Back in February of this year, we visited Integrated Systems Europe 2020 to catch up on the latest trends and new launches. Rob Scott spoke to Paul Clarke, SVP at Polly on the company’s new Studio X range for small-to-large-sized meeting rooms. During the interview, Paul also mentioned the new Poly Lens, the (then) freshly minted device management solution from the global UComms giant.
Polycom has a rich legacy of technology innovation with offerings across software, hardware, analytics and services segments. The brand was the result of Plantronics and Polycom coming together in 2018. Since then, it has worked steadfastly to push the boundaries of collaboration technology, backed by a strong partner network (Google, Microsoft, AWS, Zoom, etc.).
Poly Lens was launched at ISE 2020 in a bid to unify the management of Poly devices. Read Maya Middlemiss’ writeup on what Poly Lens brings to the table.
Inside Poly Lens
The premise behind the product is simple. Get a complete picture of device status from a single dashboard hosted on the cloud. To do this, Poly Lens offers the following features:
- Quick device onboarding – You can add new devices to your UC landscape using a QR code or a short pin code. There is no need to input complex technical details or spend hours pouring over datasheets
- Secure access – Poly Lens is designed primarily for admin use, which makes secure access essential. Poly Lens comes with single sign-on (SSO) technology through either your Microsoft or Google credentials to give you a mix of convenience + compliance
- Newsfeed – Poly Lens’ UI takes a leaf out of the social media playbook, which makes the learning curve really smooth. All important updates and notifications appear on a dynamic newsfeed, with intelligent prioritisation
- Data retention – This is an extremely handy feature. Poly Lens holds onto your video conferencing information, even when you switch providers. As a result, you can map key data such as conferencing room utilisation, tech-investment to ROI ratio, etc. over time and across the digital transformation journey
- Bulk onboarding – Without bulk device onboarding, a large company would spend a lot of time on mapping, documenting, and onboarding its many conference phones. That’s why Poly Lens enables bulk onboarding for Trio conference phones — and we expect more providers to gain compatibility once Lens is out of public preview by the end of Q2, 2020
- Geo-locationing – Poly Lens uses geo-location tags to visualise where each and every device is situated on your campus. The data is represented through an interactive map, where you can use filters to find and act on the device(s) you need
- Analytics insights – The insights module on Poly Lens gives you natural language insights, comprehensible even by non-technical personnel. For instance, it tells you how many minutes were used by a conferencing location, how this compares to your company average, and if there is an upward or downward trend
- Remote troubleshooting – As a native device management app for Poly hardware, Lens supports remote troubleshooting to ease IT workloads. Any issue or status update will appear on your newsfeed, and you can act on it directly without missing a beat
- Device support – At the moment, Poly Lens supports a select range of devices including its Trio conference phones (C60, 8800, 8500, and 8300), Poly Studio version X30 and X50, and the G7500 video conferencing system
Why Poly Lens Makes a Difference
The best thing about Poly Lens is its sheer ease of use. There is no download or installation involved. Thanks to end-to-end cloud-based deployment, you can sign-in to the Poly Lens portal with your Google or Microsoft credentials at the PolyLens homepage.
Poly Lens is a much-needed addition to the company’s hardware series of products. The company already has other endpoint management solutions, like the RealPresence Resource Manager System — but you need to set these up individually for different device variants. Lens changes this with a unified, cloud-based approach where adding a device to your IT governance dashboard is literally as easy as pressing a button.
What We Think
Lens’ primary use-case is to detect and solve utilisation challenges in your company. “Today’s businesses understand that the right communications and collaboration tools can increase productivity, but there’s a blind spot when it comes to how these tools are adopted and used by their workforce,” said Beau Wilder, VP and GM manager of infrastructure, cloud and analytics for Poly.
As you ramp up your spends on collaboration technology, Lens can help unlock maximum ROI from your investments, eventually extending outside of the Poly device family.
from UC Today https://ift.tt/2BljUSU
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