The classic version of Google Hangouts included messaging, voice, VoIP, and video call capabilities. It was replaced by the Hangouts Chat collaboration tool, and Google continues to support conferencing via the new Hangouts Meet.
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GoTo Connect
Score 7.5 out of 10
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GoToConnect, from GoTo, is a cloud-based business phone system with built-in web-based video conferencing solutions. It includes features such as call analytics, call recording, softphone, fax to email, voicemail to email, and desktop integration.
Had I completed this review a couple years ago, I would have given a rating of 9 or 10 as Hangouts (Classic) is an excellent product. However, now that Google Chat has succeeded Hangouts, I would not recommend that any new users begin using it where other more modern options are available. Android users who want an internet based instant messaging that also supports calling and video calling could benefit from using Hangouts (Classic) as Google Chat requires the user to also have Google Meet installed to make video calls and there is no voice only calling option.
Go To is a great phone system that has made the transition from our old landline phone system to a VoIP product easy. Our users can customize their speed dial buttons; the dial plans are robust, so we can fully customize anything we need to; and, besides provisioning, setting up a new device is quick and easy.
Call reports: You can see and review calls received from the first receptor until the last who attend this call, also you can review all calls make and received by your teams
Voicemail options: Availability to create some voicemail with multiple receptors
Devices option: with several options to change on your devices
Audio library: Multiple option to create your own audio library with or without ambien music
I would like to see improved video support, so that saved videos can be sent back and forth via Hangouts more easily, without having to start a separate meet chat
More pronounced notifications of messages would be helpful; pop up notifications are good, but once there is one, additional messages do not pop up
Custom muting times would be great, so that if I am in a 90 minute Zoom meeting, I can set it for that time; right now, it is 1 hour or 2 hours. Easy to forget.
They are knocking it out of the park on all fronts. I love the service and support I am receiving and have no complaints. If they raised their prices substantially I would reconsider but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. They would have to mess up something consistently moving forward to make me want to move
The tool is almost self-implemented. It is likely to be available in every pc or mobile device a user or potential user might have, and all you need to do is adding the company's account and you are done. Once you are setted up, you have almost all actual communication methods available in one tool
Overall, it's a decent product for the price. It has the basic features our company needed when it was brand new and was not overly difficult to set up. As we've grown, it's become increasingly difficult to build out the features we want to implement within the PBX, and customer support can be less than helpful. Many of the more advanced features (dial plans, queues, etc.) take a lot of research to understand how to implement. Some of the features we paid for weren't even available when we were attempting to set them up.
I have never experienced or heard of unplanned outages when it comes to GoTo Connect. Most of the time the unplanned outage is always local power at a site or internet service provider having an unplanned outage. GoTo's service has never failed any of our orgs yet that I know of.
There is no lag in phone calls. There is no background noise or static/fuzz. Calls are crystal clear. With other dialers and phone systems, I have experienced delays between dialogue or delays with the caller picking up the phone and then being able to hear you. We do not experience this with Go To Connect.
Google Hangouts works great and does not require a lot of work to troubleshoot. Everything is simple and easy to use. Google provides all of the tools that one requires to utilize Google Hangouts and any information can be found in the built-in help tools. There is also a forum for users to report issues and typically, Google responds well and will try to work out any issues.
One of the MOST challenging things in tech support is that some of the offshore agents "don't speak Texan/English", and are really hard to understand. GoTo Connect's support is usually someone who is VERY easy to understand their US/English, and are very helpful. In dozens of interactions for our business & our clients, we've only had a few tickets that couldn't be resolved on the first call
The training videos could be more in-depth. This would help our user base so that they can feel impowered to look up information that they need without having to ask our admins every time they have a question about the system. Online training videos are also inferior to an actual person explaining systems.
The implementation was incredibly easy and straightforward. I came into the project never having migrated and changed phone systems before, and the team at Go-To made it super easy to port all of our numbers and phone lines over to the new system. It was not intimidating, and all of my questions were answered promptly.
Google is the white cotton socks of the conferencing world. It’s a great ad-hoc tool, but not too much more. If you are not looking to spend money or operate completely on WiFi (without data charges), it’s a great free option as well. The benefit of being free and open is also the liability. It doesn’t have a great integration story with other corporate tools, but [it doesn’t have to] if you aren’t looking for that. All in all, it’s as helpful and ubiquitous as a public payphone…without the pay…and with a video capability.
We considered Dialpad for our work as well, but it has its limitations, and our team, like doctors and all, was not satisfied with it because it was hard for them to use. But our team is happy with GoTo Connect. It made everyone happy—our team and our clients as well.
Its not readily apparent to me, other than cost, where you would run into any issues with larger scale deployments. When we went live on the product, the Jive team was always willing to do mass updates for us on our extensions, users, etc. in the system, so we didn't have to do too much manual one-by-one updates.
I believe it was part of the google suite that was purchased. It was worth the cost as it was cheaper. I believe it is now free, but also becoming deprecated. It is much better to use Teams, Discord, Telegram, etc. Google does not provide enough support or features to make using hangouts worth it these days.
Cost Savings have been realized from reducing hardware .
We are all able to collaborate remotely and it has been seamless and easy to setup.
I'm able to pull reports, i wish there was improvement on the data analysis side. It has gotten better since LogMeIn, but something is a miss and can be improved.
