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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Most place I've worked, we'd waste anywhere from 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every meeting just trying to get A/V systems and voice conferencing to work.

"Anyone there? Hello? Crap, someone needs to dial in as the host. OK Is everyone dialed in? Good. Oh, wait, Roger can't hear us. Roger, dial back in. OK. Hey, whoever is at the cocktail party, can you go on mute?? Thank you. All right. Who's projecting? The projector is VGA, does anyone have a laptop with VGA? How about a dongle? Great, we can see it now. Can everyone who's remote see the screen sharing? No? OK let's restart the screen sharing program. How about now? Shit, we lost Roger again! Why is the screen 640x480? Damnit, can we just use a different laptop? E-mail the presentation to Diane, we can use her laptop. Did Roger dial back in yet??"

It's almost universally an awful UX.

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I worked for over a year writing software for video conferencing systems. It turns out the market has a lot of very strong solutions, but no one is willing to pay for them. The cost of building great video conferencing solutions begins to sky rocket as you reach the higher echelons of quality. The first 75% of good video conferencing is super cheap and easy to make and as you approach the 100% mark things go up exponentially. We found that most people want quality in the 95th percentile but want to pay for the 70th percentile... There will need to be some serious cost reductions, integrations, and improvements on the hardware and video encoding side before enterprise video conferencing meets the quality and price expectations that customers want.

Also important, most video conferencing solutions suffer from the same problems because they all use the same hardware just with a different software layer written on top of it. There are very few providers of video encoding and processing hardware.

So what are the strong solutions? Every high end conference room AV system I've ever seen was total garbage from a UX perspective.

If you are only looking for UX vidyo has a decent product, Microsoft's latest enterprise offering is good, HPs halo now owned by polycom is good, polycom has some cutting edge stuff that is good but very expensive.

But it's important to remember that UX is only about a quarter of the total experience.

If the UX is so bad that people can't make it work and have to resort to putting someone's laptop at one end of the conference table instead of using the conference room AV, then it doesn't matter how good the other three quarters of your system is.

Many value UX higher than that, but even for those who don't, 25% is still a whole heck of a lot.

I simply don't believe this. The cost to develop a system that isn't a horribly complex, unintuitive UX disaster is that much more expensive? We aren't talking about amazing AV quality with lag, we're talking about a system that doesn't take 15 minutes out of a meeting to get working.

Gimme your specs, I'm curious to know what meeting infrastructure you're using. I can start a vidyo meeting in about 15 seconds.

There are a lot of reasons for horrible complexity.... 1. There are many ways to roll out a video conferencing system because the hardware is all commodity. Many companies will have their IT department buy all the hardware and try to deploy it using the built in methodologies for connecting conference rooms. This is usually when everyone is given a 16 digit pin number to dial into a room, this causes the dial in nightmares. There are also 3rd parties that will basically sell the same solution as the "custom IT solution" as a service. 2. If you want a decent UI experience you move from snapping commodity hardware together to building a software engineering team, software release pipeline, software updates, and all the stuff that comes along with it. This is usually done by a third party but it still costs more than the commodity solution which it is priced against 3. Once you get a software engineering team involved they have to support the different types of hardware out in production. Most companies have generations of conferencing hardware installed with different configurations throughout the company and do not want to pay for all new hardware. Now your software has to be able to implement screen sharing with 5 different codecs and all those codecs have different bugs and different communication protocols. 4. HP tried to solve this by building their own codecs and forcing all rooms to deploy with the same configurations, but this ended up being the most expensive video conferencing system in the world. It also had the best quality and best reliability.

So yes the cost to building a good ui and less complex system can be way more expensive.

What you need there then (if you are a Windows shop - unlikely), is Lync or Skype for Business.

Despite it being Microsoft, I've found it to be the most reliable and seamless system for multi-party Audio, Video, and Screen-sharing based meetings - and I've used at some time or another in my career almost all the other big hitters in the corporate virtual-conferencing space.

Combine Lync/SfB with one of those nice multi-camera units[1] that sit in the middle of the meeting table and provide audio tracking of the speaker (the active camera switches to the person speaking) along with always-on 360 degree video as well - and it's the closest you can get to being there.

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[1] http://www.polycom.co.uk/products-services/products-for-micr...

Barfs.

Sorry, Lync/Skype for Business has been awful for us.

I'll be fair and state that I don't if it is Microsoft's or our tech teams fault.

Our company has used 3 generations of polycom devices and they have all been terrible/unusable. Those units are just an IT nightmare because of how they are set up. The newer ones require two ethernet ports if you want them wired (because reasons?), and then also act as a weird computer joining the meeting. If you are in a room with a device, the room has to be invited and join the meeting, then you have to make sure that polycom device is set up with sound but that everything else in the room is muted or else the electronic Harpies will be unleashed. Then if you want screen sharing and video, since the video is regulated by the polycom but screen is shared on a laptop, you can potentially get the video in video in video recursive fun time which will result in fun buffering.

We have "quick" instructions on how to use these devices and they take up a whole page. Most of the devices are abandoned or just left there gathering dust while we use a simple Jabra speaker puck.

PS - Most of these experiences are with SfB. These devices are somehow worse with Webex.

> What you need there then (if you are a Windows shop - unlikely), is Lync or Skype for Business.

I've used that, and experienced comparable delays of at least 5 minutes of futzing on average to get everything working, with occasional bursts to 10 minutes.

