HCL Sametime (formerly IBM Lotus Sametime, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in 2018) is an enterprise-level unified communications and VoIP platform. It includes features such as instant messaging, web conferencing, voice and video integration, telephony capabilities, and presence information.
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Zoom Phone
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Built on Zoom's platform, Zoom's cloud phone consolidates business communication and collaboration into a single system. Available in 40+ countries, with expandable coverage through a bring-your-own-carrier offering, Zoom Phone supports inbound and outbound calling through the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Features: Post call summary & next steps A post-call summary from Zoom’s AI Companion keeps the focus on the conversation instead of…
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.
Zoom Phone is great for remote work. It's pretty user friendly. You can easily transfer calls to those who have Zoom extensions programmed into the address book. Obviously, this would apply to most tech nowadays, but call quality can suffer during bad weather.
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.
Voicemail handling for queues and groups can't have their own shared voicemail box.
They recently starting limiting how many greetings you can have per user, so you have to do some annoying workarounds by setting up additional users to accomplish it when you have a number of ACD.
Does not yet support texting.
I wish they had built in text to speech to quickly build new greetings or phone tree options when needed.
You can't just assign a phone number to a call queue or group. You have to use a specific user. Fortunately, the cost is reasonable per user so its not a big problem, but annoying none-the-less.
The Salesforce integration could be better, I hope they improve it. For example, voicemails and call logs don't show up in the native lightning case feed, but as tasks.
When callers call, I wish it would pop up how they called and what tree they went through. So we could see what number they called into and perhaps what menu options they used.
I'd love to be able to ask them questions to gather info for reps answering phones when appropriate.
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.
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.
Zoom Phone has a very sleek design which makes it very easy to operate and use both in the setting up of and interacting in a meeting space. That being said, certain features can seem a bit crowded while trying to screen share or display video which somewhat defeats the purpose of the application as compared to a standard conference call.
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.
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
Support have been great during the time for implementing Zoom Phones to our team of 50 people. There were times where they kept supporting us through links but more and more we had actual people getting back to us via emails so we are very happy overall. The product is so great, too.
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, but 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.
The big draw for us to Zoom Phone is that they shook up the market. They entered the phone market by taking their overwhelming success in video conferencing, and bringing that innovation and skill to designing a game changing phone system. There is really not much difference among the other systems, except maybe their interface. They're a dime a dozen. Zoom does things differently, focusing in on the needs of the end users, and delivers a solid system that is worry free for I.T. departments
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.
