The only meeting room phone and video conferencing system you’ll ever need
Story by Kat Orphanides, Andrew Webb, IT Pro
The Polycom RealPresence Trio 8800 Collaboration Kit is a combined conference room phone and telepresence system. At its heart is Polycom’s RealPresence Trio 8800 phone. Its tripod-like appearance will be familiar to anyone who’s previously used the company’s ubiquitous SoundStation conference room telephony hardware, but the Trio 8800 is far better looking than most of its predecessors.
It also has significantly broader capabilities than the SoundStation phones, with a 5in colour LCD touchscreen interface and the ability to pair a laptop or tablet for easy control. It also has screen-sharing and full video conferencing capabilities using either a point-to-point link to other video-capable Polycom telephony devices and software or SIP Video via your business’s VoIP system.
We tested the RealPresence Trio video conferencing system using Asterisk 11.21.2. The hardware also supports Lync 2013/Skype for Business Server, Broadsoft, Cisco CUCM V10 and Avaya Communications Manager V7. Annoyingly, the Skype for Business and SIP versions of the Trio 8800 have different SKUs and run different firmware, so make sure you buy the appropriate system to go with your existing VoIP infrastructure.
