Lifesize Video Conferencing

We have five locations across three states, as well as many remote workers. LifeSize offers a way for us to easily have all of our employees join video meetings together, regardless if there are 20 people together in a large conference room using a room system, or if it is a remote worker connecting via their smart phone or tablet.

Additionally, the LifeSize support team has been fantastic in working through optimizing our system over the years. They definitely have a more customer-focused approach than larger vendors or services such as Skype.

The chat functionality is still immature compared to competing group productivity platforms, such as Slack. Would really love to see LifeSize beef up those types of features to make it truly a single platform that can provide robust instant messaging (including rich text, images, etc.) and better notifications for desktop users, in addition to the great video experience that LifeSize is known for.

If you work in small ad-hoc teams, LifeSize may be a little expensive or not offer the right balance of video-to-other collaboration-type communication features, such as robust chat and file sharing.However, if you work in an environment with larger teams spread out that also need to connect with individuals wherever they might be, then LifeSize is a solid consideration. It offers relatively platform-agnostic high quality video meetings with screen sharing and recording as the

We currently subscribe to the enterprise-level package of LifeSize Cloud, which allows us to have an LS user account for as many associates as we deem need it. Currently, we sit at 49 active users across leadership, sales, and customer service. One of the great things about LSC is that even users (associates or customers) who don’t have full user accounts can still conduct meetings from their desktops/laptops/mobile devices as guest users in one of our virtual meeting rooms. It also gives each registered user their own toll-free call-in number for audio conference calls, or for audio-only callers to join a normal LSC video meeting. I also think LSC does a great job of connecting users together into a unified meeting regardless if they are calling in from individual devices or sitting in a conference room together. After recently attending a conference call hosted by someone with Skype, I can honestly say that the experience is hands down better than Skype when it comes to the video quality, smart focus on who is speaking, and overall use of screen real estate – e.g. you can only see one person at a time (the speaker), with the focus always on the content shared. Conversely, the LSC app allows you to choose how much screen to give to the presentation vs. the other video feeds. Just an overall better experience.

There are a couple of add-on services that we have subscribed to as well. The first is the recording service, which allows us to record LifeSize meetings at the push of a button, including all of the video feeds and presentation content, which we can then save and host on our intranet for future viewing. We also subscribed to the Stream and Share package, which allows us to host live streams/webinars, which we used to host our first live webinar on back in December.

With all that said, we use it quite heavily. Last month alone we hosted 241 meetings equaling over 160 hours meeting time. In 2017, we hosted 2800 meetings for almost 1800 hours of meeting time. The screenshots below paint a picture of our usage over the course of a year.