8x8 Work is a collaboration hub for phone, video, and messaging. It brings secure unified communication and collaboration experiences to every employee.
$24
per month
MiCloud Connect
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
MiCloud Connect is a business communications solution for contact centers that includes features like IP PBX telephony service, desk phones, softphone, and collaboration tools. It is integrable with other business communication technology, including Microsoft Outlook and CRM software.
8x8 offers similar features to the ShoreTel system we used before we relocated. Not all of the features stack up to the quality of the ShoreTel system, but with the price point as low as it is for 8x8, it provided the features we required without a major investment in system …
We used the ShoreTel phone system software and phones. They worked very well together - calls could be made with either the software or the phone and they interfaced well. Phone calls answered on the handset could be manipulated with the software. However, there were no …
The global availability of 8x8 [X Series (Formerly Virtual Office)] was critical to our company wide adoption, ensuring Kaseya can use the platform regardless of geography and with no call degradation or issues. Historically we have found other providers with global exposure …
Although RingCentral and 8x8 provider similar offerings, I find the pricing and ease of use more appealing to 8x8. I also like the US-based customer support that 8x8 offers. I feel the feature set for Vonage for Business is not as strong as either RingCentral or 8x8. For …
Mitel and Toshiba for on-premises telephony. RingCentral and 8x8 for hosted. All of them have their strengths and weaknesses. For on-premises, there is no better solution than ShoreTel in my opinion. There are elements of the other hosted product I do appreciate like …
I believe that 8x8 Work is well-suited for any organization, whether it employs 1-2 users or thousands. It is so easy to deploy and use. We are mainly a MS Teams house, and we want our Users to use this for Meetings and Chats. The fact that 8x8 has the flexibility to disable this within the client, so that it forces our users to continue working in Teams for meetings and chats, and then use the phone element in 8x8 Work, is brilliant. Our company finds it extremely easy to use, and the fact that we have different departments using it, with each department having the ability to change their outbound CLI to reflect the area of the business they are calling from, is excellent.
Mitel is excellent at allowing me as a user to setup up custom call routing in response to rapidly changing work flows. If I need to work from home for a period due to medical or other reasons, logging into Mitel and setting my office phone to ring through to my home or cell is quick and simple. Changing back is just as quick.
With separate systems and two locations we used to have to fake the system into 4 digit dialing by forwarding all remote extensions to DIDs. Now with Shortel extended to the remote location we have true 4 digit dialing.
The Shortel desktop application makes managing calls and call routing a breeze for even our most novice users.
The auto attendant has built in text-to-speech, but this same engine should be put to use for individual and ring group voicemail messages.
Call forwarding in the mobile app should be relocated for easier access. Instead it's buried somewhere under the generic "account settings"
The default user template disables voicemail text transcription. Why???
One fax number should be accessible by app for more than 1 user. Responsibility for faxes is usually distributed among a few people in a typical small office setting.
Ability to receive and send SMS messages from a shared "main company number" would be awesome. Ability to assign this to certain users would rock!
All our employees love this product. No one has ever had an issue, whether it be the phone or fax. Great during the winter when employees have to work from home because of the snow. Never had an issue with the phone app. Highly recommend this product
Although the price is higher than some of the other Hosted systems out there, the value is definitely worth a renewal. Everything is relative: there are some companies out there who need phones, but don't necessarily care how they work, the functionality/features available/durability etc., they just care that they have phones that make and receive calls. There are other companies that are completely reliant on phones and certain functionality that is provided by the system. There are even some companies who are straight up dependent on the phone system and are losing tons of money anytime they are down, ShoreTel is the perfect fit for theSMB client who sees value in a solid,robust, reliable and high functioning phone system
I'm not using it to its full capacity like a Zoom or teams Workspace. I use the service for phone calls, hate application on my cellphone and the voicemail apparatus. This we like because it gives us the feel of a large firm when we aren't.
I have not used a wide array of communication software, but this far ShoreTel/MiCloud has been the simplest and easiest to get into. My work employs several temps at certain points throughout the year, and they use this piece of software frequently, and new hires seem to have little to no issue using this software. Additionally, this is our primary telephone communication infrastructure, and I have yet to encounter any issues when signed in and regularly using it handling external calls to our department.
