A Great Product with a Couple of Gaps
February 12, 2021

A Great Product with a Couple of Gaps

Robert Chatten | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BlueJeans Meetings

We use BlueJeans in a variety of ways. Among them are the following:
  • We hold Bible approximately 90 Bible fellowships a week using the platform. This includes meetings that span as many as 10 countries at a time. The size of the meetings can range from 10 to 300 people.
  • We use BlueJeans for meetings among our managers and team leaders.
  • We use it to present classes and seminars.
  • One of the things that attracted us initially was that it allows for connections to be made to the meetings from a variety of devices, including telephones. We have some people who are not very technologically savvy so the ability to use a computer or not was important.
  • The facility to record meeting and then make those recordings available has significantly increased our ability to provide a library of content to our users.
  • Users like the flexibility of being able to change their own screen display from speaker view to gallery view and so forth.
  • We find that BlueJeans makes interaction between the different participants in the meeting very simple and easy.
  • Since we have people participating from different countries, the availability access numbers in many countries is a definite plus.
  • The availability to assign as many Meeting IDs as needed, including multiple meetings happening simultaneously is crucial for our purposes.
  • The option of the break-out rooms has been very useful. At times we want to have a meeting with everyone, then break people out for discussions or group exercises and that works very well in BlueJeans.
  • Currently, although the Meeting Moderator can mute the participants' microphones globally, the user has the option to turn their own mic back on. That makes sense for interactive meetings, but is terrible for when you're trying to make a presentation without interruption. It also makes it virtually impossible to record a presentation for later use without interruptions. There should be a setting which allows the moderator to turn off everyone else's microphones and over which they have no control until it's restored to them. Another option would be to have a separate product or setting designed for webinars or other types of meetings where you want to present material without interruption.
  • BlueJeans is terrible at being able to play video for the meeting participants. Yes, you can upload video to BlueJeans, have them convert it and then be able to use it, but that requires that the person doing the presenting have access to the complete back-end of the account. It's time-consuming and a bad idea from a security standpoint. The new "play video with audio" feature helps, but it's glitchy. Sometimes it won't allow you to hide the controls of the presenter from view of the users. There needs to be a way to natively play video from within the app. (Your competitors have this.)
  • There's a similar problem with playing live music over BlueJeans. I assume that because it was originally designed for business meetings, an environment where you want the audio to "hunt" for the strongest sound - presumably the voice of the person speaking that you want to be heard. However, in practice, if you try to have someone play a guitar and sing (for example), sometimes it suppresses the instrument and sometimes it suppresses the vocals as it tries to determine which of these two competing things to prioritize. The recent change to make it possible to turn off the background noise suppression on a meeting by meeting basis is a good step, but we still find it doesn't work very well.
  • There's currently no good way to play an audio recording for participants. (This is similar to the video problem.) If you do it as a screen share of a media app playing the audio, the sound levels are very low and sometimes muddy. You can "fake the system into doing it" by converting the audio file to a video and uploading the video, but why should we have to go to all of that effort just to play an audio clip?
  • I wouldn't say it has cut down on travel but it has allowed us to be in much more close and detailed contact with our people in other states and countries, bettering considerably our communication and ability to stay up to date on important matters.
  • Where previously we might have used an email or a text, we now commonly get on BlueJeans to meet with colleagues or managers, making the interaction more personal and direct and building closer relationships.
  • Certainly in the time of this pandemic, when we have not been able to meet face-to-face in most cases, BlueJeans has saved our organization, enabling it to continue to function and serve the needs of our people despite the lack of in-person events.

Do you think BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued) delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued)'s feature set?

Yes

Did BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued) again?

Yes

The landscape has changed considerably in the years since we started with BlueJeans but we originally selected it because it would allow for much larger meetings than Skype, had much better audio and video quality than another vendor we used (whose name escapes me at the moment), the recording features were superior and the multiple ways and devices by which users can connect were ahead of the competition.
BlueJeans is very well suited for small to medium-sized meetings that you want to be somewhat interactive in the sense that you want to hear from the participants. As mentioned previously, it doesn't work well for a situation where you are primarily wanting to present something to other people and don't want them interrupting. It's also not ideal for streaming a live event where, again, you're not particularly interested in interacting with the "audience" until perhaps the end.

BlueJeans Meetings (discontinued) Feature Ratings

High quality audio
Not Rated
Mobile support
Not Rated
Calendar integration
7
Record meetings / events
9
Slideshows
Not Rated
Participant roles & permissions
6
Confidential attendee list
9