Great when it works. Frustrating when it doesn't.
April 03, 2020
Great when it works. Frustrating when it doesn't.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is used across my organization to allow people who are geographically separated to meet virtually and communicate effectively. There are a number of different situations where we have historically used GoToMeeting. It could be we have remote team members and we need to include them in a meeting. It could be that we are having a meeting with people in different offices across the country. It could be that our support team is attempting to help a customer through a problem and needs to see their screen to effectively understand what is going on. It could be that an engineering team needs to do a research call with a client and potentially get their feedback on a prototype.
- GoToMeeting recordings are usually clear and easy to understand. Also, their transcripts feature is surprisingly accurate and I like that I can jump to a point in the transcript easily if I need to clarify what was actually said.
- Screen sharing is generally easy and pretty painless even for non-technical people.
- The ability to call into a meeting in case you have a spotty internet connection is a must.
- Their reliability is my main issue. When it works, it generally works fine but it isn't very reliable.
- Audio has a delay often. Especially when people call into a meeting rather than joining from their computer.
- They automatically delete any saved cloud recordings after 1 year. This is a huge issue for an organization that is saving research calls to reference later. For a project I'm currently working on, I do need to reference research that is more than a year old.
- The GoToRoom system never seemed able to start up effectively. We joke that you have to pay the 5-10 minute GoToMeeting tax to get a meeting going.
- It has allowed our remote teams and people in different offices to connect and collaborate.
- It has allowed us to support our customers more effectively
- It has allowed our engineering teams to build better products by engaging customers more effectively.
- Zoom
We are actually in the process of switching over to Zoom from GoToMeeting as an organization. Zoom seems to generally be easier to use and much more reliable. Also, the zoom room seems to have a much better feature set than the GoToRoom system we tested. For example, on a Zoom Room it emits an ultrasonic frequency to that your laptop can detect so it knows what room your in when you walk in. This means I can just click "share" and my laptop auto-joins the meeting and shares my screen without me needing to actually type in the meeting ID or anything like that. The keys for meeting software, in my opinion, are ease of use and reliability and Zoom so far has checked those boxes. It's now coming out that Zoom may have other privacy issues so make sure to do your research.