Polycom RealPresence Immersive Studio vs. Zimbra Email & Collaboration

I find Polycom RealPresence to be useful when having one on one conversations in purpose built rooms for video conferencing. That is where the quality of the product shines. However, I dislike using Polycom Real Presence for any sort of content sharing because of the issues around resolution.If I need to share content of any kind, I prefer to use other teleconferencing solutions.

Incentivized

Zimbra is great for an email system for a medium or large organization with appropriate IT staffing. The system is easy to use for end-users, and has a fantastic web interface. Unfortunately, it is overly complex, when considering staffing requirements and price, when compared with Office 365 or Google Apps for smaller organizations. For other education customers, it is hard to compete with Microsoft and Google providing their services for "Free" now though

Incentivized

• Allows video conferencing with eagle eye view on the speaker
• Crystal clear audio and video with zero lagging and freezing
• Very fast connections to the conferences

Incentivized

• Filter emails with specific information required.
• Very good storage capacity.
• Has a mobile version and another web.
• It has a friendly and modern graphic interface.
• It is compatible with all operating systems.

• Back end setup isn't very intuitive.
• Every now and then we get a delay when conferencing and using multiple features.

Incentivized

• The password change is not activated when you access by IMAP, Pop3 or Exchange sync. You have to know that the password change is required and you must go to the website to do so.
• The management of mail rules should have more checking options.
• There should be more applications compatible with Zimbra, the ones that appear in the Zimlets.

Incentivized

Overall, we were satisfied with the implementation. We perhaps should have spent more time consulting with Zimbra or others regarding best practices but as we got to know the system better we were able to make changes relatively easily after the fact.

Incentivized

Polycom RealPresence is really only the preferred teleconferencing solution when using a purpose built room for a scheduled face to face meeting. For ad hoc video meetings, Hangouts, Skype, and Slack all provide fewer friction points for average use cases. In fact, as Google accounts are nearly ubiquitous at this point, Hangouts has almost become the de facto standard for ad hoc video conferencing amongst our users.

Incentivized

We selected Zimbra because it has a lower cost in the market, offers more development features for its open source, has a very easy to use interface and adjusts to the needs of the company.

Incentivized

• Personally we have not gotten our money's worth, but this is not Polycom's fault, it is because users found it difficult to use.
• As for me personally, I used it for video conferencing, but my job was to make sure that it was operational for video conferencing.
• As stated earlier, even though I found it very easy to use, my users did not, and as such tended to video conference with other apps.

Incentivized

• Since all of our ROI studies and strategies are performed at the corporate level, I'm really not sure what positive or negative impacts Zimbra has had on our overall business objectives. I can say that at least one positive impact it has on my business objectives, in the medical record department, is the ability to be as paperless as possible.

Incentivized