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.
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SAP Jam
Score 8.7 out of 10
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SAP Jam is a social network collaboration tool with integrated collaborative processes for knowledge, learning, and HR management. SAP Jam also includes capabilities for the entire sales, marketing, and customer service lifecycles.
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).
When you need to create a private, secure space for individuals to collaborate or work on a project together, SAP Jam does a great job at bringing people together and giving them a space to work together in. There are also great ways to provide learning opportunities (including sharing webinars or other educational content)
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.
It's an integrated platform that brings together a lot of different people from across the association to work on shared projects, etc. Given the various roles people play and the varying skill sets they bring to the table, the platform is fairly intuitive to use and easy to navigate around
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.
We have to submit requests multiple times to get a response and it often feels like they go into a black hole. Because we don't have anyone in house really supporting the back-end of the platform, we rely on SAP Jam's support and development teams to help solve problems and improve the platform for us.
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.
We utilize many products in the SAP universe of solutions. Not only was JAM feature-rich and matched our company needs, but the tight integration with our other SAP product lines makes admin as well as usability seamless. While other competitors to JAM offer more features that rely on real-time, most of our use cases were asynchronous.
