IM Disappointed
February 22, 2017
IM Disappointed
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Jabber
Jabber is being used across the entire organization for IM, presence, click-to-call, click-to-email, and voicemail. It addresses the need to communicate with others in a different part of the building, country, or world. It is important to know whether or not a person is available based on their presence. If they are offline, or in a meeting, or not at their desk, Jabber will tell you their presence. It can also be used as an alternative to the desk phone for checking voicemails, which is convenient if someone is not at their desk.
- Instant Messaging
- Presence
- Contact details (phone, email, etc.)
- Does not keep track of conversation history. Can't see what I said yesterday to a person. This is really important, since people communicate important info to one another, and that can just disappear, requiring another round of communication. Would be better to just scroll up in history like competitors' tools do.
- No chat rooms, must manually add members to group chat each time. No notion of teams/named groups, only individuals.
- Does not automatically log in to WebEx, prompts for a log in each time.
- Difficult to set a profile picture, so people see a gray outline instead of my face. I think this is coming from my pic in Active Directory, but I should be able to customize it like with other apps.
- Overall lack of features. It comes from Cisco, so all the integrations have to do with phones and voicemail. I don't have a need for this in my IM client, since I do not use my work phone at all. So it does a really poor job at the only thing I use it for. I have stopped using it recently, since everyone I need to talk to frequently is on HipChat, which my company also uses. This is bad, since all the people who use Jabber and not HipChat see me as offline even though I am available.
- Jabber is very cumbersome to use, since I only use it for IM, and it's missing many features that a client that focused specifically on IM would provide, such as group chat, chat rooms, and message history.
- Cannot send attachments to offline recipients.
- Very limited ability for rich content: Cannot display images in IM text, cannot use emojis/stickers or add custom emoticons. This seems like it wouldn't be important in a business context, but it helps make text-based communication more personal.
- For my team, Jabber does not add value in a way that couldn't be done with a free tool. This is because we only use it for IM/Presence. This is a negative impact on ROI.
- Our company uses both Jabber and Atlassian HipChat. I don't know why we use both, but some people use one and some people use the other. This makes it harder to determine if someone is online or not, since not everyone uses both all the time. This is also a negative impact on ROI, but probably wouldn't be if we only used one IM/Presence client.
- Having some solution for IM/Presence is essential for an enterprise level business. So having some IM/Presence solution in place is a positive impact on ROI.
I did not select Jabber, the business I work for did. All the solutions I listed above would work better to solve the problems my team uses Jabber to solve. This is because the alternatives are more focused on IM/Presence, and provide better group chat, chat rooms, chat history, rich content, etc. I think these are all must-have features for team communication. They also are more extensible with better plugins and integrations into the other tools we use, in the case of HipChat, at least.