered, it’s critical to define your teams’ workstyles, as individuals and as groups. Identifying your team’s workstyles can be crucial to your success when providing equitable, collaborative room setups and inclusive technology. Because everyone is different, what works for one person may not work for another, which can influence your business’s needs. When teams can consistently communicate effectively, the output is higher – and so is revenue.

Finding equitable solutions that combine innovative technology with the appropriate workspace can foster transformation. When every employee has access to the same tools and can engage and participate equally, you create opportunities for meaningful connections, higher productivity and compelling collaboration.

The Poly Difference

Poly’s products and services foster meeting equality by offering a wide array of solutions for any room size, including pre-configured Studio Kits for specific areas. Poly also delivers Microsoft Teams Certified solutions for both voice and video products. Other options include:

• Poly Director AI for cutting-edge video, including automatic camera technology that zooms in on speakers and frames them as they move about the room.
• Microsoft’s Front Row video gallery of attendees appears at the bottom of the screen, so those joining remotely are at eye level with those in the room.
• Poly MeetingAI incorporates advanced artificial intelligence-driven technologies into ready-made room kits for Microsoft Teams users.
• Poly Lens is an all-in-one app that lets you monitor and troubleshoot your devices from a single reference point.
• Poly+ offers comprehensive device support through the Ecosystem Cloud Partner Support program with 24×7 global technical customer access for urgent needs.

The new Poly Studio R30 USB video bar recently announced at ISE in Barcelona, is an example of a solution purpose-built for small meeting rooms. It shares many of the same Poly Meeting AI functionalities and features found on other Poly video bars but is optimized for small room performance at a small room price. With the introduction of the R30, comes a new room kit specialized for small rooms, the Poly Studio Small Room Kit for Microsoft Teams Rooms, expanding Poly’s line up of Teams Rooms Kits on Windows to include a kit for every room size.

The Path to Progress

Finding equitable solutions that combine innovative technology with the appropriate workspace can advance transformation. When every employee has access to the same tools and can engage and participate equally, you create opportunities for consistent communication, higher productivity and purposeful interactions.

Visit Poly.com to learn more.

Picture this: you are headed back into the office to connect with your teammates in person, but many of your teammates were unable to join you. You check into a conference room with a few in-person colleagues to join a call with your entire hybrid team. You speak up to contribute to the conversation, but your remote teammates can hardly tell who is talking with the typical fish-eye group view of your conference room, making them feel isolated and causing frustration for those in the room.

On the other side of the call, your remote colleagues have a hard time identifying who is in the room and because they don’t know whose name to call, they avoid prompting the conference room participants to join in the conversation.

Whatever side you end up on, it’s not an ideal experience.

As part of our ongoing mission to bring equality to everyone who joins a meeting, Poly is proud to announce our latest Poly DirectorAI smart camera technology: people framing mode. By creating zoomed-in tiles for every individual in the room, people framing mode solves these hybrid meeting challenges by making sure that everyone has a seat at the virtual table.

What is People Framing Mode?

As the newest framing mode within Poly DirectorAI’s suite of features, people framing sits alongside other modes including group framing and speaker framing, providing Poly users with another layer of flexibility to customize meetings to their preferences.

People framing is similar to our flagship framing modes in some ways and unique in others. Like other framing modes on Poly devices, people framing places the focus on certain elements of the meeting—in this case, all participants. After identifying participants, the camera combines several different zoomed-in shots of the room to create a unique layout of frames, showing all in-person participants with an up-close view. This layout of frames is then sent to the video app of your choice as a single video stream so that far-end viewers can easily connect with in-person participants.

And it’s as easy as that! The magic happens in the camera, which means that you can use people framing mode with any app that your Poly video device works with. This flexible deployment makes achieving meeting equality much more accessible, no matter what your preferred platform is.

Take Your Meetings Up a Notch

People framing mode will be available first on the Poly Studio X70 video bar and Poly Studio E70 camera later this quarter. To turn people framing mode on, you can utilize Poly Lens or the system’s web interface, depending on the device. Some video apps compatible with Studio X70 will even allow you to change camera modes through their interface.

Poly DirectorAI’s people framing mode is our next step towards the future of hybrid meetings. It’s a stride toward a world where remote and in-person employees feel that they have equal chances to speak, to be seen, and to succeed. And it’s another element that will go into creating hybrid meetings that are exciting, productive and feel like the new normal.

For more information on Poly DirectorAI’s newest framing mode reach out to the Poly team today or visit Poly.com!

