Polycom Group Series Remote and Real Presence Touch Screen are not working.


We have couple of Polycom Real Presence Group series 500 devices in our conference rooms. Those devices are really good and working fine for several months without any problem. Recently, we received a complaint from user saying the Polycom Remote is not working.

Issue: Polycom Group Screen Remote and Real Presence Touch Screen are not working.
I can guess what you are thinking - was it a battery issue ? it is strange, because the Power On and Power button was working but the other options like  Volume functions were not working on the remote. Moreover, if it was a battery issue even the Power On and Power Off buttons would not have worked. So, no, it was definitely not a battery issue :-)

While working with Polycom Support regarding this issue, they asked us to check if the Polycom Touch screen device was working. We found that both the Touch screen device and then Polycom Remote was not working. As per the Polycom Support, if you have Skype Mode option enabled the Polycom Remote functionality would not work. However, in our case both the Real Presence Touch screen and the Polycom Remote  was not working.

Since, the Polycom Support provided this hint (Skype Mode option) my colleague (Kit) and I decided to check the device configuration once again. We noticed that the option  Enable Skype Mode was selected and hence felt like disabling this option and test it.  So, we Unchecked that option  (shown in the Snapshot), click Save and  rebooted the device, the issue was resolved.

 Though the issue got resolved by not selecting the Enable Skype and Polycom Support also confirmed that "When Group series is in Skype mode you can only use Real Presence Touch". 
Polycom Support later replied saying Skype Mode works differently for SfB account (for Online and on-Prem accounts).

If the SfB account (which is used in the Polycom Real Presence device) is in SfB Online and if you have the option Skype Mode enabled then the Real Presence touch will work.

If the SfB account (that is used in the Polycom Real Presence device) on a On-Prem server then if you have the option Skype Mode Enabled then both the Polycom Remote and the Polycom Real Presence Touch would NOT work.