Dolby presents the Dolby Voice product line of consisting as software as well as conference phones and video conferencing equipment, able to produce an immersive, natural conferencing experience. It is available in various kits, such as the Dolby Voice Room kit, as well as Dolby Voice Pro (for boardrooms), and Dolby Voice Huddle.
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Zoom Workplace
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Zoom Workplace, Zoom’s open collaboration platform with an AI Companion, empowers teams to be more productive, and strengthen customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle with Zoom’s Business Services for sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, including Zoom Contact Center.
Implementing these units within our business reduced the number of support requests to our internal IT support desk. This was simply because these units are so simple to use. The user books a video conference meeting within Outlook and includes the meeting room they wish to hold the video conference in. Within five minutes, their meeting is recognized on the Dolby Conference Phone (Dolby Voice). Their meeting is also shown on the TV screen within the meeting room so that other people can see who will be using the room. On entering the room, the user simply touches the Join button next to their meeting on the Dolby Conference Phone (Dolby Voice), normally in the middle of the table, and within a few seconds, the meeting room has joined the video conference meeting.
Integration with other products and the AI summaries have been huge wins for Zoom Workplace in our organization. They have been life changing for our team. Also, being able to make and receive calls from our cell phones rather than have to give out personal cell phone numbers has been wildly successful with our attorneys.
I love how easy it is to set the focus on the presenter. It is annoying when people don't spotlight themselves as a presenter, so you get to see the whole gallery of attendees in smaller, two-inch windows.
I like the capability of having break-out rooms. Even though I don't use them very often, it is nice to have them available if the right situation presents itself for smaller group chats.
The recording quality is better than I have experienced with other products (Microsoft Teams, WebEx, etc.), and the fact that it is already an MP4, so I don't have to convert it for publishing on our intranet is huge to me.
Allow a way to group individual people chats - not channels just individual peeps into groups for ease of finding - like how you can group shared calendars into sections in Outlook
This rating is given because it is simple for us--a no-brainer to replace these units with a new Dolby video conferencing device. The fact that these units make the room neater and make it very easy for a user to onboard and use, just makes it a must-have item. The Linux version of these units is also easier to use with a little software patching required. For us, we can also use the Microsoft Teams gateway.
We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.
That this unit is so easy for users to use. To join a meeting is a simple one-touch join. If they have not added the meeting room to their invite, then entering the meeting ID into the unit via the touch screen on the flying saucer is very easy. The mute button is on the top of the unit and shows a red LED circle when on mute.
Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.
There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.
Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.
When we have asked the question to either BlueJeans or Dolby, we have been given the answer quickly. To be honest, the number of times that we have had to go to support on these units has been very low--maybe once a quarter.
Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.
We did not have any key issues during the implementation. The units are very easy to configure for BlueJeans. When you first turn on the unit, you select the video conferencing platform that you are using. The wizard will then request various information (e.g., IP address, network) and then look for software updates. Once completed, the unit can be installed in the meeting room. The unit will run off a PoE network lead, so one lead to the unit.
If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.
The biggest issue with others that we find is that no one has a simple one-touch method for users to join a video conference meeting. With most others, we found you either have to find your meeting or manually enter your meeting. With Dolby Conference Phone (Dolby Voice), you are straight into the room--one touch and in the meeting.
Zoom Workplace is typically on the more expensive end against other options, but it's the industry leader for a reason. It has the most brand credibility by far, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. There are limitations when it comes to technical performance, customization and video/audio quality. I prefer Slack myself for communication apps, but Zoom Workplace is a good alternative.
The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.
Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.
Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.
