Re: Ah yes locked meeting rooms affected us
"the Polycom based Cisco 7937 conference phone"
I never encountered the Cisco version, but Polycom's analogue version was (is?) a great phone -- far better audio quality than just putting a regular phone on speaker (at the local end anyway; I can't vouch for the remote end). Its styling is way cooler, too (the above links are to images).
Polycom's video-conferencing codecs, on the other hand, not so much (at least, as of 2009). No idea how good or bad they were at their core function, but if you wanted to automate a fleet of them, they were a major pain -- endless small variations in their command sets that the code had to account for. Unlike the Tandberg units, for which you could write write the code once and it would work on all of them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
