Device Review: Plantronics Voyager PRO-M UC V2

Seems Plantronics are on a roll at the moment. Thanks to friends in low places I managed to get my hands on the new Lync compatible Plantronics Voyager Pro-M this week (there is another version of this headset that is compatible with less well known softphones:-).

Finally a Bluetooth headset that comes with a nice case that makes loosing the small Bluetooth adapter really hard. Maybe they have been reading my posts about other devices. Anyway. This is a sweet device. I normally have all sorts of issues with Bluetooth but of late I have noticed that either I am getting more used to this technology or the technology is getting better. I will just assume its getting better.

My biggest issue is pairing. I always seem to mess this up but with the Voyager it was pretty easy. I paired it to my cell, Plantronics Calisto and the adapter that came with the device. They all worked fine. Having it paired with my cell and the PC adapter at the same time to take calls on either device is a nice feature. What's also pretty neat is the update to my presence when both are working.

Back to the case. The headset comes with a case and not just a little bag. Why hadn't someone thought of this before I don’t know but at $199 this is a small device that you would like to protect when its not on your ear, right. Although it has a belt clip I don’t see myself walk around with it attached to my pants. It is how ever a good way to attach it inside your laptop case for travel rather than just flapping about down the bottom under all that other stuff.

So is this device enough to get me officially unhooked from DECT and permanently on Bluetooth. Well it does only have a 30 feet range which is a downside but seeing as my kitchen (and bathroom, yes I am one of those people) is only 30 feet from my home office this is really not much of an issue. It also lets you know when your device is paired via speaking to you through the ear piece so you know if you have lost contact by being to far away. In the end my curse of finding a really good Bluetooth device seems to be over.

It does have some other features such as WindSmart and advanced noise cancellation but I have yet to really see this make considerable difference to my calls. I am in only the early stages of testing so this might have more effect as I get out more with my cell phone. What I do like is the automatic answering when you pick it up when its been siting. This can be turned off if this isn't your thing. If its on your ear already when you get a call you will need to press the answer button on the headset.

If there is one thing I will say that I consider slightly negative about the Voyager Pro-M and this really applies to all the Voyager releases over the last few years is that it isn't the most stylish of headsets. It does have the look of an older styled hearing aid which may not be a big deal to some but others may see it as a negative. It doesn’t really bother me but it is something I have noticed. Given what it can do I really don’t care what it looks like though. The form factor does have a benefit though and that is comfort. It is extremely comfortable so if you put your fashion sense to one side and focus on the positives the look is much less distracting.

The last thing I will mention is that the Bluetooth adapter is very small. Most likely the smallest on the market today so the fact they thought to have a case that has a specific place for the adapter is a good idea. Pictured below is the case, headset and USB adapter. If you think the adapter is an illusion because of its size, its not. It really is that small. If you'll notice the square pocket on the inside of the case, this is where the adapter sits.

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So as I feed my device fetish a little more I have found with what I consider another winner. Now I just need a bigger laptop bag.

Comments welcomed.

VoIPNorm

Lync Virtualization Whitepaper

Just wanted to get this out there as it’s a revamped whitepaper. Get it here. Pay special attention to the mixing physical and virtual servers section.

This is somewhat confusing but it states:

2.5.1 Mixing Physical and Virtual Servers Running Lync Server 2010

Generally physical and virtual servers can be combined in a deployment, with the following limitations:

Mixed virtual and physical servers within the same pool are not supported. A pool[1] of Lync Server roles must be deployed as a homogenous set of servers (either physical or virtual) which roughly provide the same amount of resources. For virtualized deployments, ensure that the virtual machines are hosted in a way that equal resources are available to each guest in the pool. Lync Server does not perform load-based load balancing with the exception of the A/V conferencing workload. Note that a virtual Front End Server and a physical SQL Server Back End Servers are explicitly supported.

Balanced end-to end-performance is required. When sizing a virtualized Lync Server deployment, use the guidance provided in this document to size each role adequately, and perform tests using the synthetic load tools available to validate that no bottlenecks exist.


[1] A pool is defined as a Lync Server pool with more than two servers including the follow Server roles: Enterprise Edition Front End Server, Director, Mediation Server, A/V Conferencing Server, and Edge Server.

So if you have a pool of 4 front ends you can not have 2 virtual and 2 on physical servers. They must be all one or the other. But you can have 4 virtual frontends and a physical SQL backend. So the opening statement can be a little misleading. Also of important is the last note. A Lync deployment can be more than one pool . You can have a pool of mediation servers or AV conferencing servers etc. So while in the same pool you can’t mix virtual and physical you can have a mix of pools. So your frontend pool may be on virtualized servers but your AV conferencing server pool  might be physical. Like I said it’s a little confusing but hopefully that explanation helps. Of course it may seem obvious but if you are collocating AV conferencing servers and mediation servers on your frontends you can not mix those as they would be in the same pool as your frontends.

Being familiar with Lync terminology and reading this statement several times is very handy.

Comments welcomed.

VoIPNorm

Polycom Far Side Camera Control with Lync

Short post this week. This is something that has been floating around the web for a few weeks now but I wanted to capture the content on my blog. Far end camera control in Lync is something I have had requested before from a company so this was great to see.

