Date: 09/26/08 (IT Professionals)    Keywords: no keywords

I have what I suspect is a relatively stupid question to those who know, but this is outside my areas of expertise, so...

I have a client that is interested in having a small conference room setup for video conferencing. I'm "familiar" with systems from LifeSize, Tandberg, Polycom, etc in that I've used them a couple times, but they were already setup and it was literally a matter of using the remote to select "Satellite Office A". Always in environments where the setups at each end were identical brands and usually over VPNs.

My question is, if you have one office with say LifeSize, will that system be able to communicate with any other office using Tandberg, Polycom, etc, and over public IP (assuming proper bandwidth of course)? Are they compatible, and all that's needed is a public IP? Or do all endpoints really need to be identical? Are one-time video conferences difficult to setup?

Thanks for the primer! I suspect that once the "obvious" is out of the way the rest is relatively easy to figure out, for an IT pro.

P.S. If anyone has suggestions for a 4-6 person conference room, and ballpark cost figure, that'd be useful too.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/itprofessionals/80346.html