Item: Webex App
Rating: 7
Author: Rahul Chaudhary

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Jabber

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my previous company, we used Jabber to connect all employees within the organization. The idea was to have easy accessibility to all employees instantly. Jabber was installed on all machines and was used across the entire organization. With Jabber we hoped to have a similar interface where everyone would feel comfortable and could easily see everyone's status (online/busy/meeting).

Pros and Cons

Pros

Friendly UI. It felt plain, elegant, and simple.
Online status (Busy/In meeting/Available/Offline, Custom status).
Message history is saved (not like Microsoft Lync).
Truly instant messaging. Never experienced downtime or delays in messaging.
Ability to set profile pictures. Great way to show off in my opinion.
Support for basic emoticons. Those really helped me during conversations.
Basic phone integration. Jabber was aware of my phone extension which helped me dial in to my meetings.
Online employee directory. I constantly used them to find people across organization.

Cons

Too many updates. Every other day there was one. As soon as you open your system, there was one waiting for you.
Non-Optional updates. There were very few updates which you could skip. They make you update the software by not allowing you to skip.
My Jabber was not able to connect me directly to the conference call. I had to join in using the actual phone. This could be a problem just for my company though.
Group messaging was hard. Every time I had to add the participants.

Return on Investment

Con: Enterprise level Jabber is costly thus reducing timely ROI.
Con: User maintenance of software (installing patches by every user) is quite high, thus reducing ROI.
Pros: Private enterprise conversations. For closed companies secrets can be passed.
Pros: Secure file sharing. Important documents can be passed around safely.
Pros: Collaboration is easy.
Pros: Quick IM enables me to get answers quickly, thus increasing my productivity.

Alternatives Considered

Slack and Atlassian Confluence

Slack is hands down the best IM tool I have used. There are features which are really comforting and soothing to a tech savvy person. For a developers group, I definitely will recommend Slack over any other product including Jabber.

Jabber, however, stacks up better than Microsoft Lync. In Lync my main issue is that the chats are not being saved, and there is no option to upload your profile picture (this could be my organization's problem more than Lync).

Additionally, Jabber is a complete suite of tools required for you to schedule/attend meetings, presentations, monitor screens, etc. You get IM on top of that. Slack is good for IM, but it doesn't have all these extra features.

Other Software Used

Skype for Business, Slack, Atlassian Confluence

Likelihood to Recommend

To me Jabber is a great tool for IM but not the best. There are other products such as Slack which are much more fulfilling and satisfying. Jabber is good for a mid-sized corporation. Out of the box, you get basic IM support, and common conference tools such as scheduling meetings, presentation during meetings, etc.

But if you are in an organization where a lot of chatter happens you will soon realize this solution is not best for you. The current trend is a publish-subscribe model where if you wish to listen to a conversation you need to subscribe to the channel and you can unsubscribe whenever you want (like Slack). Jabber has tried to enhance the solution for direct IM to behave like a group conversation by allowing you to add more participants in the conversation. But this should not be it. In a group conversation I do want to interact silently with a couple of other folks but now I have to maintain those chat windows separately which is error prone for writing in the wrong window (been there, done that).

Jabber is not all sour but it has tried to bundle many things in one.

Webex App Feature Ratings

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Jabber has potential, but ...