VoIPNorm

ISSUE ALERT: Cisco Gateways with Lync Media Bypass Inbound Call Failures

This was an interesting issue this week that was being encountered by one of the companies I work with. Thanks to the help from some of the guys at Microsoft Global Voice Practice (big thanks to Doug and Taimoor) we were able to find the issue. Also thanks to Eddie who's continual harassment lead me to reach out to Doug and Taimoor for more help.
The Issue
The issue only surfaces for inbound calls when media by pass is turned on the Mediation Server for Cisco Gateways. In the case we were working on the call would make the client ring but the client could not answer and the call would fall back to Exchange Unified Messaging. Although Exchange UM could answer the call the Lync client could not.
Below is the SDP sent by the Cisco gateway that indicates comfort noise payload type 19. 19 was reserved for an IETF draft that was eventually replaced by RFC 3389. RFC 3389 describes a Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) payload format for transporting comfort noise (CN).
 
v=0
o=CiscoSystemsSIP-GW-UserAgent 6674 1741 IN IP4 10.10.125.10
s=session
c=IN IP4 10.10.125.10
t=0 0
m=audio 17544 RTP/AVP 0 101 19
c=IN IP4 10.10.125.10
a=rtcp:17545
a=x-bypassid:bc5cdacd-0c16-47e5-8213-97808ff94bbf
a=rtpmap:0 PCMU/8000
a=rtpmap:101 telephone-event/8000
a=fmtp:101 0-15
a=rtpmap:19 CN/8000
a=ptime:20
a=x-mediasettings:signalboostunsupported rtcpunsupported holdrtcpunsupported
As you can see the gateway signals the wrong comfort noise format for G.711 and the Lync client is unable to answer the call. Not sure why Cisco are still using 19 format as default since the RFC was written in 2002 but it is what it is. There is an expectation in the RFC of backward compatibility   also so this may be more than the wrong default at play here so I am not about to point a finger.
The Fix
There are in fact two fixes that are pretty easily configured on the gateway. First off you can disable Voice Activity Detection all together on the outbound dial peer. The second option is to change the payload type for comfort noise to the correct format. Its pretty common for people to turn VAD off by default so some people may not have realized this issues existed. Previous Cisco documentation for OCS R2 has VAD enabled which it is by default so people migrating to Lync hoping to take advantage of media bypass might be caught out.
Option 1
dial-peer voice 1999 voip
 tone ringback alert-no-PI
 description TO Lync
 destination-pattern 55555
 session protocol sipv2
 session target ipv4:192.168.1.250:5068
 session transport tcp
 dtmf-relay rtp-nte
 codec g711ulaw
 fax protocol none
no vad
 
Option 2
 
dial-peer voice 1999 voip
 tone ringback alert-no-PI
 description TO Lync
 destination-pattern 55555
 session protocol sipv2
 session target ipv4:192.168.1.250:5068
 session transport tcp
 dtmf-relay rtp-nte
 codec g711ulaw
 fax protocol none
rtp payload-type comfort-noise 13
 
Hopefully this helps some poor sole stuck on the problem and now they can move on with their lives.
Comments welcomed.
VoIPNorm

Device Review: Plantronics Calisto 825M

I was lucky enough this week to receive the newly announced Calisto 825M from Plantronics. My socks are officially blown off. Before I begin though I must apologies for my crappy photography but I like to do my own photo’s of a product so you know I have actually tried it out.

Below: The Calisto in all its speakerphone glory

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The Calisto is a really nice design. Large screen and nice big button areas for short stubby fingers like mine. The panel is very responsive but has trouble sometimes if you don’t put enough skin on the touch surface. But all in all its pretty good. When the device is idle the device is mostly blacked out other than the time and your current presence status which is pictured below.

Below: Main display when idle. I really like how bright the display is and displaying the time like this is handy.

image

As with all certified devices it became available on Lync as soon as the device drivers loaded. Very seamless and worked great. One of the great things about this device so far is the Bluetooth pairing. I know that other devices can do it but this was very easy to setup, more so than what I have found with other devices. The fact I can use this device to have a Bluetooth headset, cell phone and Lync all working off this one device is very cool indeed. Although I have tried the Bluetooth headset (from Jabra) I have only my cell phone and Lync currently working with the Calisto. It is pretty easy to switch around once you have done the initial pairing of headset to the Calisto.

Below: Main menu with Bluetooth highlighted

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Below:Cell phone and lapel microphone paired with main unit

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Sound quality so far has been excellent although I haven't tried it out in a expanded conference room. It does a pretty good job in my home office space. Even though this model has a lapel microphone I am not sure I would ever use the lapel microphone at home.The lapel microphone would be good in a large conference room when presenting though.

Below: lapel microphone

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I also really like the call logs and favorites on the device. It’s a handy add for when your PC is locked and you want to make a call without unlocking your PC. Once your cell is paired to the device you can also make use of both of these features to call out either on cell phone or Lync.

Below: Picking the device to make a phone call from. Cell phone or Lync?

image

Portability is not a strong point. Its not that the device is poorly constructed, its more the space it would take up in the average laptop bag. This is a chunky little unit which has no soft carry case. Its design is more akin to the desktop or conference room in my opinion. You could carry it around with you but there are other more portable friendly devices out there. So if portability is your number one concern this is probably not the right device for you.

One thing that could also be improved is conferencing control or displaying conferencing participants. When in a conference it shows as unknown and not a list of participants. This maybe a limitation of the Lync client to pass this information so I don’t want to be to hard on Plantronics but it would be a nice add.

Below: In a conference call

image

All in all this is a really cool device. It does have a price tag of around $250 for the model I received but for what you can do with it I think its worth the money. It really is a great alternative to that $800 conference room phone you probably have right now.

Notes: Here on VoIPNorm I generally don’t give bad reviews. Not because I think every product is great I just don’t have time to review stuff I don’t use and I generally wont use something unless I like it. I am by definition a gadgets guy with no loyalty to any one vendor (I love them all equally). I must have a collection of 10-15 different headsets and speakerphones and yet I keep seeing new products coming out from both Plantronics and Jabra that impress me. I don’t have a hard time finding great products at the moment, its more a case of not enough room in my laptop case to take them all with me.

Comments welcomed.

VoIPNorm