[asterisk-users] Productivity Suite on Polycom IP7000

[Karl Fife]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Watkins, Bradley" <Bradley.Watkins at compuware.com>
To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion" 
<asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2010 4:50 PM
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Productivity Suite on Polycom IP7000


>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
>> [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of
>> Karl Fife
>> Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2010 5:42 PM
>> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
>> Subject: [asterisk-users] Productivity Suite on Polycom IP7000
>>
>> Has anyone here ever actually truly successfully gotten a
>> Polycom IP7000 to
>> take a productivity suite license and enabled the bonus
>> features like 4-way
>> calling, recording etc?  It ALWAYS works perfectly with ALL of our
>> Soundpoint IP 5/6xx phones, but NEVER for our IP7000s.
>>
>> I just want to know it's POSSIBLE before I keep slogging away
>> at this.  Is
>> there a 'bastard_phone=yes' setting that I need to toggle?
>> Also, does
>> anybody know any good therapists with a side-specialty of
>> torn-out hair
>> replacement? :-)
>
> According to the release notes (I'm looking at 3.2.3), 4-way
> conferencing is not possible on the IP7000s.
>
> In fact, any of the features that are supported that would otherwise
> require a Productivity License (LDAP, Conference Management) are
> available without any license.
>
> Regards,
> - Brad

Thanks Brad.
That matches my observation.
It seems like such an ironic a feature omission as to be absurd.  The 
expensive _conference_  phone seems (to me) to be precisely the most likely 
to support conference-like features.

We actually first bumped into this 'problem' over a year ago when the phone 
was first released.  We were early adopters.  We put in support tickets in 
with Polycom but got no love.  We gave up, only now revisiting it.  You'd 
think someone in support might have known it was not supported way back 
then.

What's most interesting about this is that if you look at the ORIGINAL 
productivity suite marketing Flash videos, they actually show FIVE-way [sic] 
conferencing on an IP670.  That's five-way, as in YOU and 4 other callers. 
I suspect that 5-way was originally the hope, but in the real-world it ended 
up being too resource intensive to provide consistent quality.  It seems 
reasonable that the feature may have simply been 'scaled back' from FIVE to 
FOUR-way calling on the IP6xx. By extension, perhaps the IP7000 (supporting 
full 14khz audio) found its 'real world' limit at THREE-way calling instead 
of FOUR.  Just a WAG, but maybe a reasonable one.

-Karl