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 For a SOHO business, this solution is ideal. You don't need to administrative overhead of other products like GSuite, and it saves licensing costs. The maintenance effort is minimal as long as you use their default applications. Migrations to newer versions can be done with a few commands and run automatically. If you're planning on using Nextcloud in large deployments with many users, you'll start to see higher costs on your resources and maintenance. There will be a point at which Gsuite becomes easier to manage.
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 Remote collaboration platform with just the right tools. Ease of access from any device, anywhere. Solid templates for development teams to collaborate without distraction. 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 Slow in comparison to other solutions May be complex for the start since there are lots of apps and features May be not focusing on core topics 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 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 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 I never needed support as everything always worked fine. The documentation on Nextcloud website is extensive and clear. The community is very active on the forum and should support you if you don't already find what you are looking for.
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 Nextcloud stacks up pretty well against
Mattermost and
ownCloud . I really appreciate the fact that Nextcloud seems to integrate with other products pretty seamlessly and allows for extensibility that our product team can extend and improve functionality without a tremendous ramp-up time. We once used
ownCloud in previous years, but they went the wrong way, and have found Nextcloud to be the right direction over time.
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 It allowed us access to our files from any device over the internet. It helped manage and organize our file sharing with third parties. It provided a secure wrapper for accessing files. Joe Foran Director Of Information Technology and HIPAA Privacy Officer
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