Item: BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued)
Rating: 10
Author: Ryan Bittner

Overall Satisfaction with BlueJeans

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

BlueJeans is currently used by our entire organization. The executive and talent ops (HR) teams use it the most. We had previously been using Skype for Business, though it was causing headaches for our users. Everything of Skype not signing in to being unable to join meetings to being dropped from meetings was fairly common.

An executive got word of BlueJeans as a product and asked for it. We first rolled it out to the Executive team and they loved it! They have very few issues and, when they do, BlueJeans has live (and very responsive) phone support to assist.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy meeting joins, especially using a BlueJeans Puck (conference phone). Everything ends up being one-tap-to-join.
Screen sharing is particularly fast on BlueJeans. Both connecting to a share and viewing the share are very smooth experiences
Whenever there is trouble, BlueJeans has never (in my experience) taken more than 5-10 minutes to start working with me on the problem. Usually I can call and immediately get a person on the other end (within 10 seconds).

Cons

As of the last time I checked (earlier this year) BlueJeans cannot replace a POTS line. Meetings can be created and dial-in numbers can be used, but so far I have not seen a "dial-out" functionality.
The Outlook extension, while useful, is not as neatly integrated as it could be. Occassionally I need to restart Outlook to get it to show up again
Integration with macOS isn't as tight as it is with Windows. Granted, this is also an issue on Skype, but it's worth mentioning.

Return on Investment

It has allowed us to be much more efficient in meetings, wasting much less time with troubleshooting before starting the conference
It has reduced the load on our Service Desk both because it is a more reliable product and because BlueJeans support is so responsive
This product has enabled our Recruiting department to accelerate recruiting efforts

Alternatives Considered

Skype for Business

Skype for Business (formerly Lync) is a very well-known product. It has lots of features (we used Skype for Business Online with O365), though each of those features is less seamless than the relevant BlueJeans features. It is sort of like a comparison between Android and iOS. Android has more features but they can be a little bit more troublesome for end users. BlueJeans is very ease-of-use focused.

Usability

Joining a meeting has nearly always been as simple as clicking a link in an email. The BlueJeans app (or browser) opens and joins the meeting automatically. It is very quick and seemless in my experience. This even applies for external people who have not ever downloaded or installed BlueJeans before.

Likelihood to Recommend

BlueJeans is excellent for both meetings within the company as well as meetings with people outside of the company. BlueJeans works with Chrome out of the box without needing to install an add-on/extension. This is miles better than other conferencing solutions as there is less troubleshooting to perform for outside people.

If you primarily need to dial out to a phone number, however, this may not be the product for you. I have heard that they are going to be introducing this feature, but I do not know when.

BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued) Feature Ratings

Comments

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BlueJeans, an excellent product that is well worth the money