From Enghouse Systems, Vidyo is a web conferencing platform that features video calling and instant chat capabilities. The platform integrates with most environments, networks, and devices.
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Google Chat
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Google Chat, formerly Hangouts Chat, is a collaboration tool competing with Slack, designed to make it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate, and with dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat helps users track progress and follow up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members.
I've had HR professionals ask about using it for interviews. Gone are the days where we have to spend hundreds of dollars to fly candidates in or limit ourselves to phone interviews. Vidyo with it's high reliability has saved the organization thousands in travel costs with candidate recruitment. Business meetings that can often be troubling to get leaders and executive all in one room, Vidyo has functioned extraordinarily well in bringing in people from home, on the road, or the airport. Mobile capabilities are easy and fast. Quick daily calls and chats in the office are probably best suited for the free options out there as Vidyo is not a free service like others. Better yet general phone calls will suffice.
Well suited for businesses of all sizes. HOWEVER, I would say keep the chat groups limited at the departmental level, ensure that your moderator or the individual responsible for the group keeps it on topic, and have your IT team monitor it from time to time. Google Chat gets used so much in our organization that we have rules and regs in our Employee Handbook regarding its proper use (and when used PROPERLY, it can be very effective).
I didn't have to sign up, I just need to log into the "room" I was supposed to, so unlike Skype or other instruments, I didn't need to spend time and create my own account.
To be honest, the largest online class I've attended had 10 people in it (besides the teacher), but it was a good quality connection.
I enjoyed the ability to ask questions or clarifications in the chat (without having to turn on my microphone, so that the teacher could answer the question when he/she finished the thought).
The updates, support, general reviews on Google Chat are great everywhere. The development of the features is ongoing and this adds a great value to Google as a big company in the market. Other applications are limiting communication while Google Chat is allowing communication to grow. It is very easy to use it and teach others how to use Google Chat.
It's not perfect. There are occasional glitches, drop-outs, and it takes a bit to get everything loaded and working. But it is significantly better than Zoom or GoToMeeting when you're in instructional settings. I know my teacher friends here like it and the administrators and parents seem to be satisfied too.
We have an internal tech team dedicated to setup and troubleshooting of Vidyo. This makes it very easy, because we have access to our own employees for help. Rarely have I or anyone I work with had to escalate something to Vidyo themselves, and we're lucky to have the internal administrators that run the show. Almost like Vidyo is ours and ours alone.
I have not needed to contact the support folks for Google Hangouts Chat, so I can't speak to this with any accuracy. The online instructions are fairly clearly written, so it is fairly intuitive to start with. I did not feel the need to use the support people anyway.
Vidyo gives all of the competitors a run for their money. Since it works seamlessly, is easy to use, and has a clean UI. Screenshare could benefit from some work, like the ability to share multiple screens from different users at the same time. The search function could be improved, but overall, it's a great software.
Prior to Google Hangouts, our company used Spark. Spark was not integrated into our email, therefore it couldn't be easily accessed in the same browser. With Spark we also couldn't search our emails for keywords in a conversation, searching had to be done manually. The one feature I enjoyed about Spark was a request to get a user's attention: If I had an urgent question and I wanted to ensure the recipient saw my message/question, I would request their attention and the message screen would pop up on their screen.
It did help us reach the objective of education - after a while, everyone had a chance to connect and the quality of video/audio once you're in is great. It's just getting there that isn't up to par (but hopefully would be changed in next versions).
