Polycom 3725-77601-001H manual Polycom CMA System Integration with Microsoft Outlook

Polycom CMA System Setup Overview

In Routed mode, the number of concurrent calls supported by a CMA system is derived from the number of device licenses at a 3/10 ratio (calls/devices). So, for example, a system in Routed mode licensed for 5000 devices supports up to 1500 calls.

The advantage of Routed mode is that it enables advanced features such as Simplified Dialing, Conference on Demand, Alternate Routing, Least Cost Routing, MCU board hunting and firewall traversal for a Polycom VBP system in "Enterprise" or "E" mode. Routed mode is also supported for the Polycom VBP system in "Service Provider" or "S" mode.

The disadvantage of routed mode is that a gatekeeper failure and restart terminates all running conferences that include a registered device. Calls are not reestablished after a system failure and restart. Conferences show a status of Active, but participants show a status of Disconnected.

In either mode, CDR information for calls is accurate if the CMA system does not fail and the endpoints send a DRQ (Disconnect Request) at the end of the call.

Polycom CMA System Integration with Microsoft Outlook

Polycom now supports two conferencing methods when integrating Polycom conferencing with Microsoft Outlook: Reserved and Reservationless.

Note

If you wish to implement both reserved conferencing (enabled by a CMA system) and reservationless or ad hoc conferencing (enabled by a Polycom DMA system), you should create two pools of RMX bridges as described in “DMA View” on page 225. However if you do, Polycom does not recommend using both the Polycom Scheduling Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook (Reserved Conferencing) and the Polycom Conferencing Add-in for Microsoft Outlook (Reservationless Conferencing) on the same client system.

Standard Polycom CMA System and Reserved Conferencing

Reserved conferencing is standard with the CMA system. All conferences scheduled either through the CMA system web scheduler or one of the Scheduling Plugins are reserved conferences, which means the CMA system reserves video bridge, network resources, and video endpoints at the scheduled time. In this case, the calendars for the endpoints are stored and maintained by the CMA system.

When the conference is scheduled using the Scheduling Plugin for Microsoft Outlook and the participants use Microsoft Outlook as their E-mail and calendaring tool, the scheduled conferences are also posted as meetings on the participants’ Outlook calendars. However, the endpoints themselves do not have Outlook calendars.

Polycom, Inc. 399