As mentioned before, we have not had an outage with the phone system per say, There was an issue with the call center where we did have an outage, but it was quickly and promplty handled by 8x8 support, they got us up and going again within 24 hours. The 8x8 hard phone and softphone side of things have been rock solid, I couldn't ask for anything more seeing we are in health care and it's exactly what we were looking for. When and if there is an issue 99% of the time it's user error
The system has gone down on us MULTIPLE times. We asked them to move us to a different cluster. Shoretel declined. Basically we had problems or outages every month of the year from June 2012 to date. Our old phone system was just that: OLD, no bells or whistles. But it was up every day and I never had to think about it much until it was time for an upgrade. That's how I want Shoretel to be. I want it so reliable that I never have to think about it.
None of the features that are available slow down the application. The reports (even the ones with hundreds of records) complete very quickly and the web interface as well as the mobile application never struggle to load or complete a task. The analytics will sometimes take some time to reflect the online status of users but it is to be expected due to connection speeds.
Even though the system uses a lower bandwidth connection we have experienced a higher call quality than our previous system which required a T1 line and back up broadband connection.
We are a USA based organization. Support was refreshingly quick (callback via phone or email, online live agents). Agents are knowledgeable, thorough in their explanations, and extremely patient when dealing with end-users at various levels of the ICT knowledge spectrum.
ShoreTel Sky's support is amazing. The only reason why I didn't give it a 10 is that we still need to contact them for stuff that we should be able to do, for ourselves, within the management portal. I know their portal is being worked on, so hopefully they will get the "little things" included for self-management.
The person giving the training was very engaged, He also listened and answered all the questions. He created a video for our company while he was training in case we needed to reference it again in the future. The questions he could not answer were answered within 24 hours via an email to the IT support staff here so we could share the answers with the rest of the group
I attended the first ShoreTel installer class in Austin,TX. It was a week of intensive study with a live lab and having hands on experience made the class worthwhile. I have taken all of the sales courses and remaining technical courses either online or self study to keep costs down. I send my techs to the first installer course in Austin as I feel it gives them a solid foundation and most of teh other courses they have taken have been online.
The training identified some things M5 (ShoreTel's cloud division) could provide, however it was only using it every day and asking the Shoretel support several questions that I got the hang of it. The training was able to highlight functions but I did not learn how to use the phone from the training.
The implementation of 8x8 X was rather smooth. We had training prior to getting the system. The IT company did a good job on the training. The whole system is wonderful. Saves me so much time with the faxing, as i can just let it go by itself and not have to make sure pages don't get skipped, as with a regular fax machine.
Each of our locations has a dedicated ShoreTel router and managed QoS. With full management, it provides us a breath of space and bandwidth to use our resources in other means. Strongly consider the managed solution as you have to maintain more technical issues when hosting with your ISP. You have to make sure your ISP can provide you the best service for voice and data. Plug and 'hope' doesn't work with just routing your phones over any Internet connection....especially when your handsets run int he 100's
I prefer 8x8 Work; it has the right number of features and modes for the communication I need. I much prefer 8x8 Work meetings to zoom meetings, as it is much, much easier to transition between devices when I am on the road. 8x8 Work is also easier to manage across multiple modes of communication.
Aptela. I chose M5 (ShoreTelSky) because their platform puts call quality first. Their system also uses Cisco endpoints, which are very compatible with the rest of my Cisco network. I also liked the fact that ShoreTelSky uses the internet only as a backup for transport; I use MPLS as my primary connectivity.
At this time, we’re very happy with the pricing model that we have worked out and they have provided for us. Just be sure to do your homework, and use your comparisons to work out your cost with 8x8. They will be very straightforward with you on what they can adjust for you.
The only issue was adding licences was not via a button click but through your account admin which seems bad practice in a SaaS world as the user should be able to sign up, amend and close their account with ease
I believe that ShoreTel can be used by a minimum company size of about 25 to almost any size of a company and this can be achieved while the company grows, hence makes it pretty scalable when required. For companies which are smaller in size i.e. smaller than 25, I am not sure how useful it would be, it may be depending upon the type of business
PS had all the users etc. set up by our go-live date. All hard phones were activated and when we received them, all we had to do was set them up and punch in the activation code to activate them.
At my branch alone, we are saving over $500 a month using Shoretel Sky versus the phone company we were using before them.
Shoretel Sky has increased customer service by allowing our employees to easily transfer a call to the proper department or branch no matter where they are located instead of giving the caller a phone number to call.
Most of our locations did not have caller ID before Shoretel Sky. That feature has increased employee efficiency because when they know who is calling before they answer allows them to professionally greet their caller and have their info up on their computer as they answer.
