Jabra Engage 75 Stereo Review

Unified Communications Background

Prior to joining Unify Square, the last time that I used Skype for Business (SfB) was in 2015. At that time I was working within Microsoft’s Venture Integration Group, which is responsible for the company’s acquisitions. We were part of the team that was Onboarding 25,000 or so Nokia employees, a process that lasted well over a year. That clearly didn’t end the best, either, but that’s another story.

During that project, we had weekly conference calls using SfB with over 100 people. I’m not sure if it was because I was a contractor at the time, but no one educated us on the importance of using a headset that had been tested and certified for SfB. I would dial in from an LTE-connected iPhone with cheap headsets or from a laptop on a WiFi network. Not surprisingly, the audio quality at times was terrible and screen shares would often fail. At that time, it seemed to be just accepted that this was how it was going to be, with jokes that Skype did not perform as expected. Management would encourage team members to attend the meeting in person in a conference rooms that were reserved, in part to overcome the call quality issues. However, I had no idea that team members like myself were contributing to the poor qualify and we were affecting everyone else. I sure wish I had a Jabra Engage 75 then! 

Fast forward to now: I’m working at Unify Square, a company that is focused on enabling outstanding experiences for enterprise meetings, chats and calls. A major part of that is helping IT leaders understand that it’s often the ‘last mile’ that is often a major pain point for their UC environment. Making sure connections are happening over a good network with a certified headset is critical to call quality, not only for a particular user, but for everyone on the call. As Alan Shen, our VP of Consulting describes it best as “Your Users are your Infrastructure” and something that IT leaders need to account for as they deploy UC platforms.

In the last year since starting here, I have used a number of headsets: Jabra VXi UC, Plantronics Voyager 4200, Jabra Motion and the Plantronics Savi 440. Each of these headsets worked well for what was needed, which were UC calls and meetings. That said, they were just tools to get work done, nothing else.