CallFire vs. HCL Sametime

If you need to find a test candidate for your client quickly, this is one of the best ways. Pull yourself a hot list of a couple hundred potential candidates and load them in to CallFire. Then get ready to hit about 50-60 calls per hour. You should have a great test candidate for your client in about 24 hours! It's amazing how quickly you can show your clients the true speed of your company.

Incentivized

Sametime is well suited for very quick conversations, where you know the person is an active Sametime user. It also serves as an easy way to reach out to someone you may not know when looking for an answer to a quick question, as they are likely to be a Sametime user. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to use Sametime for Audio or Video chat. The quality and reliability are horrendous.

Incentivized

• CallFire provides detailed analytics that show what/when callers select within the phone system
• The text message broadcast feature is a game changer. This allows a company to dispatch text campaigns with specific calls-to-action, with tracking analytics.
• The voice broadcast feature allows a mass automated message to be sent to client phones. This saves a lot of time when the same notification needs to go out to multiple clients.

Incentivized

• Sametime's web-based interfaces are "zero load", requiring no plug-ins to be installed to join a meeting, launch a meeting, or use chat in a browser. A plugin is required only if you want to share your screen.
• Integration with IBM Notes is very tight. Sametime's chat status can change according to your Notes calendar. You can easily see if someone who just emailed you is available to chat. Your chat History is right inside Notes as well.
• IBM's mobile apps are top notch. We automated the apps for our users thanks to IBM's work with third party MDMs. This made it very simple for us to deploy the Sametime mobile apps -- Chat and Meetings -- and get new capabilities such as Audio & Video mobilized quickly.
• No down time, ever. The rock solid WebSphere back-end of Sametime means the environment is always up. Period.

Incentivized

• The services are easy to use and robust, but there is room for improvement. Unfortunately, not much has changed over the last 2 years of use. There haven't been any new features or innovations in that time.
• API integration and automation is not easy for most folks to jump into and there is very little technical support or documentation to take advantage of such features.
• The standard reports are generally sufficient, but there isn't any customization or intelligence available.

Incentivized

• Not convenient for a large group meeting.
• Very basic tool for internal communication only not available for third party communication
• Very basic and limited mobile app features.
• High speed connection is needed to connect to Sametime

Incentivized

There is no reason not to, it has proven effective in the usage

Sametime is now an embedded experience for our users. They know it, they like it, they use it, and they expect it to be wherever they are. Because it is pretty easy to use and NEVER goes down, users know they can rely on it and won't be frustrated by it. Sametime is right up with there with Microsoft Office in terms of user adoption and appreciation.

Incentivized

Just about everything works the way you expect it would and it's relatively easy for users to figure out. Sametime was one of those things that we started with only a few people as a "test" and before the test period was done we discovered a few hundred people had figured out how to log in and most got it working all on their own. Many of our users want to use Sametime and do so regularly; we do not have to create policies enforcing its usage. Users find it practical to use Sametime to do things like chat, transfer files, share their screen, and so forth.

Incentivized

Typically if Sametime is not available, it's because Windows Updates were done on the servers and they were not rebooted. However, that's not a problem with Sametime -- in fact, if you have Linux you could probably run Sametime for years without any hiccups whatsoever. We have no internal Linux expertise.

Incentivized

Generally very good. Occasionally AV or screen-sharing will stutter and every now and then I hear of it dropping out altogether, but in all cases it was easy to re-establish

Incentivized

I have not needed to use the Sametime support team. Our local support team was able to configure it for me.

Incentivized

CallFire has a pricing structure that is attractive to us as a small business. The "pay as you use" options helps us keep our overhead low, especially with so many softwares already in our tech stack. It's a tremendous value for the cost!

Incentivized

We use Jabber globally in our company and Symphony (no relevant app in able list) in some of the teams as well. All these are instant messenger tools, but Sametime is the easiest one to be used and its chat history is easy to be searched. Sametime can be used to contact almost all internal staff as it’s included in default computer package. Symphony is used to chat with front end business while Jabber is used for call.

Incentivized

Sametime is rock solid. It runs on WebSphere, DB2 and other related IBM technologies. This does mean the back-end is highly complex and very difficult to learn and get comfortable with, however.

Incentivized

• I sent out a broadcast message pretty deep in our data base, well three years out. I had one customer come in and buy thanking me for contacting her.
• Our holiday season was up 35% over last year, this year we used CallFire more than we did in the past.

Incentivized

• Sametime keeps many of our team members in contact throughout the day which leads to increased productivity which makes everyone happy.
• We use the team chat room feature every day. This allows a team to stay focused on the task without any extra messages that are not on topic.
• The split between IBM Sametime, Slack and Google Hangouts has caused some issues when team members are not checking for messages on a certain app.

Incentivized