Anecdotal, but our company uses SfB and it has been anything but good. We always have problems in voice calls (which forms the majority of use) - doesn't matter if we're all sitting on the same LAN with wired connections or on very good Internet connections away from the office. The number of disconnects, breaking audio, unable to hear someone, and of course, SfB deciding to crash sometimes after some updates - it's been terrible for people using it. The company has "saved" money by moving to it from using phone lines. Who cares about individual productivity anyway?

Having been on the other side of a Skype for Business installation I can tell you that it is extremely variable and can scale anywhere from a self-contained single server set-up[1] to a multi-region, multi-fail-over-cluster, highly available, extremely complicated set-up[2]. We had a few issues post initial install but spent the time to track them down to the point where our system was reliable and more usable than web ex and it's ilk. This is the crux of Lync, so much depends on your required set up and how well that was done.

[1] - http://bressner.com/ucbox-express/ [2] - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=550989

Well, we're on MS Office 365 and all that it provides, including Skype. I have no idea how things could be so bad even with that (it used to be bad before with an on-premise installation too).

Skype for Business is abysmal. Login credential always seem to be a huge problem using the desktop client so we just join using the web client.

Skype for Business (i.e. rebranded Lync) is complete garbage.

If I could even log in to Skype for Business, that would be great.

Most of my customers are located in a different city than the one I live and work in. You'd think videoconferencing would be perfect for someone like me.

But no, once or twice a month I rent a car and drive ~225km to meet with them personally. I supplement these in-person meetings with phone calls.

I'm not sure I've ever had a videoconference call go perfectly smoothly, and I found that these kinds of calls added all sorts of invisible friction to the customer relationship. My goal as a service provider is to take problems away from my customer, not to add new ones or make them feel technically inept.

My travel days are long and tiring, but most of my customers actually forget that I'm not local, which is exactly how I like it.

This product looks interesting, and purports to solve some of the issues, but color me skeptical.

Do you think a video wall would help? I often wonder if it is the size of the screen that makes people feel 'distant' when using video conferencing.

Super high def full wall screen, so they can see every hair on your head with minimal lag -- I think this would work, the only thing they'd miss was a handshake.

I don't think the friction has anything to do with screen size. It's the never-ending technical issues.

Oops, you're frozen. Dang, we lost the connection. There's a really bad echo, do you hear that? Bob can't connect. Etc.

Besides, I'm not particularly handsome in HD. :-)

Why do members of an online conference need to be seen at all? What is the benefit of adding video instead of just using audio -- y'know, the medium by which actually information is exchanged?

Human beings happen to be tuned for face to face communication. They exchange a relatively low bandwidth but high importance information through facial gestures, eyebrows, eye contact, etcetera. As long as businesses relationships are still happening between such human beings, there will be a value placed on seeing each other's faces.

Yeah, I get that. I'm sure there are benefits for a purely business-oriented meeting where people are guarding their cards and trying to make deals.

But I've had to be on conferences with purely technical topics where people use cameras. There's barely even a reason for the call to begin with when specs and questions can just be sent via e-mail, so why do we need to see each other?

I'm convinced this exact scenario, bad A/V at the start of a meeting, has cost billions in lost dev time.

I completely agree. Out of all the places I've worked at and all of the developers I've talked to, not being able to work AV with TVs for presenting or conference calls is the common, almost 100% of the time an issue.

One place I worked at spent about $25,000 to get an AV system setup complete with conference calling that was supposed to make it "easy". Every single meeting without fail we'd waste 10 minutes trying to figure it out then have to bring someone from IT support who would then spend 10 minutes themselves fiddling with it.

Perhaps if expectations were set before rolling out a new system, that IT Support would attend every meeting ten minutes early to get things working, conference system decision-makers would have priorities better aligned with the rest of the organization. Of course you could plan for a "Phase 2" in which mandatory attendance would cease, but that would be based on performance rather than timing.

> IT Support would attend every meeting ten minutes early to get things working

Why must these things be so complicated that you need IT support for them? The purpose of computers is to automate and make things easier.

That's the point: they shouldn't be. A situation like that would be seen as an intolerable waste in the C-suite (with the exception of their IT support guy). However, if the status quo were for the support to be there every time, that sets up a different conversation in the executive meeting:

CEO: "Why does everything take so long to get done?"

Everyone: "We can only have 15 meetings starting at the same time, and any additional meetings must be delayed 20 minutes, because there are only 15 IT support techs."

CEO: "What?!? Is this something to do with that teleconference project? That was like a year ago!"

CIO: "That's why I've suggested to the stakeholders, most of whom are here in this meeting, that they sign off on moving to Phase 2. That way we'll have more capacity to fix the ongoing issues with desktops and printers..."

Everyone: "Absolutely not! Your techs get there ten minutes ahead of time, and usually they're still struggling to get everything working five minutes after we should have started! The system you bought is crap!"

CIO: "We've always had a great relationship with that vendor, but unfortunately their product has had a few issues..."

CEO: "I know what 'great relationship' means... I don't care if the salesmen for competing products don't have comparable expense accounts, just get something in here that works!"

Well I guess this is what the Microsoft Surface Hub promises to fix. That makes 10(or 20k) per Device please.

Unless your tied to Microsoft Products (including Skype for Business), its not worth buying the Surface Hub.

Care to elaborate? What doesn't work? Can't you use normal Skype?

Its been several months, but I recall it is really tied to Skype for Business (Lync), and having a windows domain. The office that had one of these didn't use skype for business nor had an Windows domain. It can be switched into a dumb display mode though, but performance in that mode is iffy.

why isn't Google Hangouts good enough?

I've done a lot of deals, real high value business, and meeting coordination in them, in a variety of situations and companies.

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