Connect Standard for Microsoft/Google licensing packages

Pexip's Connect Standard licensing packages for Microsoft and Google cover all the needs of your customers who need to interoperate with either Microsoft Teams or Google Meet.

They comprise a corporate-level licensing model (Enterprise Agreement) related to the number of customer room devices (SIP/H.323 endpoints/video systems) and includes all the capabilities required by customers who use the Pexip Cloud Service.

With Connect Standard (formerly referred to as ERC Premium) you can connect internal and external (guest) users into the same meeting, using devices from different manufacturers including Cisco, Poly and Yealink.

The advantages of the Connect Standard solution are:

• Allows you to have a predictable cost.
• Costs are calculated based on the total number of video devices deployed.
• Simplifies room enablement – get access to the full Pexip package.

See this article for more information.

Features summary

The Connect Standard license bundle includes the following components:

Connect Essentials package

The Connect Essentials for Microsoft/Google license packages are simplified offerings that provide 1 call into a Microsoft/Google hosted meeting, One-Touch Join, and also includes 1x Domain Hosting License for the organization.

See Connect Essentials licensing package for more information about our essentials package.

ERC Basic package (renewals only)

The Enterprise Room Connector (ERC) Basic licensing package is now only available as renewals for existing ERC Basic customers.

Interoperability with Microsoft Teams or Google Meet

Pexip has provided Microsoft Teams and Google Meet interoperability since 2018. It includes the following features:

• Allows calls from any SIP or H.323 standards-based endpoints, Microsoft Teams Rooms, and calls from Microsoft Skype for Business Dedicated/Office365.
• Meeting invitations through Outlook/Exchange calendar for Teams, and Google Calendar for Google Meet.
• Direct "lobby bypass" connection without going through the waiting room.
• Desktop sharing with the highest resolution.
• Dual-screen support for viewing/sharing presentations.
• Name overlays of all meeting participants.

• The Connect Standard for Microsoft Teams package includes:

  • SIP Guest Join, which allows external Teams and Google Meet calls outside the organization, up to the purchased calling capacity.
  • Teams-like layout for VTC systems that looks and operates in a similar manner to the meeting experience seen by native Teams clients.
  • Teams meeting indicators: recording, transcriptions and lobby notifications, raised hands, and non-supported content sharing warning message.
  • Participants who connect only by audio and belong to the same organization are displayed with images from the corporate directory associated with their profile or avatar, or their initials if no image exists.
  • Ability to switch to Microsoft's Large Gallery view.
  • Macros on Cisco devices — supporting roster list, change layout, mute controls, raise hand indications etc.
  • Ability to join a Microsoft Teams live event in a Presenter role.
  • QR Code meeting join via Pexip MeetingConnect.
  • Video systems can join a Teams live event in the Presenter role, allowing them to share live audio, video and content. See our Teams live events guide for more details.
• The Connect Standard for Google Meet package includes SIP Guest Join (which allows external Google Meet and Teams calls outside the organization, up to the purchased calling capacity), and the option to use the Adaptive Composition layout.

Enhanced Room Management

Enhanced Room Management (ERM) is a separately-installable Pexip product that provides management of your Cisco and Poly devices and room systems. From system monitoring to bulk provisioning of software upgrades, address books, and branding profiles, it provides everything you need to manage your systems from one single management interface.

Its main features include:

• Monitoring, usage and diagnostic data: it provides instant visibility into video systems and room usage data, allowing you to diagnose room system health in real-time. Call statistics allows you to generate valuable insights reports showing system usage per hour/day by participant or group.
• Provisioning of video systems: you can provision configuration settings to a single system or in bulk across your organization. You can also create and distribute powerful macros for room automation, and update firmware for any number of systems either immediately or scheduled for later that night.
• Address books: you can create address books from multiple sources, including importing from Cisco TMS. Entries in large phonebooks are easy to find by using the search and filtering functions.
• People count:* Currently only available for Cisco devices. real time monitoring of meeting room usage enables you to create powerful reporting from both online and offline meetings.
• Branding profiles:* Currently only available for Cisco devices. you can provision your branding profiles on all or some of your meeting room displays and touch panels across the organization as often as needed.

* Currently only available for Cisco devices.

See this article for more information about ERM.

Full HD (1080p) for Teams CVI

This add-on feature provides Full HD (1080p) video and content to endpoints that are gatewayed into Teams meetings.

Microsoft Teams Rooms SIP/H.323 calling

This add-on feature enables customers who have Microsoft Teams Room devices on Windows with Pro licensing to make and receive 1:1 (also referred to as point-to-point) SIP/H.323 video calls with VTCs.

Teams Room SIP/H.323 calling supports:

• Dialing from a VTC (internal or external) into a Teams Room.
• Dialing from a Teams Room to an internal or external VTC.
• Dialing from a Teams Room into a third-party SIP or H.323 enabled meeting.
• Dialing via One-Touch Join into meetings with other third-party providers.
• Bi-directional screensharing (BFCP or H239) between the Teams Room and the VTC.
• Single and dual screen systems for meetings and content sharing.
• Sending DTMF tones from a Teams Room.

Note that:

• Different calling policies can be applied to certain rooms to, for example, not allow incoming SIP/H.323 calls, while other systems are enabled for this functionality depending on your business requirements.
• When joining a Teams Meeting the full feature set of a Teams Room is available, including participant list and other advanced meeting interaction features. However, this is not a call to a Teams meeting, thus when calling a SIP/H.323 destination many of the standard Teams meeting features (such as call transfer, share whiteboard, and add participant) are not available, as the functionality for 1:1 calls is focused around bidirectional audio/video communication and content sharing.

