Item: BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued)
Rating: 9
Author: H. Kipsang Choge

Overall Satisfaction with BlueJeans

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use BlueJeans across our entire organization, as well as some of our overseas affiliates for all kinds of meetings: from small team meetings within the same premises when users do not have access to the limited number of physical meeting rooms, to countrywide/global meetings spanning several time zones. The heaviest users are in the core business divisions - pharmaceutical sales, marketing, planning, and accounting.

Pros and Cons

Pros

BlueJeans provides an easy and seamless experience for users joining meetings from a multitude of devices, with a minimal number of steps between receiving a meeting invite and getting into the meeting. There are is no clutter in the joining instructions or interfaces, making it easy even those of our users than do not understand English.
The low-bandwidth mode that is available for mobile devices is very helpful for many of our mobile users who do not have a guaranteed 4G LTE signal as they join meetings from remote locations. In this mode they are able to view shared content and receive audio with minimal distortions or dropped calls.
Setting up meeting invites is particularly simple and with the Outlook Add-in that most of our users use, Bluejeans elevates the experience to new heights. The updated add-in, after the issues and hiccups with the first version, is easy to install and set up and once it is set up, works like an integral part of Outlook with no issues at all.

Cons

The upgrade of the BlueJeans desktop client from 1.x to 2.x saw the transition to completely redesigned interface which is quite impressive from a UI point of view. However, the upgrade seems to have been rushed without enough testing and confirmation of feature availability when using all possible OS and processor combinations. Features that our users had come to love in 1.x, such as remote desktop control, sharing of recorded/uploaded video during meetings, and temporary un-mute ('push-to-talk') capability during meetings seem to have disappeared or are not working with the new desktop version.
Another feature that is no longer available with the newer versions of BlueJeans is the ability to see all scheduled meetings in the web portal once a named host logs in. This was available until about Autumn 2017, after which a user does not have visibility to meetings scheduled in the Outlook add-in when they log on to their web interface.
Support for more languages would certainly be great, beyond the few it now supports. Our Japanese users would really love to have their language supported, as am sure other major language-users in Asia are.

Return on Investment

The biggest ROI we have seen since adopting BlueJeans as our primary video conferencing solution has been the savings on business travel. In the last six months alone we have had a total of more than 11,000 meetings from over 43,000 endpoints, for a total of more than 2.5 Million minutes, which is a nearly three-fold increase from the same period 3 years ago when we were using an on-premise solution. This is over a half a million dollars saved in travel costs, and with the detailed metrics provided by BlueJeans in the Command Center, it is very easy to provide these figures to our senior management as well!
We have also witnessed an increased use of mobile devices for meetings, especially the iOS mobile phones that each of our employees is provided with, thanks to the easy of installation and use of the BlueJeans app (no extra settings!). This has had a very positive impact on our field marketing staff, especially, by reducing the number of devices that they have to carry with them and enabling them to join meetings on the move.
From the help desk aspect, there has been a nearly 40 percent reduction in the number of video-conferencing support calls since we deployed BlueJeans, and most of our first-time users report a successful 'first-time' connection and positive experience during a recent user poll.

Alternatives Considered

StarLeaf, GoToMeeting and Zoom

We evaluated StarLeaf and GoToMeeting prior to selecting BlueJeans, but the former required some hardware investment while the pricing structure of the latter was rather opaque and not easy to understand. BlueJeans usability without any hardware investment and very easy to understand interface, combined with a straightforward pricing structure were some of the factors that influenced our selection, together with very strong recommendations from our early-adopting affiliates in the US who had such a good experience with BlueJeans.

Usability

Joining a BlueJeans meeting, from the simple instructions in the meeting invite, to the easy 2-step installation of the desktop client and simple configuration, is a seamless and intuitive experience that comes easy even for those using devices with non-supported languages. Once in the meeting itself, the minimal clutter of the interface and easy to see buttons make for an overall satisfying meeting experience.

Likelihood to Recommend

BlueJeans is a great conferencing/collaboration solution for organizations transitioning from on-premise video conferencing MCU towards a cloud-based service as it provides an easy-to-use, high quality video and audio experience combined with seamless connectivity from existing room systems without any new investments in software or hardware. BlueJeans excels in medium to large meetings where attendees join from a variety of devices including PCs, smartphones and tablets, providing a uniformly engaging user experience.

BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued) Feature Ratings

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

The Ultimate Cloud-based Video Conferencing Solution