MiVoice Business is a unified communications platform from Canadian Mitel Networks Corporation, for businesses with 5 to 65,000 potential users.
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Webex Calling
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Webex Calling is Cisco’s flagship cloud calling solution with over 12 million users worldwide. It delivers an enterprise-grade calling experience that enables customers to replace PBX hardware with a cloud calling solution. Webex Calling's connectivity and collaboration experience includes calling, meetings, messaging, contact center, and integrated devices.
As a phone system, MiVoice Business is absolutely fantastic. It's equipment and even virtual appliances are extremely stable. Simple auto attendants and making/receiving calls is where the strength is. Where is needs help is the Windows-based software. Upgrading this can be extremely difficult and it frequently fails for no reason. Services stop running and needs frequent reboots. The client has improved greatly with newer releases but can be buggy. Sadly, the old ways of a traditional desktop phone is dying and I think MiVoice Business isn't as good as some other options that provide more. The end user client just isn't as stable as something like Microsoft Teams or Zoom Voice that can provide a more stable soft phone experience.
The audio is very clear, but when the two devices are close, there is considerable noise. Also the calling is quite expensive considering that there are countless free tools available which provide the same features. Call recording is an add on so there you need to think about whether it's worth purchasing or not. Also that it can be used on multiple devices with the app makes things easier. For small scale corporates and teams it's all good, but with respect to its competitors bringing so much on plate and that too for free, I rate it 6/10.
For example, with WebEx calling, it's an offer which include many features of each on-prem server and every features are included in WebEx calling. So that's something which is very appreciated by customer because they don't have to buy each server like it was the case. They just buy WebEx calling and they have many features. Even if they don't need it, they have it and we can give them the notice to use them and they can use it and they are very happy with this software.
It is a very easy product to deploy and configure and to really take advantage of. It does not matter if you are using it in an office or your home, or for a security office or a collaboration meeting room - you have the right endpoint available for each case and the configuration parameters to improve the functionality you need.
I have been working for a long time with Cisco as a provider and also Cisco TAC and Cisco Support Engineers. The support starts right beforehand in the documentation of the product you are interested in. From the start you have a good, complete, and detailed and easy to read datasheet and there's always someone available to answer any questions.
I've used MiVoice Business at multiple employers. Once of them was moving from a very old Avaya PBX, another was with an NEC phone system that was slightly newer. MiVoice was far more easier to setup phones, setup users, manage voicemail, ETC. While we had consultants perform any upgrades with Avaya and NEC, MiVoice we did more collaborative with our support partner but we ran into far more issues with upgrades of MiVoice. My last 2 companies have discussed moving their phone system to Microsoft Teams and my current position they've already done that. All the issues with MiVoice relating to upgrades and issues with the Connect client are not existant with Teams. Teams is the bar, sadly MiVoice Business - while a very good product - falls short. They just haven't yet resolved issues that have long existed and in a pre-covid world it was OK. Now that people are displaced, the office environment has changed and end users are not isolated to a desk with a physical phone. MiVoice Business needs to catch up.
The differences between both software can be marginal in some aspects, but for the campaign in a proffessional level it was a clear win to Webex due the quality and security of the platform, being a Cisco product has more impact on the final decision, and in the end the overall experience has been great, having used Twilio in the past, that last part is my personal opinion.
I don't make decisions on ROI, but Webex Calling is used quite widely in the organization.
The ease of calling definitely makes it easy to coordinate across teams and geographies.
Good performance in low bandwidth situations means that employees with lower bandwidths don't necessarily need to upgrade internet speeds to have video calling.
