IBM Sametime is a Basic Chat App that gets the Job Done... and not Much Else
December 09, 2018
IBM Sametime is a Basic Chat App that gets the Job Done... and not Much Else
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Sametime
IBM Sametime is the messaging app that many people at our company use on a daily basis. Not all departments use Sametime, but the ones that do, love it for regular communication between team members. It is not well suited for some of our other teams though so there is competition between Sametime, Slack, Google Hangouts and Skype.
- IBM Sametime is incredibly simple to use. It is straightforward and offers an easy to use chat experience.
- Being able to set up team chats is a great feature. This allows us to keep a chat room focused on a singular topic if required.
- Sametime is available for our team members on PC as well as on Macs. There is also a mobile app to keep people in touch when they are away from the office.
- The mobile app is not that great for anything outside of straight up messaging.
- We tried video chatting within Sametime without any real success. There were connection issues and the app would crash quite often. We switched to another product and had no problems.
- IBM Sametime just looks outdated. The menus and contact list are not up to date from a UX perspective compared to many other popular chat apps.
- Sametime keeps many of our team members in contact throughout the day which leads to increased productivity which makes everyone happy.
- We use the team chat room feature every day. This allows a team to stay focused on the task without any extra messages that are not on topic.
- The split between IBM Sametime, Slack and Google Hangouts has caused some issues when team members are not checking for messages on a certain app.
Slack is the best messaging app that I have used for work communication. Slack is actually so easy to use, and offers such a good mobile app, that I use it on my own for personal conversations. Slack offers many features that Sametime either doesn't or doesn't do well. We chose IBM Sametime because it was the first chat app that we used at our company. Many people are familiar with it and did not want to move to a new tool.