Telepresence & iPad/iPhone

[mpitts]

I have a number of users who like using the Polycom App, downloaded from the Apple store, with our Cisco Telepresence system. I don't think Cisco officially supports this App, but lots of folks are fascinated with their iPhones and iPads and I've been trying to accommodate them..

The problem I'm having is that they seem to be inconsistent.  Sometimes they work fine and other times they get connected fine but have one-way video (usually no video outbound from the C series endpoints). Some use a Polycom Windows based client to connect remotely and have no issues.  I've done some testing myself with my iPhone (all are iOS 6) and had the same experience.  So far I can't seem to pin down the cause.  I opened up the RTP port range on the endpoints a while back and that seemed to help for a while but I suspect that wasn't really the whole problem. It also seems to occur on both 4G and Wireless connections.

Our systems include VCS Expressway (outside the firewall) and VCS Control (inside) with three C series endpoints, all managed by TMS.

If anyone has seen this problem, and managed to figure it out, I would certainly appreciate some help.

I've seen some notes on folks having success with the Jabber clients for iPhone/iPad, and I've been working on implementing CUPS and Jabber but it's not likely going to be ready in a hurry.  Some kinks left in the archiving and compliance configurations.

Thanks,

Mike

[Jens Didriksen]

Why not steer them towards Cisco JabberVideo instead? App is free and can be used with both the "enterprise" version and the "free" version hosted by Cisco.

Just search appstore for Cisco and download and install Jabber.

See our webpage for more info:

http://www.jcu.edu.au/Videoconferencing/tips/JCU_109027.html

If using the hosted version, then they must creat an account first:

https://www.ciscojabbervideo.com/home

which, if they also download this client, also gives them a desktop videoconferencing client which will work on both PCs and Macs.

/jens

[mpitts]

Thanks Jen,

I appreciate the feedback but I mentioned that I'm not ready just yet to deploy Jabber.  I personally have an account on the Cisco hosted Jabber video cloud, and that wouldn't be a bad idea except for the fact that our systems, for secuity reasons, don't register with a public gatekeeper.  I've found that the cloud can't connect to us.  A few others also have accounts and it works fine for desktop-to-desktop sessions.

Mike

[Jens Didriksen]

My apologies - I didn't read your post properly....

We have the same set-up as you VCS-C inside FW, VCS-E outside, and we tried Polycom RealPresence app as well on iPad, before Cisco released their app, but we had similar issues to what you described which we were not able to resolve.

This became a moot issue for us though once Cisco released their app as we have "enterprise" JabberVideo rolled out to all and sundry anyway, so provisioning the iPad app wasn't a big deal.

Works well.

/jens

[mpitts]

Jen,

Happy to hear that I'm not the only one who has run into this problem.  I'm still hoping someone may have found a solution to this headache, but I probably need to accelerate my Jabber deployment.

Thanks,

Mike