Item: BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued)
Rating: 10
Author: David Paton

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

BlueJeans is the preferred tool across the entire organization where I work. I typically have 5 - 10 meetings a day using BlueJeans. Our company is distributed globally. BlueJeans allows our organization to communicate effectively. BlueJeans is feature rich and yet easy to use. The settings and options available have been thought thru to be useful and easy to configure.

Pros and Cons

BlueJeans can handle meetings of the size typically found in the business environment. If video is being shared, the video of the person speaking will appear in the interface. If only audio is being shared the name of the person will be bolded. BlueJeans has the information you want to see in the interface displayed in an intuitive way.
A BlueJeans add-on provides a seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook. You can schedule recurring meetings, start a meeting immediately or have a standing BlueJeans "number" to include in all of your meeting invitations.
BlueJeans allows you to share all or part of your screen with meeting participants. Sharing control can be passed to the participants which provides a dynamic meeting environment.

We occasionally have times when BlueJeans doesn't want to function. A notice appears that says there are server issues. But we really don't know why this is occurring. When you rely on BlueJeans as heavily as we do it can be frustrating.
The "notification" that you are sending your video feed is not obvious enough. I often attend meetings where participants are unaware they are sending their video. Setting the "default" mode to "not sending video" is easily overridden and forgotten by the user.

Return on Investment

Since we are a global company, it has allowed more efficient transfer of information. The old method of having conference calls with no video and no screen sharing was not that long ago. BlueJeans allows problems to be solved much more quickly in the global business environment.
Travel is rarely used now to meet with other business departments. We always add a BlueJeans instance to our meetings in case even a local team member is working from home that day. Less time is lost due to travel, or other business interruptions.

Alternatives Considered

Blackboard Collaborate and Cisco WebEx Teams (formerly Cisco Spark)

BlueJeans is my favorite tool for business meetings. Other tools continue to improve but they are still held back by feature decisions that they can't get away from. Blackboard is feature rich but very hard to use. Webex has been know stop working when the number of participants is too large. BlueJeans is a newer product that has been well thought out and implemented.

Usability

BlueJeans allows you to immediately engage with those in the meeting. You feel you are in their presence and vice versa. BlueJeans does not take away from your focus on the meeting objectives. You don't have to spend much of your conscious awareness fiddling with the tool. Usually muting and unmuting yourself is as much interaction you will need to do with BlueJeans once the meeting starts. Screen sharing is simple and intuitive.

Likelihood to Recommend

BlueJeans is great in the business environment. For meetings up to 20 people it is my favorite tool. As the number of attendees goes beyond that, it can get more chaotic if many people want to engage in the conversation. For those working at home, a large number of video feeds can cause some increase in the bandwidth needed.
When working at home it is bests to switch to using your home phone with BlueJeans. It is integrated into the interface to switch to a phone. Even at work I have seen the audio drop out at times for some participants.

BlueJeans keeps us working together in a global environment

Overall Satisfaction with BlueJeans