Solid video conferencing tools for bringing remote teams together
January 20, 2020
Solid video conferencing tools for bringing remote teams together
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with BlueJeans Events
BlueJeans is a tool utilized across the Expedia Group team globally. With large distributed teams, effective remote communication is critical and BlueJeans is used at the team level, for cross-team purposes, for large and recurring employee meetings and for company-wide meetings. BlueJeans provides video, audio and screen sharing capabilities which are useful for any situation where meeting attendees are in different physical locations.
- For larger meetings, BlueJeans does a great job of handling active speakers and bringing their video to the forefront while they are speaking. This goes a long way toward bringing all employees to the table in a meeting setting and makes it easy for participants to follow the flow of the meeting, especially in event format meetings with hundreds of participants.
- BlueJeans does a good job of calendar integration making it easy to add/create single or recurring meeting invites with an associated BlueJeans meeting within the invite so all attendees are able to manage and join meetings with ease.
- Reliability is the biggest challenge I see with BlueJeans. There are times when BlueJeans seems to handle the demands of a big company seamlessly, but then there are other times when BlueJeans runs into issues that I've seen affect entire offices for extended periods of time which creates a challenge for the teams who depend on BlueJeans to effectively run their remote meetings. While in the grand scheme of things, these outages have been few and far between, when they happen people aren't able to start their BlueJeans meetings and have to scramble for an alternate way to meet (while attendees are simultaneously having issues trying to dial into the BlueJeans meeting).
- Aside from the occasional outage, the quality of the video and audio is pretty solid. With variables that are likely outside of the BlueJeans product (office connectivity, bandwidth issues, internal routing) there are times where BlueJeans would either lag or echo which would either impact the output for the host of the meeting (who likely has a room full of participants) or multiple attendees. It would be great to see BlueJeans enhance their packet handling in these cases to prioritize audio over video (and perhaps auto-adjust video quality when there are bandwidth issues).
- Meeting effectiveness and efficiency
- Optimized team relationships and dynamics due to regular face-to-face interactions
Most of the video conferencing tools are evolving with similar feature sets. BlueJeans stands out to me for the scale at which it has been able to handle. From 1:1 meetings to large company-wide events, BlueJeans has been solid in terms of bringing people together and facilitating interaction between remote participants.