A great conferencing solution for growing companies!
Updated October 26, 2018

A great conferencing solution for growing companies!

Ryan Scherding | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BlueJeans

Audio and video quality is above everything short of the massively more expensive tele-presence systems, and far above our old vendor Highfive. Setup was easy, and calendar integration on the Dolby has been helpful with user adoption. Overall it has been a great and high quality meeting system that has scaled with our hyper-growth.
  • Audio Quality, which was the main reason we left our old vendor
  • Ease of integration into G-suite for calendars
  • Meetings show on the Dolby conference phone and on the TV, which keeps people from occupying rooms when they are booked
  • Cost of licenses, we have had to restrict contractors from the service to keep BlueJeans in budget
  • Training from BlueJeans was VERY boring, and most users just opted to figure things out for themselves
  • The Intel NUC can reboot randomly for Windows update, I know this is an issue with Windows 10, but having to reboot the NUC once a month is an unnecessary chore for my IT staff
  • Great for recruiting, as they can hold high quality interviews from HQ
  • Reduced the amount of travel needed
  • Great for live events where not everyone can attend in person
It is night and day, Highfive has a limit on simultaneous meetings which was a real problem as we grew. The audio quality is much better, which was the main reason we dropped Highfive. the only thing Highfive did better was screen sharing, I have no idea why but BlueJeans is really laggy and cant seem to synch audio with video.
The best thing is you can just hit join on your laptop or on the screen of the Dolby conferencing phone. If all else fails you can use the meeting ID, but the only time I have used that feature is when calling in from my phone, and to be honest isn't all that hard
Great for recruiting, as all the interviewee needs is a Chrome extension to join the meeting. Because the call is so clear we are doing about half of our interviews on BlueJeans instead of in person to reduce the inconvenience of travel on candidates.

The record function is great for large meetings and we have the higher end systems with the Aver camera in our presentation areas. After a meeting we will often make the video available to staff if they were unable to attend in person or via the livestream.

Good for small or growing companies who don't have the need or capital for 10k+ tele-presence systems

BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued) Feature Ratings

High quality audio
9
High quality video
8
Low bandwidth requirements
6
Mobile support
8
Desktop sharing
9
Calendar integration
10
Meeting initiation
10
Record meetings / events
9
Live chat
9
User authentication
9
Participant roles & permissions
10
Confidential attendee list
9

Using BlueJeans

416 - Bluejeans is used by all staff, We are a real estate brokerage so that means everyone except the agents has access to bluejeans. This includes Operations, IT, Marketing, Design and Engineering. We also use this for livestreams of company events, and often use the integration with workplace by Facebook to have them viewable after the event.
30 - Really we just rely on our tier two onsite IT support to troubleshoot issues with the system. As far as installation we worked with bluejeans and conferencing advisors to get all of our rooms across the country set up with bluejeans. normal troubleshooting has been minimal, and often is just that the intel NUC that controls the system is running an update or powered off.
  • decrease travel cost
  • livestream company events
  • ability to record meetings, for people who could not attend live
  • We livestream a weekly Q&A with our COO using blujeans but it is broadcasted via workplace by facebook
  • because bluejeans displays upcoming events on the television we were able to scrap the plan to install screens near the door of each room
  • SIP phone functionality with the dolby phone has made for very clear conference calls
  • All team meetings
  • expansion can use this when going international, with less travel
Really because the audio and video quality is so good that we really have no reason to look elsewhere. Also the cost of hardware to have it installed in all of our conference rooms was quite high, and competing products would not use the same setup. Also to go to the next tier of product would be 4x as expensive per room, and not really worth it

Evaluating BlueJeans and Competitors

Yes - Highfive, we replaced it with bluejeans as the audio and video was quite poor. Also as we grew at a rapid rate the 30 maximum simultaneous calls limitation was becoming a big problem. Highfive really just couldn't scale with the business and we needed a solution for clear and reliable meetings
  • Product Usability
  • Third-party Reviews
We did a trial just within IT to see if Bluejeans was any better than out existing solution. The difference in call quality really pushed bluejeans over to a yes and when we put the switch over to a vote, it was almost unanimous to make the move to bluejeans.
I think we would have rolled it out region by region rather than all at once, as wiring and coordinating installation and setup at 90+ offices in three time zones in under 2 weeks was really difficult. We did work with conferencing advisors who took a lot of the logistical work off of onsite and HQ IT

BlueJeans Implementation

With the exception of a few hiccups we had a pretty good experience rolling out bluejeans. user adoption was really quick as it integrated into their gsuite, and we pushed the chrome extension via google admin and the desktop app via JAMF. the training ahead of the rollout provided by bluejeans was kinda boring and pretty unnecessary as the system is very easy to use, and most users opted to skip the training
  • Third-party professional services
We used bluejeans and conferencing advisors, this was because our go live company-wide was two weeks after evaluation
Change management was minimal - It honestly wasnt bad from a systems perspective, once tied into our google calendars we were able to go live in about 10 minutes. It was a little harder to segment our staff into who got bluejeans and who didnt, but we found that by using roles and tying them to apps in out SSO we could autimate the process for new hires
  • 90+ offices going live in under 2 weeks was a little too much, we should have just gone region by region
  • installation crews were either fantastic or terrible
  • not all of our rooms had enough ethernet so we had to buy PoE switches for a few of the rooms

BlueJeans Support

The fact that I normally get a response within the hour to my tickets, and can reach out to our rep via slack during normal business hours has been great. this has been far above what we have gotten from other vendors and has really made the transition a lot easier
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Not kept informed
No - There was no need standard tier support has been so helpful, and when we have major issues we just contact our rep directly. We even have our points of contact in a slack channel for when we need help asap (site outage exc) which has been very useful, the licenses cost enough no need to spend more
We had an issue with reporting, where we had users putting in a ticket for an office that the call quality was awful. Our network engineer couldn't find any outages or slowdowns from the isp and our network utilization was low, but the calls were grainy with poor audio. With one quick slack message our rep had his engineers on it, and within 24 hours it was fine. They wouldn't tell me exactly what they did other than "we made a change on the back end" but it worked and was a quick turnaround.

Using BlueJeans

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
Difficult to use
  • making calls from an integrated calendar event
  • recording calls
  • using the room system which displays the event on the dolby phone with a connect button
  • screen sharing is a url when using a room system
  • call in is difficult with meetings that have an additional pin
  • screen share is quite laggy and not good for displaying video