Synergy SKYCONNECT
Whitepaper

Contents
1. Introduction

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2. Current Industry Challenges

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2.1 Video has become business-critical
2.2 How to create a collaboration equilibrium
3. Our Solution
3.1 Interoperability
3.2 Video Conferencing
3.3 Meeting Room Optimization

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4. Technical Product Information

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4.1 Deployment model
4.2 Security
4.3 Supported protocols
4.4 Supported devices
4.5 Solution requirements

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5. Conclusion

Page 2“ It’s all very simple. Itis an invisible technology
with a minimal approachthat just works. Meetings
start on time now!

”14﻿

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Introduction
How many business video meetings have been compromised by the sheer availabilityof one too many video conferencing platforms, connection problems, and lack ofuser-friendliness. Everything is often planned out efficiently but when the time comes,meetings simply do not work as they should. And even when it does, it does not lookexactly as it should.

Short-sighted fixes are not enoughTraditionally, it is not easy for a SIP endpoint (Cisco, Poly, Lifesize, etc.) to connect toa Microsoft Teams meeting. It is a prerequisite that the users know who booked themeeting and whether a Cloud Video Interop (CVI) product has been configured toallow the user to connect to the meeting from its preferred video meeting room.

There are two key reasons behind why this happens:•Interoperability•

Workflow

Users and admins look at their meeting rooms, sensors and SIP endpoints and often
find themselves not knowing how to get the best of their resources. Thankfully, it ispossible to address this by streamlining and optimizing your current environments.
Synergy SKY CONNECT enables the maximization of investments and leveraging
to full power existing setups. Find out how interoperability can help meetings start ontime and enable organizations to accomplish their best work.

Current industry challenges
Complex landscape for cross-vendor collaboration
Business video meetings have become critical to all organizations. In recent years,
we witnessed a rapid market explosion that forced organizations to adapt to what
was available and functional for hybrid work. This introduced more players andtechnologies resulting in an extraordinarily diverse market where most solutions areproprietary and incompatible.

Alternatively, the meeting organizer must understand the internal and external
participants’ access methods to ensure a successful and on-time connection for allusers. This is, of course, not something to be expected from an average employee.

Using different CVI providers also introduces different user experiences when it
comes to video layout. The layout will depend on the layout from the CVI provider.
Furthermore, presentation sharing is not possible with CVI vendors. Microsoft Teams
has recently introduced PowerPoint Live in Teams – but this does not work withtraditional CVI either.

This difficulty and uncertainty lead most organizations to forego interoperability andreach for the most common, cheap, or convenient solution. These decisions hurt
the end-users as well as the organizations that have invested in superior endpoint
technology and close sales opportunities for premium endpoints and meetingservices.

“You need interoperability because you have several meeting platforms
already. Why should you have to invest in another meeting platform just to getinteroperability with the platforms you already have?”

With the recent rise in popularity of cloud-based video meeting platforms such asMicrosoft Teams, the trend has been to gravitate towards single vendor connectivity.
These islands of connectivity make it difficult for users to interact with different
platforms using technology built for other service platforms. Existing interoperability
solutions (“gateways” or “CVIs”) have limited scope and face shortcomings in a lot ofcommon use case scenarios.

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Page 5Our Solution

SIP endpoints remain the go-to in the industry

Multi-platform collaboration &seamless meeting experience
Synergy SKY CONNECT makes it easy for users to connect video conferencing devices toMicrosoft Teams meetings, and manage video meetings in a multi-vendor and -technology
environment. This patent-pending video gateway allows for SIP endpoints, independentof registration, to communicate bidirectionally with both audio and video to the Microsoft
Teams platform.
Unlike other solutions that only partially address the problem, CONNECT fully removes theuncertainty of scheduling, joining and managing meetings. It ensures meetings work without
requiring any technical knowledge from users. It offers a uniform and native Microsoft Teams
experience to the invited SIP endpoints regardless of who the organizer is, combined withthe features the users expect from a SIP endpoint.

There are approximately 6 million SIP-based video conferencing rooms in theworld. Unsurprisingly, they are still perceived as being extraordinarily reliable forbusiness video meetings today due to their robustness, versatility and featurerichness which is second to none in the Unified Communications industry.
Cisco Webex is followed by Poly as the endpoint manufacturing leaders.
There are two key reasons why it is chosen by the vast majority of organizations:• It has been successfully standardized across multiple vendors through the last 20 years
and backed up by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
• It can communicate with multiple vendors.

It does so by providing a media handling server that performs SIP signaling-based video
protocol gateway services to web conference-based cloud platforms.
But Synergy SKY CONNECT is more than just interoperability. It also includes a self-hosted
management suite for video endpoints and meeting rooms that unifies the collaboration
experience and administration across calendars, meetings rooms, and video conferencing
platforms.

CONNECT
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OurSolutionMulti-platformcollaboration&seamlessmeetingexperience

SIP endpoint
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Interoperability
The Synergy SKY CONNECT gateway navigates the media translation between theSIP endpoint and Microsoft Teams using the WebRTC guest facilities. All it takes
is for the user to leverage the calendar invitations handled by the inbuilt Synergy
SKY management suite component of CONNECT, which offers both meetings invite
workflow and end-to-end media flow. This ensures consistent, robust connectivity andcall quality, as well as the native Microsoft Teams experience the user would have
had in a web browser.

