Polycom RealPresence Immersive Studio vs. Zoom Workplace

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

Zoom Workplace is especially good for corporate environments or for companies with a large number of employees. This is exponentially more so for companies that have remote workers, as it's one of the leaders in the video conferencing industry. It may not be ideal for smaller companies or startups who could easily get by with cheaper/free messaging apps or text messaging on phones.

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

• I love how easy it is to set the focus on the presenter. It is annoying when people don't spotlight themselves as a presenter, so you get to see the whole gallery of attendees in smaller, two-inch windows.
• I like the capability of having break-out rooms. Even though I don't use them very often, it is nice to have them available if the right situation presents itself for smaller group chats.
• The recording quality is better than I have experienced with other products (Microsoft Teams, WebEx, etc.), and the fact that it is already an MP4, so I don't have to convert it for publishing on our intranet is huge to me.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Love notes - allow insertion of table or grid
• Allow admin to turn off DND
• Allow a way to group individual people chats - not channels just individual peeps into groups for ease of finding - like how you can group shared calendars into sections in Outlook

Incentivized

We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.

It is fairly easy to set up and use both for the administrator and the end user.

Incentivized

Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.

There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.

Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.

Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.

Incentivized

If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.

Polycom RealPresence Immersive Studio is well established and is 10 years ahead of the current market. On doing my research I was amazed at the fact that Polycom RealPresence Immersive Studio has been trusted for years and used by astronauts, that's one feet no product can take away from Polycom RealPresence Immersive Studio as it takes on to show high quality and required support to reach that far.

Incentivized

Based on my experience with Teams, I like Zoom's messaging interface much better and Zoom seems to have better video quality. When I was evaluating different VoIP providers, Zoom Phone also had way more features and was much more stable than Teams Phone. I also evaluated Nextiva and did not its UI as much as the Zoom desktop app. Zoom Phone's pricing was also significantly better.

Incentivized

The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.

Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.

Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.

• Frustrated user base - issues almost every week with the systems.
• Successfully reduced travel costs - when it works. For quick one-off meetings, Polycom RealPresence makes for easy face to face communications. However, for more serious conversations, travel is preferred.
• Lack of integration into other tools. Polycom Realpresence is an entirely separate product from all of our other communications tools and does not provide an easy point of integration to hop into a video conference. As a result, using Polycom RealPresence is always a planned activity, never ad hoc.

Incentivized

• Zoom, in essence, is how we deliver what we sell. Services delivered over Zoom account for 80% of our annual revenue.
• Zoom saves me approximately 3 hours every week thanks to integrations with other software I use.
• Zoom webinars have fueled my list growth.

Incentivized