Microsoft Teams Rooms vs. Whereby

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

If you cannot use another more common solution on the market or are looking for an alternative to the known solutions, it is a great alternative. If you have other tools already, and just want to test [them], that's fine, but I think the better-known ones have a better chance of using, knowing, and the learning curve will be shorter.

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

• Easy to use: The app is very, very easy to use. Literally just create a chat room (input a name) and access it to chat.
• Call/video quality: I've experienced better call quality on appear.in than in almost all other chat and video conferencing services out there.

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

• The paid version may have dial-in. But I have always used the free version. Dial-in is typically required for an "official" multi-purpose teleconference platform.
• I did have some trouble with larger groups (5+) when it was Appear.in but almost always use it for small 1-on-1 or 3 person meetings.

Incentivized

We are using a larger tool suite that already includes video conferencing instead of our older approach of using different apps from different vendors. appear.in has a simple but great set of features but its pricing scheme is not as scalable as we really need in a 500+ employee company.

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

Very easy to use, technical and non-technical colleagues have used it with no instructions needed. That says all about the app and services.

Incentivized

Never had to contact support, so we cannot give a rating for their overall support. When we noticed the audio was not always great quality, we simply educated our users to mute the mic and use the in-room conference phone which is connected via a dedicated VOIP link and had much better voice quality. The video performance varied by locations network speed and found it got much worse when the room size increased to over 4 connections.

Incentivized

After a recommendation from a partner, as the system is very easy to use, we simply start.

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

I find Zoom more complicated to use and harder to use because a lot of people do not like having to download things to their computers or devices and Whereby is so easy to get connected with . I like that Zoom offers larger rooms, but at this point the cost is not worth the extra expense.

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

• In general, any sort of online collaborations saves a lot on your budget. The meetings are rather more on time and can be efficient and short.
• Easy to drop-by and have a small talk with clients/teammates within COVID era.
• The URL makes you look fancy instead of a random hash.

Incentivized