Poly Customers with Studio X30 and X50 Get First Mover Advantage to Deploy

Remember web conferencing? That’s what we used to call online meetings and cloud collaboration. They’ve been around quite a while, almost as long as the Web itself, but arguably really started in earnest in May of 1996 when Microsoft announced NetMeeting as an included component in Internet Explorer 3.0.

Of course, a lot has changed since then- computing power, connectivity and most recently Covid have made online collaboration ubiquitous across Windows, Android and iOS, and the introduction of platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom has made video meetings as convenient and familiar as email.

There has been, however, one final frontier to cross, and that has been the ability to collaborate seamlessly beyond the boundaries of specific video platforms. Thankfully that is no longer the case, with the announcement that Zoom meetings can now be joined directly by Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android devices, via Direct Guest Join.

As a strategic alliance partner working in lockstep with both great partners to deliver the future of work, we’re delighted to confirm that Direct Guest Join is supported from launch by the Poly Studio X30 and X50 video bars.

Poly customers with Studio X30 and X50 video bars will have a first mover advantage in deploying this new feature. To utilize Direct Guest Join, simply schedule a new meeting on Zoom or forward an existing meeting to your Microsoft Teams Room and it will appear on the calendar. Simply click on “Join” from your Teams Rooms device to enter the meeting.

The benchmark for performance in Android Appliance devices for Microsoft Team Rooms, Poly Studio X family delivers radical simplicity in a small and elegant package.  The familiar Microsoft Teams Rooms interface will have users connected to meetings in seconds, with innovations such as Poly DirectorAI smart camera technology, NoiseBlockAI and Acoustic Fence ensuring everyone is seen and heard clearly.

Poly offers the most comprehensive line-up of video bars certified for Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Easy to install, easy to manage and best of all, easy to use, the Poly Studio X line of video bars with Direct Guest Join will ensure for seamless meetings regardless of what platform your invite is coming from. Visit Poly.com to see the full line up of meeting room solutions.  For more information on enabling Direct Guest Join visit Microsoft.com.

As part of our mission to support hybrid workers and take steps towards meeting equality, Poly continues to develop solutions for every workstyle and situation, which leads us to the introduction of our newest USB video bar for small rooms: Poly Studio R30.  

Certified for Zoom and with Microsoft Teams certification pending, Poly Studio R30 shares many of the same functionalities and features found on other Poly video bars but is optimized for small room performance at a small room price. At an MSRP of $799, this USB video bar packs quite the punch with a built-in speaker, 4k camera with a 120-degree field-of-view, 3-element beam-forming microphone array, and Poly DirectorAI smart camera technology. 

With Poly Studio R30, we strategically chose the most important group video elements from our larger group devices and combined them with some user-friendly attributes of our personal devices, like USB connectivity and a removable monitor clamp, to create a device that is thoughtfully optimized for small meeting rooms.  

We’ve doubled down on elements of the videoconferencing experience that are crucial for hybrid meetings. Poly DirectorAI technology is the brain behind our cameras, delivering features like group framing, speaker framing and presenter tracking. It’s like your meeting room director whose job is to make sure that everyone is seen clearly and has an equitable seat at the table. 

We accomplish this by thoughtfully crafting a set of production rules, inspired by TV and movies, using machine learning and AI to automate those rules based on the dynamics of your meeting. The magic all happens in the camera; it uses facial recognition algorithms and voice triangulation to identify the nuances of your meeting and then create the best frame based on those nuances as well as your preferences.  

No meeting is the same, and that’s why Poly Studio R30 provides you with the flexibility to use the best framing mode for your unique situation. Scaling down to a small room price also means that this experience is more accessible than ever before.  

With the introduction of Poly Studio R30, we continue to build out our strong portfolio of certified USB video bars with a dedicated solution for every size room.

• Poly Studio P15 is optimized for your home office or in a personal space at the office such as a focus room.  

• Poly Studio R30 has got your small conference rooms covered for all its USB video bar needs.  

• Poly Studio USB is ideal for those mid-sized rooms that are a bit too big for Poly Studio R30.  With stereo speakers, impressive camera performance, and the option to add an expansion mic, Poly Studio makes the perfect device for those “in-between” rooms.  

Our portfolio of USB video bars, including the newly introduced Poly Studio R30, provides an accessible and professional video conferencing option for meeting rooms of every size. Regardless of what company you work for, what industry you are in, and where your work is getting done, Poly’s collaboration solutions ensure you an equal seat at the virtual meeting table. 

To learn more about the Poly Studio R30, visit Poly.com