Video Conferencing can generically refer to the simple act of turning on the embedded video camera on a laptop or mobile phone while participating in a Skype for Business meeting, or walking into a traditional corporate conferencing room and expecting to join the same meeting using some level of in-room equipment providing a higher-end video experience. This familiar behavior was the figurative linchpin in the literal redevelopment of interoperability solutions like Polycom RealConnect back in 2014, later followed by other products like Pexip Infinity or Acano Dual Homed Conferencing (now part of Cisco Meeting Server) which began to use similar architectures pioneered by Polycom. The tide that seems to driving this is the ubiquitous usage and understanding of a very common workflow based on using Outlook to schedule a Skype for Business meeting. Note that in the past most of the interoperability requests were described more often as “bringing together standard conferencing and desktop conferencing systems.” More recently that need is specifically about getting the traditional solutions to play along in the Microsoft UC workflow. The intent of this article is to clearly explain a few of the concepts and delivery models surrounding a topic of continuously growing interest: bringing traditional video teleconferencing (VTC) solutions into Skype for Business meetings. The main differences since then are that the overall solutions have become more streamlined and feature-rich in the few years that have passed while knowledge of the back-end infrastructure is deemed less important as more of these components are moving into cloud-provided models.
The concepts outlined here may look familiar as much of what was covered in this previous article has been applicable to on-premises Skype for Business Server (SfB) deployments for some time. Interoperability is a term which can been used in a few different ways throughout the industry, but the articles here attempt to separate the overall term between ‘ native’ integration provided directly within a client or endpoint versus ‘ interoperability’ which can be provided indirectly between systems by way of an intermediary component. The summaries below also include various details from today’s announcements from Microsoft and some of their device partners at the Ignite 2016 event in Atlanta. Fresh on the heels of the recent Microsoft broadcast entitled Video Interop in the Cloud have come a number of questions from the overall community looking for further clarification on exactly what all this means.
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