Daniel Pearson's Blog

Whenever I do a demonstration of OCS I always begin by bringing out a whole range of devices that we have to demonstrate and give one to each of the people present for the demonstration. At the end of the day the device isnt what the customers are buying. It is the desktop experience and feature set that comes with bringing your communications to the desktop layer.

There are many devices now certified, optimised and designed for use with Office Communicator. It is no longer a requirement for users to have to have a headset. A lot of people believe that if you are going to be running a softphone on your PC then you need to use a headset (and look like a call centre agent). This is not the case. There are a wide range of devices out there that look like a handset while are still connected to your PC.

I wanted to put together some recommendations that I have on each device and where its good and bad points are. I am fortunate enough to have vendors give me devices to test and comment on as we are now running all of the OCS services and are deploying communicator to many organisations as their replacement to their PBX.

That being said it would take too long to go through each device so i am going to pick some of the more popular and up-coming devices out there. At the time of writing this blog I am using the soon to be released Voyager Pro headset by Plantronics so i will start with that.

Device: Voyager Pro (due for release Q4 2009 / Q1 2010)

Category: Wireless Headset

Pros:

• Great looking device.
• Very comfortable to wear. I have been wearing it for almost a week solid and dont find it unconfortable. I am one of those people who hate having headphones in my ears. This device is surprisingly comfortable and light weight.
• Great battery life. I have had it for 6 days and only charged it once. Talk time is claimed to be 6 hours of actual talk time. I am yet to have a flat battery.
• This unit works wth my mobile and my PC at the same time. It didnt come wth the USB dongle but i had one from the Savi Go and that seemed to pair up ok.
• The switching between mobile and PC is also very well done. It seems to know which device i want to answer so all i need to do is press the button on the headset. Very Star Trek…
• Audio Clarity is also great. It is one of the first wireless devices designed for speech recognition. (and it actually works….exchange now understands me!)

Cons:

• I would have to start by saying the range is very poor. While i have not used  bluetooth devices before i would strugle to get 25 metres out of it. I am used to using DECT. This bluetooth doesnt even come close to the range of DECT.

I actually quite like this device. The only problem I had was that it didnt come with the USB dongle for your PC so I used another plantronics one that I had. They are going to be shipping this when they are officially released so no problems there.

As usual I have put another poll below. Please take the time to complete it.