Likelihood to Recommend 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).
Read full review Miro is perfect if you need to either present an idea, or workshop ways of getting to alignment. It's pretty magic for all of that. Miro is less perfect than
FigJam if you're just interrogating a
Figma UI and you want to make direct edits.
Read full review Pros Google Hangouts Chat allows you to send and receive messages real time with emoticons that can help you express your mood. You can download and upload image file that can be use for business process and more. Google Hangouts Chat also allows you to make a calls to reach other users.What I like the most is the awesome screen sharing while on call. Read full review Exceptional templates help me get started quickly with almost any type of whiteboarding, creating consistency where needed and extreme variety when also needed. Having multiple active users on the same board happens so smoothly. It's easy to get people on the board and updating objects simultaneously without weird conflicts is amazing. The amount of objects & tools Miro provides allows us to create very specific and detailed artifacts. Read full review Cons I wish it was easier to turn the sound off, I hate being in meetings and my chat is blowing up. Needing to "accept" a chat invite from someone within my org seems counter-intuitive. Some people have trouble getting their notifications before midnight, somehow? Prior to downloading the app, group messages didn't come up for me on my computer. Read full review Sometimes the text inside sticky notes is very small, it's hard to read. It would be great to preserve the board layout and functionality when offline, such as when taking a flight. Load the board before the flight, keep working during the flight, then update it when the connection gets restored, instead of losing sync and functionality when internet connectivity is not available. It would be helpful to denote progress on a board with some sort of recommended flow. Instead of having to depend on the user adding new inputs to the right of previous work, if Miro detects inputs to the board happening to the left or above existing work, ask if you'd like to add it to the right. Also, it could be that you could replay a "video" or animation of the board (zoomed out) showing the order in which content has been added to the board over time. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review There is no other tool like Miro for process Mapping in particular. I've tried PowerPoint, Word, and other programs, but when collaborating virtually on how to improve a process, Miro has all of the tools and more to enable successful mapping. The colors, different types of shapes and text books, along with the ability to integrate different documents and other functionality, make it ideal for this purpose. In a virtual world, it's a must-have.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review It's pretty easy to use. My gripes are with some small idiosyncrasies with selection behavior with objects and editing text. When I move an object, it automatically de-selects it when I am not done with it. I have to click to select again. Text control is challenging and could be improved. It could use a little more styling capability. It's also weird that it behaves differently in a shape then when using the text tool.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I only give a 9/10 because of the speed at which it loads. I have never experienced issues with Miro logging me out early, or some other technical issue causing the program to crash, or even it just loading in perpetuity without ever actually coming up (unlike other programs such as SFDC). It take a minute for all of my boards to come up after I click on it in my favorites, but besides that, it's all good.
Read full review Performance I took the loading quickly to be related to availability which I commented on before, so ditto with those comment on load time here. Although to reemphasize, Miro doesn't crash or just refuse to load like some other programs. The weak point of Miro for me is integration of files like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint (especially the later two). When you embed these, it gets slow, and complicated to bring them up while you're in the application.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review The support staff at Miro are fantastic. Whenever I have had an issue, they have been timely and helpful with their response. They are also very knowledgeable and go out of their way to not only help, but offer proactive training sessions on different topics and new functionality so everyone can try it out.
Read full review In-Person Training Not applicable as never had in person training
Read full review Online Training Superb. very well explained videos. Really helps get the knowledge up on the product. The slides are divided into the topics of usage. I have enjoyed following and implementing all of these slides. The videos are well explained and it is easy to follow. There are tutorials that you can take yourself later. It would be nice however if more training modules were added.
Read full review Implementation Rating It was and still is a challenge to get our IT folks at 3M to support the tool. Single sign on still not implemented. I now have Miro on my personal computer. I had a few hardware issues, but nothing major.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review In many cases the other tools did a single thing better than Miro but overall Miro better solved all our needs. In some cases, like
FigJam the hurdle was licensing. Teams just doesn't have an awesome set of features. MindMap is good for what it is but not so good for other uses.
Mural is excellent...just not as good.
Read full review Scalability Miro is great for scaling. In every department and subdivision across my entire organization, there is someone using it. From Sales to marketing, to manufacturing and operations; and even in legal and finance, there isn't a process or a department that is not using Miro, and if they aren't, they're missing out! Even at the highest to the lowest levels of the organization, it is essential for virtual collaboration.
Read full review Return on Investment In my work it allows us to report troubles that may cost loss of investment thru Google Hangouts Chat we were able to communicate on how to fix it. I hope we can make it on our own choice of colors to heightened workers vibe It is connected to your email Read full review Simplicity- it’s simplified our communication It’s taken away the stress of manually documenting research with pen and paper in live design thinking sessions Remote - we can host our diverse teams from all over the world in quick productive meetings without paying for travel Miro has helped me design for over 8 enterprise product teams Read full review ScreenShots