{"id":7923,"date":"2020-03-03T14:15:49","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T14:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skyswitch.com\/?p=7923"},"modified":"2021-09-21T20:55:10","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T20:55:10","slug":"product-review-poly-trio-8300-conference-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/product-reviews\/product-review-poly-trio-8300-conference-phone\/","title":{"rendered":"Product Review: The Poly Trio 8300 Conference Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>BY JASON HARRIS,\u00a0<em>REVIEWS EDITOR<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I work for a small company and as a small business, we try to conduct our conference calls the best we can \u2014 on our laptops. Thus, we often struggle with the quality of voice calls and as a result, our business meetings suffer. In our company\u2019s case, we use a variety of conference calling solutions based on who we\u2019re meeting with, including WebEx, Zoom, UberConference, Microsoft Teams and Amazon Chime \u2014 and also GoToMeeting and the like.<\/p>\n<p>We also call each other directly when meetings are between smaller groups. It\u2019s comical because, typically, we huddle around one person\u2019s laptop, which is unfortunate for the person we\u2019re calling because they can\u2019t hear people who are sitting a few feet away from the hosts\u2019 laptop. Thankfully, this is why <a href=\"https:\/\/www.poly.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Poly<\/a> has conference calling phones that make everyone\u2019s phone collaboration easy and so headache-free.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.polycom.com\/voice-conferencing-solutions\/conference-phones\/trio.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Poly\u2019s Trio<\/a> line of conference phones brings a robust variety of features, capabilities and options for businesses and conference rooms of all sizes. Today we\u2019ll take a look at the Trio 8300 conference phone, which is intended to be a smart conferencing solution for small meeting rooms.<\/p>\n<h2>Features and Overview<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.polycom.com\/content\/dam\/polycom\/common\/documents\/data-sheets\/poly-trio-8300-datasheet-enus.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Poly Trio 8300<\/a> is the least expensive Poly conference calling solution aimed at small meeting spaces or huddle rooms aimed at calls with 2-5 people. The conference phone features noise-blocking technology, adeptly called NoiseBlock, Bluetooth connectivity and is compatible with video conferencing solutions including Zoom, Skype for Business, WebEx and more.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s peek at the Trio 8300\u2019s features:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Three microphones designed to pick up voices up to 12\u2019 away<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">NoiseBlock noise-canceling capability<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">WiFi connectivity for cord-free collaboration<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A useful on-screen display for call management<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Color LED lights that indicate call and mute status<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Support for up to three phone lines<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Full call management including call forwarding, waiting, do-not-disturb and more<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dimensions of 13.3\u201d x 14.1\u201d x 3.5\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Opening the Box<\/h2>\n<p>The Poly Trio 8300 is an attractive UFO-looking device that is designed to fit nicely in your huddle or conference room\u2019s desk setup. As expected, it\u2019s 3-star shape is designed in a way to pick up voices, as this is a conference-calling phone.<\/p>\n<p>In the box, you\u2019ll find the Trio unit itself along with a power adapter and an ethernet cord. Simply remove the plastic and attach the physical cords, and your Trio 8300 will boot up, assume an IP address on your local network, and you\u2019re ready for provisioning and set up.<\/p>\n<h2>Setup on SkySwitch<\/h2>\n<p>Once I had the Poly Trio 8300 unboxed and on the network, the conference phone boots up for the initial set up.<\/p>\n<p>Setting up on SkySwitch\u2019s network is easy \u2014 simply find your device\u2019s MAC address on the onscreen menus and migrate to the management dashboard to add the Trio to your organization\u2019s account. If the Trio 8300, or any Poly device is ordered via the SkySwitch Store, it comes auto-provisioned. Zero-touch provisioning is clearly the way to go, but as this 8300 came direct from Poly, I set it up.<\/p>\n<p>In just a few minutes, I simply navigated to the Admin settings, then Network Configuration, then Provisioning Server, changed the Server Type to HTTP and set the server address to <a href=\"http:\/\/sipcfg.io\/cfg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/sipcfg.io\/cfg<\/a> \u2014- then, the Poly Trio 8300 power cycled itself and the phone came back ready to use!<\/p>\n<p>One last step I had, after the reboot, was enabling Wi-Fi on the Trio 8300 according to the setup in our conference room. To accomplish this, I followed <a href=\"https:\/\/documents.polycom.com\/bundle\/trio-ag-5-5-3-AA\/page\/t_ucs_ag_enable_wi-fi_on_the_polycom_trio_8800.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Poly\u2019s instructions<\/a>. Note: you\u2019ll need to know your organization&#8217;s Wi-Fi Network type, SSID and passcode. For example, our network is WPA2-PSK &#8211; I had to set that preference in our Trio 8300\u2019s menu.<\/p>\n<h2>Performance and Real-World Usage<\/h2>\n<p>I\u2019ve placed calls on the Trio 8300 in our conference room, which is sized appropriately for the unit. We have a conference room with brick on one side and a small amount of background noise (because the room isn\u2019t totally noise-isolated), so it\u2019s a good testing place for this conference calling phone.<\/p>\n<p>In a word, the Trio 8300 has performed <i>marvelously<\/i>. It is so nice to be able to have a conference call with as many as 5 people, and for all of us to be fully audible to our callers. With a laptop-based phone call, we\u2019re asked 10-20% of the time to repeat ourselves and we have trouble hearing the other party.<\/p>\n<p>I tested the range of the Trio 8300 by stepping around 10 feet away from the unit and asked callers how I sounded. They reported that I, of course, wasn\u2019t as audible as I was when I was 2-4 feet away, but they could hear every word.<\/p>\n<p>Also, Wi-Fi performance has been strong on the Trio 8300. With this unit on our office\u2019s Wi-Fi, we have had no dropouts, garbled audio or performance issues at all. In fact, performance is so fantastic that it\u2019s not noticeable at all that this unit is using a wireless, not a hard-wired, connection.<\/p>\n<h2>Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>The Poly Trio 8300 is an effective and affordable conference calling phone\/solution for your small business that\u2019s aimed to keep small teams in close connection. It performs very well, even in a wireless-network based environment.<\/p>\n<section data-id=\"81d3bb9\" data-element_type=\"section\"><em>*Like all products Jason Harris is reviewing, this device is available in the SkySwitch store, accessible through the SkySwitch Reseller Dashboard.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BY JASON HARRIS,\u00a0REVIEWS EDITOR I work for a small company and as a small business, we try to conduct our conference calls the best we can \u2014 on our laptops. Thus, we often struggle with the quality of voice calls and as a result, our business meetings suffer. In our company\u2019s case, we use a&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":7933,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-product-reviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skyswitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}