Microsoft Teams Rooms vs. ReadyTalk (Discontinued)

We use Microsoft Teams Rooms across all of our main conference suites. This ensure our staff have consistent meeting experiences in out part of the education sector - meetings generally become hybrid fairly frequently and can even extend to pupils or staff working from home. We did try some of the poly equipment in a classroom environment but due to noise levels and the amount of pupils and staff it quickly became a non starter. We were advised to stick with participant numbers aligned to our purchased hardware before we tried this.

Incentivized

Think about your needs as an organization and whether you will be using primarily audio only or audio plus web. If audio only then ReadyTalk will certainly meet your need. If web, then shop around for functionality, support, and price. I am fairly "neutral" on ReadyTalk - neither a huge cheerleader nor a huge detractor.

Incentivized

• Camera view selection is a nice feature which allows remote users to choose the camera feedback to select for better experience.
• Live reactions like hand claps, thumbs up, raised hands,etc can be used to indicate to presenters that a meeting attendee has a question. This is cool.
• We can connect our laptop seamlessly to the Microsoft Teams Rooms to share our content or presentation which makes things very simple.

Incentivized

• Screen share/conference calling: They make it quick and easy to join a meeting for your guests. They don't need to download anything; all they need to do is click on the link and enter the access code.
• Mobile App: The app has been great for our team as they can now easily start a meeting with a click of a button from the app.
• Recordings: It is very easy to record a webinar or conference call which you can then download.

Incentivized

• Improve AI Camera to frame participants in large rooms
• no translation captions in real team for multilingual teams
• new elements to introduce quizzes and help with engagement

• If ReadyTalk provided an easier way to set up the initial call through a different platform aside from email, it may make things a bit simpler.
• ReadyTalk's monitor-specific screensharing process is a bit clunky and could be a bit better in identifying which monitor has been selected for sharing.
• ReadyTalk's admin dashboard could use a UI update.

Incentivized

Microsoft Teams Rooms has been very useful for our small business. As mentioned, it has allowed us to connect with our team more regularly, share important information, and keep productivity up by allowing our team to get on remotely and not have to commute to be together in person.

Incentivized

ReadyTalk is easy to use, but I did find the initial integration to Outlook a bit cumbersome. I couldn't tell you how to do it now - someone else had to walk me through it when I started at the company. We also have a lot of issues with people trying to use their computers for audio; often, it stops working entirely mid-meeting

Incentivized

They have been responsive to support-related issues.

Incentivized

I consider MTR better because it first allows integration with all the Microsoft apps and is more cost-effective, considering all the included services such as the Office app, Cloud Storage, and email.

Incentivized

Other regions in our organization have implemented WebEx. We have experienced poor audio and lack of customer service in our region. For quick interoffice communication and screen share, we use Skype for Business. Many people who have had the choice between WebEx and ReadyTalk will, more times than not, request a ReadyTalk account to be created. They feel the interface is much simpler to adapt. WebEx is not super friendly, especially on the backend of the tool.

Incentivized

• Increase in Staff confidence to use meeting equipment
• less "device failures" during meetings
• More and more staff have reduced the need to travel to each of our sites for a meeting.

Incentivized

• Positive impact. Able to fluidly demonstrate our software over conference call at the drop of a dime
• Positively impacts clients onboarding process due to ability to screen share with a high amount of people at the same time
• Higher ROI due to ability to show clients our new platform before their purchase in order to show the value of our product in real time via Readytalk conference

Incentivized