Likelihood to Recommend GoToConnect is a powerful platform for correspondence. The user interface is straightforward, and installing the majority of clients only requires a small amount of preparation. GoTo Connect is an excellent choice for us because it's a reasonably priced solution that has all the necessary advanced capabilities that our company needs. GoTo Connect's high-quality calls and recording feature make it an excellent choice for offering customer care over the phone.
Read full review Sametime is well suited for very quick conversations, where you know the person is an active Sametime user. It also serves as an easy way to reach out to someone you may not know when looking for an answer to a quick question, as they are likely to be a Sametime user. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to use Sametime for Audio or Video chat. The quality and reliability are horrendous.
Read full review Pros GoTo Connect is a much more cost-effective solution rather than separate phone lines and video conferencing tools. I conduct daily team meetings and project brainstorming sessions using video conferencing using GoTo Connect. It integrates smoothly with our regularly used tools like Google Drive and has become very easy to share the documents we use. Read full review Sametime's web-based interfaces are "zero load", requiring no plug-ins to be installed to join a meeting, launch a meeting, or use chat in a browser. A plugin is required only if you want to share your screen. Integration with IBM Notes is very tight. Sametime's chat status can change according to your Notes calendar. You can easily see if someone who just emailed you is available to chat. Your chat History is right inside Notes as well. IBM's mobile apps are top notch. We automated the apps for our users thanks to IBM's work with third party MDMs. This made it very simple for us to deploy the Sametime mobile apps -- Chat and Meetings -- and get new capabilities such as Audio & Video mobilized quickly. No down time, ever. The rock solid WebSphere back-end of Sametime means the environment is always up. Period. Read full review Cons I would like flexibility on billing - now set as auto-pay only on company credit card. We would like to pay by check or ACH. Better integration of GoTo Meeting, which we also use (and like) Better broad-plan pricing (like 'bundling') when we use multiple platforms as we do - and simplified billing Read full review Not convenient for a large group meeting. Very basic tool for internal communication only not available for third party communication Very basic and limited mobile app features. High speed connection is needed to connect to Sametime Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Sametime is now an embedded experience for our users. They know it, they like it, they use it, and they expect it to be wherever they are. Because it is pretty easy to use and NEVER goes down, users know they can rely on it and won't be frustrated by it. Sametime is right up with there with Microsoft Office in terms of user adoption and appreciation.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Just about everything works the way you expect it would and it's relatively easy for users to figure out. Sametime was one of those things that we started with only a few people as a "test" and before the test period was done we discovered a few hundred people had figured out how to log in and most got it working all on their own. Many of our users want to use Sametime and do so regularly; we do not have to create policies enforcing its usage. Users find it practical to use Sametime to do things like chat, transfer files, share their screen, and so forth.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We have rarely experienced any technical issues with GoTo Connect. Our phones virtually never go down which make us reliable to our clientele and available at all times.
Read full review Typically if Sametime is not available, it's because Windows Updates were done on the servers and they were not rebooted. However, that's not a problem with Sametime -- in fact, if you have Linux you could probably run Sametime for years without any hiccups whatsoever. We have no internal Linux expertise.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Generally very good. Occasionally AV or screen-sharing will stutter and every now and then I hear of it dropping out altogether, but in all cases it was easy to re-establish
Read full review Support Rating Support used to be great when it was Jive support out of Utah. Now that they've offshored support it can be difficult to get a response. Our most common issues are least cost routing, and we run into support pushing back in stead of just figuring out which upstream carrier is having an issue like they used to. We often have to get our account manager involved, who is pretty strong.
Read full review I have not needed to use the Sametime support team. Our local support team was able to configure it for me.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation of GoTo Connect was easy from the day of the kick-off call where a short brief was given about the company, a discussion around the project timelines, and the data dependencies on us to set up the platform. The updates around the project during the implementation and the hand holding after go-live is really appreciated
Read full review Alternatives Considered Teams seems more advanced and suited to bigger audiences, GoTo Connect seems like its a more basic version suited to smaller audiences. If you are looking to get started with an easy to use and full functioning meeting system with good audio visual then this is a great place to get started. Teams has the edge with more people comfortable on how to use this and some more in depth features
Read full review We use
Jabber globally in our company and Symphony (no relevant app in able list) in some of the teams as well. All these are instant messenger tools, bu
t Sametime is the easiest one to be used and its chat history is easy to be searched. Sametime can be used to contact almost all internal staff as it’s included in default computer package. Symphony is used to chat with front end business while
Jabber is used for call.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Sametime is rock solid. It runs on WebSphere, DB2 and other related IBM technologies. This does mean the back-end is highly complex and very difficult to learn and get comfortable with, however.
Read full review Return on Investment This product definietly cost the company more but for ease of use and hosting team webinars made the ROI worth it As a leader, I was able to confirm each of my AMs were doing what they were supposed to be doing with their clients with easy analytics We were able to view attendee analytics and send messages for re-engagement Read full review Sametime keeps many of our team members in contact throughout the day which leads to increased productivity which makes everyone happy. We use the team chat room feature every day. This allows a team to stay focused on the task without any extra messages that are not on topic. The split between IBM Sametime, Slack and Google Hangouts has caused some issues when team members are not checking for messages on a certain app. Read full review ScreenShots