Item: BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued)
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use BlueJeans to provide our users with secure audio conference bridges, but mainly for video conferencing bridging. We have 10-15 licenses primarily reserved for IT to give out meeting ID's to the rest of the organization on an as needed basis. We also have used BlueJeans Events for our TownHalls. BlueJeans as a platform seems to work best with our current video conferencing systems and allows us to do multi point video conferencing between two or more offices. Content playback (after uploading) and screensharing capabilities are also used. Our Copyright/Royalties teams use Blue Jeans the most in our organization.

Pros and Cons

Multi point conference bridges that are platform agnostic. Being able to join from a phone/laptop/VC system gives us the flexibility we need.
Automatic invites with meeting join details are nice. Not having to send out emails with the join info after the fact means less time spent on organizing a project.
Content upload for playback in the cloud. Being able to upload a video and have it play back for all parties simultaneously allows our media driven company the ability to share video content in a proficient relatively high quality manner in all locations at the same time.

There is currently no way to turn off announcements if no party has joined. Often we will connect a blue jeans bridge via audio only, and there is a voice that continues to announce that no one has joined. If someone never calls in, the voice never stops and disrupts the meeting. We usually resort to calling in as IT and muting our phones in case someone does need to join later.
Upload of more file formats would be nice. Having to convert an audio file to a video to play back for all parties is a pain. Why cant we just upload an audio file and the presenter initiate playback at the appropriate time?
Pricing. I would love to roll bluejeans out for each user in our organization, but it is prohibitively expensive and not in line with competitor's offerings.

Return on Investment

BlueJeans has decreased travel expenses by allowing in depth training to happen over a video call instead of flying someone on site.
BlueJeans has allowed us to free up conference rooms for other meetings when there are only a few attendees from one location.
BlueJeans has decreased the need for IT involvement in connecting meetings with it's ease of use.

Alternatives Considered

Zoom and Skype for Business (formerly Lync)

BlueJeans does content playback (specifically video) that is requested by the business we are in regularly. Zoom seems to be a great product as well, although some of our users do not like the layout as much. Skype does not work with our conference units (LifeSize) at this time, and as such does not meet our needs currently.

Usability

BlueJeans is relatively easy to use, however the meeting invitations that BlueJeans automatically sends out is not exactly end user friendly. If there is no passcode for the meeting, the end user has to know to press # (trips up some end users who are not seasoned).

Joining from a link on the iPhone works 99% of the time, but when it doesn't it can be frustrating. When joining from a computer, I have seen competitor's products that automatically assist the end user with audio/video set up if it detects a potential problem, Blue Jeans does not do this as well in it's current iteration.

Joining a meeting is overall relatively easy, but there is room for improvement. Creating links in the meeting invite that automatically dial the meeting ID and passcode when pressed would be nice.

Likelihood to Recommend

BlueJeans is well suited for multi point conference bridging with audio dial in needs and the need to join from mobile app/laptop and video conference rooms. If you have executives/employees all over the world who may be walking through the airport, others sitting in a conference room, some sitting on their laptops in the hotel and they all need to meet with video and presentation to follow along with, then BlueJeans does that. BlueJeans can even record that. If you have teams across the world that need to do training and screenshare, and you want to record the whole thing to distribute to those who couldn't be there, BlueJeans is well suited to that.

BlueJeans does not work well if you have users who are strongly entrenched in using Skype, or if you want to use BlueJeans as an audio only dial for a Video Conference call and you are unsure if anyone will call in.

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Overall Satisfaction with BlueJeans