BlueJeans works well for religious groups holding classes and services
October 08, 2021
BlueJeans works well for religious groups holding classes and services
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with BlueJeans Meetings
The Temple of the People is a religious organization whose members met on a regular basis, before the COVID-19 pandemic, in person in order to conduct study classes and Sunday services. Once the COVID-19 shutdown began, we started using BlueJeans on my recommendation (due to previous experience using it for various meetings in my capacity as an IT professional). Though the group was initially resistant to using BlueJeans, due to a general favoritism towards Zoom, over time we have grown used to the platform and have been pleased by the numerous new feature releases and quality improvements that have taken place over the last several months. We use BlueJeans at least three times a week, every week, to conduct online meetings and services, and we have found it to be a wonderful gateway allowing us to open up our meetings to people who are distant from our primary geographical location. Since we started using it, our membership has grown internationally and our sense of connectedness has measurably increased.
- Easy to use for those who have little technical expertise, especially older participants.
- Support team is helpful and responsive when we have issues or questions.
- Active new feature development has met many of our needs over time.
- Uptime and stability have been good overall and have improved over time.
- Recently, we've had issues where changing the view format (speaker only, gallery view, speaker plus participants) has caused the interface to freeze in an intermediate state.
- Our current subscription level only allows for one admin login, which makes it challenging when we want to, for instance, delegate screen sharing to another user but block all other users from sharing (which older inexperienced users sometimes do accidentally).
- Inexperienced users have some trouble keeping themselves on mute while others are speaking; would be nice to give admins more control in addition to having to hover over the mute button for each participant.
- Would be ideal to have better support for our specific use case when running classes: we have a session leader (other than the admin) and participants are recognized by the leader by raising their hands in order, after which they unmute themselves and offer comments; our current process is workable but not ideal.
- Has allowed us to include members across multiple geographies and time zones for the first time in our 100+ year history.
- Has been relatively easy (after a fairly short learning cycle) for older, less tech savvy participants to be fully present at meetings.
- Allows for us to accommodate requests from new participants efficiently and quickly.
I believe the support was less robust when we first started for participation via web browser. So far, most of our members interact via desktop application or mobile app. However, it will be useful to us in the future if it's easier now to log in without downloading any software. Our membership is older and less comfortable with technology, so removing as many steps as possible is always desirable for us.
I am the IT admin but we've had very few concerns about monitoring and security. We do appreciate that end-to-end encryption is apparently stronger than with certain well-known competitors, a concern for some of our participants who may be worried that meetings could be hacked or information gathered by malicious parties.
Audio quality is generally good. We do experience from time to time issues with specific participants that may be related to their bandwidth but are generally difficult to diagnose. For instance, one of our members claims to have a high-speed internet connection with no issues using other sites and services, yet he often experiences issues where his audio and/or video cuts out during BlueJeans meetings. These issues can be hard to diagnose.
Do you think BlueJeans Meetings delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with BlueJeans Meetings's feature set?
Yes
Did BlueJeans Meetings live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of BlueJeans Meetings go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy BlueJeans Meetings again?
Yes
- Zoom, Webex App, Microsoft Teams and Dialpad Meetings (formerly UberConference)
I selected BlueJeans due to my impression that it had better ease of use than other products and a comparable feature set. Though some of our members clamored to have us switch to Zoom, due to its perceived better feature set in early 2020, we stuck with BlueJeans and can say it has largely caught up with any feature gaps -- in particular, the ability to see video feeds from all participants.