The functional diagram on the following page illustrates CONNECT’s components
and how they interact to enable end-to-end user experience from a simple calendar
invitation.
The process begins with a Microsoft Teams invitation, the adding of participants, andthe selection of a meeting room with a SIP endpoint (as a participant, e.g. “Room A”)
At this point, the Synergy SKY management suite-configured endpoint receives theinvitation and begins processing a “green button” to easily join the meeting. A One
Button To Push (OBTP) for Cisco users and/or a One Touch Dial (OTD) for Poly video
endpoints.
At the click of the “green button,” the endpoint calls the Synergy SKY CONNECT
module via the SIP protocol, where it is translated to a WebRTC connection andestablishes the path to the Microsoft Teams service.
Once the interoperability negotiation is completed, audio and video media flow
bidirectionally. The negotiated quality is the one available to a WebRTC guest callparticipant.

Page 8CONNECT’s Technical Diagram

Page 9Video Conferencing
The management suite component of CONNECT helps streamline the meeting
workflow for users and admins. Easily schedule, join and manage meetings while
gaining a full overview of user behaviour in a single dashboard. The data points fromcurrent technologies play a crucial role in assisting the control, analysis and adjustmentof meetings throughout the organization. There is no need to rip n’replace. Support
platforms today and tomorrow, on-prem or cloud.

Conference control

One-click-to-join

No-show detection alerts

Touch panel video meeting booking

End-of-meeting alerts

Whiteboarding

Auto inserted video details

Presentation sharing (PowerPoint Live)

Forwarded meeting confirmation

Multi-vendor insights

Meeting Rooms Optimization
Leverage meeting rooms’ usage to the fullest. Utilize valuable space correctly dependingon the meeting purpose and group size. With the help of sensors and the SIP endpoints,
admins have the information required to ensure no time or resources are wasted whenusers schedule and join a meeting.
Data Sources for the management suite

Phonebook

Platform compatibility check

Auto release of rooms with no-show

Participant countAuto check-in

Video system operational healthPage 10

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Technical Information
Deployment model
The Synergy SKY CONNECT gateway is available as a public cloud service*. Theinbuilt Synergy SKY management suite component, on the other hand, is available
for deployment in an on-prem format as well as a private cloud service. This allows
the customers to execute a very rapid deployment, in addition to keeping all theirdata on-prem in their own company network.

Supported protocols
The primary function of Synergy SKY CONNECT is to enable SIP to WebRTC
calls. Different endpoints and meeting services support a vast collection of media
standards. The focus of the product for the time being is to support the most popularand common mechanisms to ensure the most robust of implementations. Thefollowing media and connectivity standards are supported:

Security
Synergy SKY CONNECT has been built from the ground up to provide secure control
for both media and operational interactions. The platform supports the following
security protocols:

Media:

Interface:• AES• SRTP• SIPS• HTTPS• SSH

Supported devices

Gateway services that convert calls from one format to another can only secure one
leg of the call in each direction. In other words, a customer using a public gateway
service can only ensure that both the call to the gateway and the connection fromthe destination service are secure. However, since the gateway is by nature aman-in-the-middle appliance, the call cannot be guaranteed secure from source todestination. Security schemes such as on-screen key displays, and administrator
validation tools are a potential solution to these concerns. These features are notincluded in the current product version.

* Synergy SKY CONNECT as a self-hosted gateway that supports Microsoft
Teams commercial cloud, GCC, GCC-H, GCC-DoD is available for publicagencies under the name Synergy SKY CONNECT for Government.

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TechnicalPage
13 Information

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Solution requirements
The Synergy SKY CONNECT service is hosted in Microsoft Azure.
Our servers are currently deployed in two Azure regions:
AzureCloud.westeurope
AzureCloud.eastus

Get connected today

An up-to-date overview of all Azure IP ranges can be found here.
Port requirements:
SIP (TCP): 5060/5061
Media (UDP): 55000-55999
API for the Synergy SKY management suite (TCP): 42009•Contact your Synergy SKY representative•Visit the solution page•

Watch the video demo•

Explore our documentation​ he Synergy SKY CONNECT solution is deployed in conjunction with theTSynergy SKY management suite (previously referred to as Synergy SKYSuite). Please consult its deployment guide for details by clicking here.
Get a custom demo
Reach out to see how Synergy SKY CONNECT helps you get thesimple, consistent, and reliable meetings you need. We are confident
that our solution speaks for itself. Zero obligation and zero hassle.

Conclusion
Organizations that use SIP endpoints for video conferencing and use Outlook,
Exchange and O365 or Google Calendar as their calendar to connect to Microsoft
Teams meetings can benefit from Synergy SKY CONNECT. There is no otherinterop solution in the market that addresses the complexities of cross-vendor
collaboration without compromising quality and user friendliness as shortsighted fixes do. Together with its videoconferencing and meeting room optimization
features, Synergy SKY CONNECT interoperability ensures both users and admins
have training-free video meeting experiences.

Copyright © 2022 Synergy SKY
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any
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Synergy SKY AS
Dronning Eufemias gate 16, 0191 Oslo - Norway
11921 Freedom Drive, Reston - USA
contact@synergysky.com
https://www.synergysky.com/

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