Snom C520-WiMi and C52-SP Conferencing: Use Cases

Hello dear reader!
As promised, we continue to review the conference system Snom C520-WiMi and speakerphone Snom C52-SP… Let’s talk today about the intended use cases for these devices, both separately and in conjunction with each other.

Workplace at home

Let’s start with the trends of the season. Over the past year, each of us at least once participated in a working conference from home, and some switched to a permanent mode of work from a cozy home chair. Naturally, when working from home, the issue of sound quality, during a meeting or when talking with colleagues and clients is more relevant than ever. It is far from always convenient to solve it in a standard way for an office – connecting an IP phone at a remote workplace of an employee is not a standard task, most likely you will have to organize a VPN connection from his home network to securely connect the phone to a telephone exchange, and is it worth the game? Plus, we’re all used to using a laptop or PC as one of our primary means of communication at home, so why change anything here? You just need to slightly improve the scheme you are used to. Connect a speakerphone to your home PC C52-SPusing DECT dongle A230 and do not limit yourself on moving around the house during negotiations by placing the speakerphone in any place where it is convenient for you to discuss business issues.

Communication quality in the workplace is surprisingly simple.

Surely, everyone who has ever designed and installed a telephony system in a company has faced the dilemma of equipping the offices of big bosses. On the one hand, the manager needs a modern device, with a number of BLF-keys, a handset, a large display and a comfortable keyboard. But besides this, the phone should have a good quality of hands-free communication and not only good sound quality, but also a coverage area that significantly exceeds a standard workplace. The latter can rarely be provided by a stationary device, and a conference phone is too narrowly focused device to meet all the needs that arise in the work of a manager. Installation of two devices doubles up the call history, complicates the setup and runs into the problem of registering several devices on one SIP account, which is still not supported by every communication server. It would seem that this is a dead end. But this is a dead end only when trying to approach the issue in a standard way, we propose a slightly different way.

A landline telephone is actually installed on the manager’s table, and the speakerphone is connected to it using a DECT dongle, allowing you to use all the capabilities of a familiar device, as well as hold meetings using the manager’s office as a mini-meeting room.

Equipping small meeting rooms

Many times in our work we have come across the fact that in a meeting room, in addition to a conference phone, it is almost always required to install an apparatus for calling employees to a meeting. It is not always convenient to use a conference phone for this, therefore, a DECT handset or a stationary device is usually placed in meeting rooms. But why not use this device as the main source of the call, providing it with a high-quality acoustic complement in the form of a speakerphone?

You get standard functionality for a small meeting room, reduced costs, since the speakerphone will be a more budget solution than a full-fledged conference phone, and the mobility of the intercom, since the speakerphone connected via DECT is not tied by wires and easily moves within a radius of 50 m from the stationary device.

Meeting rooms of medium size.

To equip full-fledged meeting rooms, the speakerphone as an independent solution is no longer suitable – here you need a larger microphone pickup radius, your own dialer located right on the conference room table and at the same time there is a need to capture voice outside the main table of the room, for example, if the speaker needs to depict something on the blackboard, as often happens during a meeting.

In this case, we propose the following concept: A conference phone is used at the conference room table Snom C520-WiMi… If you need to move away from the table for any action, you remove the microphone that is part of the device at normal times and take it with you, ensuring that all meeting participants can hear well. Worried that changing microphone position will affect overall sound quality? Not worth it. The microphones are synchronized with each other and will provide good quality communication in any position.

Conference rooms and large meeting rooms.

Thinking about equipping rooms of various sizes, we also got to conference rooms. The fundamental difference here from the previous examples is, firstly, in the much larger size of the premises, and secondly, in the need to work with sound from several sources, which are very far apart from each other. In this case, one conference phone will obviously not be enough, since although the expansion microphones can help to receive sound from different points in the hall, they do not have speakers, which means they will not convey to the speaker the reaction of the interlocutor. What to do? Remember the speakerphone again!

Naturally this time Snom C52-SP will not be the main device for working with sound, but only part of a system based on C520-WiMi… A maximum of 3 can be connected to the system C52-SP, providing good audibility to every corner of the conference room.

Outcome

We contemplated the application Snom C520-WiMi and C52-SP from their point of view. We are sure you will find many uses for conferencing devices, and we will always be happy to help you with their implementation, providing high-quality and functional communication tools for your tasks.