Our team likes BlueJeans
February 15, 2019
Our team likes BlueJeans
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with BlueJeans
We are a 100% online business with employees scattered all over the country (and some team members abroad), working from their homes. BlueJeans is what we use for all of our group meetings, as well as some one-on-one sessions. Aside from simply having a way to meet together with our geographic separation, we extensively use the screen sharing feature to talk about the systems we are working with. Most people choose not to turn their video cameras on. I also sometimes use this to help customers with technical issues they are having; if it's something where I can't figure out why it's working for me but not them, I use BlueJeans to have them share their screen so I can figure out what's happening on their computer specifically.
- The sound is always clear -- a number of employees have commented on that. We used to use GoToMeeting, and when we got BlueJeans, that was the most frequent comment about why they liked BlueJeans better. I've used GoToMeeting with our company and attended WebEx and Zoom with other companies, and while there are generally no complaints about the sound at the others, something about BlueJeans sound seems exceptionally clear.
- It's cheap. I'm not sure about the current price comparison, but when we switched from GoToMeeting to BlueJeans, BlueJeans was about one-third of the price of GoToMeeting.
- It's easy to use. I've had much fewer issues with people joining, being able to mute them, and things of that nature than I had with GoToMeeting. Screen sharing is easier also. There's also a permanent personal meeting number that I can use anytime for an instant, unplanned meeting.
- Customer support has been excellent. They're generally easy to get in contact with and are knowledgeable and helpful.
- One thing that I liked better about GoToMeeting was the separation of the chat box from the main screen. It's important to be able to see the chat box while I'm presenting, but the way it's set up on BlueJeans, it's combined with the main screen and so it's quite inconvenient. Another problem with this is that if I'm sharing my screen for presenting, when I look at the chats-- which would even include private chats-- they show up for everyone to see. This is a major flaw. The chat box should be separate.
- I have recurring meetings, with meeting numbers, which I would like to send out reminders of to team members. In version 1 of BlueJeans, I could copy and paste those. In the current version (2), I cannot; I have to memorize and type them in manually to my reminder messages. For my permanent person meeting number, I can copy it easily. However, this is not possible with other meeting IDs. Why would they make the meeting numbers not possible to copy?
- Similarly, in version 1, after the meeting, I could copy the chat box, which I kept with the meeting's presentation and meeting minutes for recordkeeping. The chats could also remind me who said what in the meeting for the purpose of writing my meeting minutes. With version 2, chat is no longer copiable, so I have to use multiple screenshots to get all the chats -- what a pain.
- Scheduling meetings is not convenient. It forces me to a web page to do so.
- The biggest return on investment is that it only costs one-third of what we were paying with Citrix GoToMeeting.
- We've always used online meetings, so there isn't really any other change in ROI from what we used previously.
- GoToMeeting, Zoom and Webex Meetings
I have only used GoToMeeting and BlueJeans from the presenter/organizer side of things, but I have used Zoom and WebEx as an attendee at the meetings of other companies. Of the four, WebEx is by far my least favorite. It's unintuitive, clunky, and troublesome to download for the meeting. I strongly dislike WebEx. As for GoToMeeting vs. Zoom, it's about six of one, half a dozen of the other. Overall I prefer Zoom, but one thing I don't like about it is that when someone shares their screen for presenting, Zoom automatically takes up my entire screen. It took me awhile to figure out that I could back out of this. I've never had this issue with the others. As for BlueJeans vs. GoToMeeting, I've already listed a number of comparisons of why I like BlueJeans better. One thing I would add was that once LogMeIn acquired GoToMeeting, that was even more incentive to ditch GoToMeeting because I've had multiple bad experiences with LogMeIn Rescue, where it refuses to delete from my machine and keeps opening up every time I start my computer. They may have resolved that by now, but first impressions linger.
BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued) Feature Ratings
BlueJeans Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
No - Current level of support is plenty effective.
Yes - Under BlueJeans version 1, submission of logs for bug reporting would not allow the usage of our company email addresses because their system rejected our top level domain. I repeatedly complained about this, but nothing ever came of it in version 1; however, it was fixed in version 2. As stated in the last question, we had major bugs when we first got version 2, but I was satisfied with their effort in working to resolve the issue. It took a long time, but when they couldn't reproduce it for a long time, that of course makes it harder to fix. I don't recall any bugs in the past year. I will say this: I have liked BlueJeans support far better than the support we got under Citrix GoToMeeting.
During the time we couldn't get version 2 to work, I was glad when someone finally offered to allow us to downgrade back to version 1 again.