LifeSize: Big Cooperation for All Sizes
Updated January 16, 2017

LifeSize: Big Cooperation for All Sizes

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Lifesize Video Conferencing

Setting up the LifeSize Icons is pretty easy. LifeSize Cloud is very easy to implement on your own as well. Though there were a few gotchas with ADFS and SSO. One thing to keep in mind, if you're using ADFS 3.0 (comes with 2012 R2), the default secure hash algorithm for new Relying Party Trusts is SHA-256. I had to change it to SHA-1 in order to get SSO to work with LifeSize Cloud. Another thought: we upgraded from DirSync + ADFS 3.0 to Azure AD Connect. After the upgrade we slowly started losing access to LifeSize Cloud SSO. Turns out the problem was that when we migrated to AAD Connect it updated our federation metadata, which caused it to fail the very last part of the SSO. Just update the x.509 certificate from the new federation metadata in your LifeSize Cloud advanced settings and you should be back to normal!
We currently use LifeSize to help increase employee coordination both internally and externally. It does a good job at allowing internal employees to work better together, from the same office, to the same country, and even all over the world. It quickly became very popular to use and was adopted very quickly as we had a need for an easy system that would help boost our cooperation and user experience between offices. It's even very popular for the use of LifeSize Cloud's Audio Only Meetings, as they can handle up to 25 participants and are one of the most common types of meetings we need to have. It's helped saved numerous flights and hotel stays around the world as often, business meetings can easily take place over LifeSize. Not all have been replaced, but definitely a good number.

Pros

  • LifeSize is simple to use. Especially when using LifeSize Cloud. The ease of selecting meetings, conference rooms, or available users to call is really, really helpful.
  • LifeSize Cloud's Single Sign On was a bit of a pain to set up, but now that it's running, it's amazingly simple to use and my users are already used to it!
  • The presentation quality has been upgraded over previous versions and is now better able to show spreadsheets and other documentation that is often looked at.
  • LifeSize updates their endpoints and user clients fairly often, meaning you're getting good security updates and software updates automatically, like you need to.

Cons

  • My biggest gripe was that when we first invested in LifeSize (and later Cloud), it didn't feel like a finished product. Large changes happen fairly often for a fully deployed product and that makes it difficult to get out in front of sometimes.
  • The price is expensive. While they're around the same range as their competition, with how far along the platform was when we started, it didn't feel like we should have had to pay as much as we did.
  • We had to have numerous bad issues and experiences over and over again before getting a very high level of support. However once things started to get too bad, LifeSize did step up and address our problems with the fervor and dedication that we wanted and expected.
We've deployed at least one LifeSize Icon 600 in every branch office we have, as well as another 6 or so in the various conference rooms around our headquarters. They are massively popular among our employees and help not only our local meetings with presentations, but also help connect our employees around the world to better support the company, and our customers. LifeSize has its issues, all systems do. However, I've rated it as a 10 as it's nothing we haven't been able to overcome and have been supported by LifeSize's company very well. Though again, there have been times where that wasn't up to snuff either, what counts is how they rectify and work to fix not only the issue but their support.

Lifesize Video Conferencing Feature Ratings

9.7
High quality audio
10
High quality video
9
Low bandwidth requirements
10
10.0
Desktop sharing
10
8.5
Calendar integration
7
Meeting initiation
10
Record meetings / events
7
Slideshows
10
6.5
Live chat
6
Q&A
7
8.0
Participant roles & permissions
8
VoIP system collaboration ()
Not Rated
Web and Video Conferencing ()
Not Rated

Lifesize Video Conferencing Reliability

With LifeSize Cloud, it's very easy to simply add another Icon to your system and join it to your cloud. You can easily and instantly create meetings and add users both in your organization and out without any difficulty. The cooperation between the Icons and cloud users running on their laptops makes it easy to scale this out to your entire company, including joint venture without difficulty.

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