One-Touch Join (OTJ) / MeetingConnect

We've all had some bad experiences with meeting rooms, not only finding one that's available, but also being able to connect quickly. It's frustrating having to enter the meeting name/id, consisting of an "endless" sequence of characters before you can access the meeting. In general, we end up accepting it, but there are simpler ways to do it. Pexip eliminates complexity and makes it easy to join any meeting, regardless of how the meeting is organized.

Pexip offers two ways to do this:

Trusted devices / lobby bypass

Trusted devices is an add-on for customers with Microsoft Teams CVI or Google Meet interoperability that allows lobby-bypass for SIP video endpoints that are not registered to the service — this enables them to join the interop meeting directly and not have to wait to be admitted by the meeting host.

Video endpoints that are registered on the service under the same company that has the Teams CVI / Google Meet interop service do not need a trusted device license — they are automatically treated as trusted and can bypass the Teams / Google Meet lobby.

Trusted devices join workflow:

Non-trusted devices join workflow:

Learn more about trusted devices in our configuration steps.

Endpoint subscriptions, registration/activation and phonebook

Registering video conferencing equipment to the Pexip Service allows customers a number of advantages that can be summed up as having greater control of calls.

Users can directly call other rooms (internal or external) or initiate a virtual meeting room connection with multiple participants. All this without the need to deploy any additional video conferencing infrastructure or having to upgrade the existing infrastructure, if it is already obsolete.

The Pexip Service:

• Supports devices from Avaya, Cisco, Poly and Yealink.
• Has a simple activation process (sometimes referred to as provisioning) thanks to Pexip's own "Activate Endpoint" application.
• Has its own network that guarantees the quality of service required — it has Points of Presence (PoPs) distributed globally. Before establishing a call, the nearest PoP is identified, so we reduce latency and get better call quality. The procedure is based on a geographical DNS service.
• Allows you to organize a Corporate Directory structured in folders (sorted by country, building and so on). This lets your users more easily find the endpoint or virtual room they want to call. Note that a Cisco or Poly endpoint that supports such a folder option is required to use this feature.
• Includes 4 Mbps maximum bandwidth (with the Premium license) that allows high resolution 1080p meetings. It also provides a good experience when sharing dynamic content from the desktop. A dynamic algorithm is used to distribute that flow rate.
• Encourages the use of security mechanisms in all flows during meetings. It has established preferences when negotiating the signaling protocol to use. In addition, these flows traverse the client's firewalls, requiring a set of firewall rules that you need to enable.

See our list of compatible endpoints.

Business to business calls and firewall traversal

With the cloud service from Pexip you remove the need to place endpoints on the public Internet. Instead, all Pexip registered endpoints and softclients are placed and connected from within the customer’s private network, behind the resident firewall. This provides easy and direct business-to-business video calling, without compromising on security. This is made possible by Pexip’s firewall traversal solution. Pexip registered endpoints automatically connect out through firewalls securely to Pexip Service points of presence (PoPs). Hence there is a secure trust relationship between the endpoints at the customer premises and the Pexip Service in the cloud. This connection is of course secured by TLS. Pexip ensures privacy of all audio and video calls by enabling (by default) encrypted signaling using SIP TLS and encrypted media using Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) for all communications on audio and video.

Learn more about Firewall traversal on the Pexip Service.

Bulk endpoint activation using the Video System Configuration client

Pexip's Video System Configuration client can be used to activate large numbers of hardware video endpoints on the Pexip Service. It will offer the following features:

• Bulk activation of video endpoints
• Bulk firmware upgrade of video endpoints
• Managing configurations (upload, backup, restore)
• Macro upload (Cisco endpoints)

For more information see this article.

Management and Analytics portal

Pexip Analytics lets Pexip Partners view metrics on their customer's service usage. This data includes overall call trends and individual customer usage trends.

See About Analytics for the Pexip Service for more information.

User portal for analytics

Pexip Control Center (PCC) is the platform we're developing to bring the admin and analytics tasks for all users — distributors, partners, company admins and users — into one place.

To find out more, see What is Pexip Control Center?.

Domain hosting

The Pexip Service allows you to assign unique and universal video addresses to users and endpoints, even within the customer's own domain via our Domain Hosting feature. You can even match a user's own email address for a more user-friendly solution.

Learn more about the setup and DNS records required for domain hosting.

Connecting with your local provider via Bring your own carrier (BYOC)

Any Pexip cloud-registered device can make or receive audio calls through a connection with its on-premises provider, which provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

This way you get a higher return on video conferencing room investment and this device becomes the communications center. You don't need to have two devices per room, one for video calls and one only for audio calls.

This interconnection means the cost of international calls can be reduced as these providers such as Voxbone and Twilio may offer lower rates.

Learn more in our BYOC guidelines.

Immersive video experience with Adaptive Composition

Based on artificial intelligence technology, Adaptive Composition detects participant faces and frames them optimally, providing an immersive video experience.

It is independent of where the participants are and which device they are using. No end-user action or configuration is required.

See this article for more information.

Licensing considerations

• A Connect Standard license is purchased for each video device, with a minimum of 10 licenses.
• You can declare more devices to connect to the Pexip Service and add them at any time during the duration of the contract.
• During the renewal period (from one month before the end date), Pexip will review the license amount along with the customer to confirm that the license consumption corresponds to the number of licenses purchased. Pexip reserves the right to renegotiate the contract, in case of any discrepancies.

To set up a trial or to order a Connect package, see Pexip Connect: trial, orderability and enablement.

Terms of service

• The total number of simultaneous calls (including both internal and external) should not exceed the number of Connect Standard licenses purchased.
• An email notification will be sent if usage exceeds 80% of the contracted licenses.
• A further email notification will be sent if the usage exceeds 100% of the contracted licenses. In case of exceeding this limit, Pexip reserves the right to renegotiate the agreement.