Polycom Soundstation IP 7000 SIP-Based IP Conference Phone (No PSU)

The hardware is great. Speaker and mic is loud and clear, but I did have to adjust the gain settings to perfect it in our environment as we have white noise generators which made everyone sound far away with the default settings in our environment.Software... well its much better than it used to be. Old firmware web interface was an absolute nightmare and totally useless. New firmware is much easier and way faster to boot up. You can customize just about anything on this phone, but not from the web interface. (You can however import/export advanced configs).My only beef with polycom is many of thier default settings are ill conceived. You have to spend an inordinate amount of time customizing it to overwrite thier dumb defaults. Settings that should be a factory defaults are advanced options that you can only set using thier config files or provisioning servers. Basially, you come across dumb behaviour, spend hours/days/weeks researching online sifting through 10 versions of thier manuals looking for a way to change that dumb behaviour, then you find it but can't figure out what the parameter values should be because they are convoluted and the manual doesn't tell you IE: -3 to 54, and then do it all over again for the next one. The end result of all that work is an amazing phone that gets the job done (that deserves 5 stars), but I can't in good conscience give it 5 stars because the setup process is way more work than it should be.

I was a little hesitant purchasing this system for a new conference room because of SIP compatibility. However, I am glad that I did. We have an Allworxs SIP, and adding this phone to the existing system was no different than adding a regular IP handset. Although this phone comes with zero instructions whatsoever, there are a lot of websites with guides on how to set this up with your current set-up. Everything on the sound station works on our allworxs system (transfer, hold, and extension dialing) except the clock and I believe answering parked calls. I haven't found a way to manually set the time and it just isn't contacting the servers correctly. So I just gave up and disabled the clock... Lastly, the microphone and speaker clarity are unbelievable; it is sitting in the center of a 18' conference table and it can pick up voices of people sitting on either end. I did end up getting extension microphones to help with echo. The echo is more of our conference room design than phone design.Overall I rate this phone 4/5 with a one star deduction from lack of instructions. I understand they can not include instructions to accommodate every SIP system out there. Polycom should at least include instructions on how to set-up the dialing plan and access the phones web UI, or at least make a reference to the online resource on a sheet of paper.

I will start by saying I think it's ridiculous how much these things cost, especially when you consider how far technology has come and that wired phones haven't been common in homes for decades. That being said, when you're doing business you need to have reliable phones, and nothing beats a wired connection. We use a VOIP service for our business phones, and all the VOIP company had were 5000 series conference phones. The CEO hated them even with the extension microphones (couldn't hear anyone) so I tried a cheaper alternative with two "bases". Those didn't go over well so I bit the bullet, spent 3x the $ and got 2 of these linked by the multi interface module . Haven't heard any complaints since.

It looks very fancy and i had it up and running on my Zulty's phone server in less than 15 minutes for our business. I love how easy it is to set up and use.Update March 25th, 2016Still very happy with this phone. So happy our business bought 4 more of them. Just like my first phone setup it only took me 10-15 minutes to set up the phones including the unboxing time.

If you have the money to afford this phone, I would choose this over any other option. We have used some similar lower end products at our office, and none of them can stand up to the overall look and feel of this phone, not to mention that hd sound is super clear. Easy to configure with my voip service. It is slightly technical though, so make sure that you have someone around who knows what they're doing. I would buy this phone any time I needed a conference phone.