Cisco Business Edition 7000 (discontinued) vs. Podio

Cisco business edition are well suited for the environment where we need regular communication as they are easy to dial and has got great features. The product is well suited for both small business and large enterprises. Speed dial, good voice quality are key features of Cisco phones. They are not well suited in scenarios where we do not have LAN connectivity or internet. Sometimes we may face latency and jitteriness which is not good.

Incentivized

[Citrix Podios's] customer support is very quick and they provide you an option to convert your
project into small tasks so that you can better assist your team and extract
maximum work out of them hence I will totally recommend its usage. I could not think that keeping track of tasks could be this much easier and smart. It is a fully customizable tool that manages my tasks efficiently and deal with them effectively.

Incentivized

• The platform supports up to 5,000 users connected at the same time in voice and video calls.
• Everything is virtually deployed on Cisco servers with reliability.
• Intuitive configuration and user-friendly web interface.
• It has several types of IP phones and is compatible with legacy and multi-brand hardware with SIP protocol.

Incentivized

• Very easy for people without coding or technical skills to set up and maintain information in "Apps".
• Platform is very easy to learn and adopt--it's intuitive.
• Project management potential is awesome--instead of having to fit your projects into a structure that is industry specific, you can build an app that tracks what you want, in the order you want it.
• Has a "relationship" field that allows you to relate an individual item or record to a record in another app. It effectively gives some of the functionality of a relational database.
• Very useful for information sharing when staff members are in different regions or places.

Incentivized

• More cloud based services need to be added to the default service package.
• Companies frequently require a small contact center within the UC environment. It would be nice to see a build it contact center in the box.
• It would be nice to see some advanced AI based services (IVR voice recognition service) in the BE7K application list.
• Call recording should be also built in.

Incentivized

• More filter options for calendars.
• Customizable views for Relation fields.
• Full featured Podio mobile App for iPad.
• A customizable profile status – would love to work with Podio in silent mode (logged in while working, but "not available" for requests when in heavy work mode)

Incentivized

Podio customer service is great. The cloud and mobile service is fast (almost instant, continuous syncing). With a solid user base, and backed by Citrix, this is a serious business solution. They're also constantly working on improving and making it more powerful. I anticipate it only getting better

It is usable, for sure. Requires a bit of thinking to be really useful.

I have not experienced any down time

It works all the time and if I have a question, support get back to me ASAP

Podio support was always responsive and very quick to provide answers and assistance during the history of using this product, their support team has always been top notch. There have been several cases where calling podio support a feature was not available and they provided either workaround solutions or added the features straight into their roadmap.

Incentivized

Could of got more help sooner and mapped out structure after the 1st month. Future planning

I've used 220s and 240s too, but it takes a lot of time to set them up, a lot of time to download the iso files, and set up of datastores. 7k saves the engineer a lot of pre-build assessment and evaluation time. Gets a lot done in a lot less time, returns are a happy engineer and a happier customer.

Incentivized

Compared to Salesforce: Podio is not as robust as a tool for CRM tracking. It also doesn't have the in-email capabilities that SF offers. Compared to Basecamp: Podio is somewhat similar to Basecamp but doesn't offer the same functionality with checking items off and archiving projects. Compared to Zoho Projects: Podio is vastly superior to Zoho Project's lack of flexibility (requiring a development team to build) and accessibility by all members (Zoho Projects requires a very limited number of "owners" of projects which makes it difficult if multiple owners need to assign one or more people to a project).

As you business grows, so does Podio. There seems to be no limit to the workspace and apps you can create on the platform

• It has allowed for mostly smooth communication from department to department/office to office.
• It allows for saved phone # / last contact to appear quickly.
• It has allowed for safety warnings/announcements to emerge all across every office so that everyone within the organization is on the same page about events when they occur.

Incentivized

• Podio is great for task assignment and tracking. The ability to enter and assign tasks from mobile and track their completion saves me several phone calls a day.
• Podio outdoes email as my go to place to search for information. The ability to forward emails into the system, organize by projects and contacts, and search it all saves considerable time and confusion.
• Podio has considerable potential to reduce overall admin time spent organizing information (filing, tracking, etc) The ability to keep a single record of a given piece of information without being tied to email vs file structure works very well.