LifeSize Cloud - 7 year user / admin / satisfied customer
Overall Satisfaction with Lifesize Video Conferencing
We currently subscribe to the enterprise-level package of LifeSize Cloud, which allows us to have an LS user account for as many associates as we deem need it. Currently, we sit at 49 active users across leadership, sales, and customer service. One of the great things about LSC is that even users (associates or customers) who don’t have full user accounts can still conduct meetings from their desktops/laptops/mobile devices as guest users in one of our virtual meeting rooms. It also gives each registered user their own toll-free call-in number for audio conference calls, or for audio-only callers to join a normal LSC video meeting. I also think LSC does a great job of connecting users together into a unified meeting regardless if they are calling in from individual devices or sitting in a conference room together. After recently attending a conference call hosted by someone with Skype, I can honestly say that the experience is hands down better than Skype when it comes to the video quality, smart focus on who is speaking, and overall use of screen real estate – e.g. you can only see one person at a time (the speaker), with the focus always on the content shared. Conversely, the LSC app allows you to choose how much screen to give to the presentation vs. the other video feeds. Just an overall better experience.
There are a couple of add-on services that we have subscribed to as well. The first is the recording service, which allows us to record LifeSize meetings at the push of a button, including all of the video feeds and presentation content, which we can then save and host on our intranet for future viewing. We also subscribed to the Stream and Share package, which allows us to host live streams/webinars, which we used to host our first live webinar on back in December.
With all that said, we use it quite heavily. Last month alone we hosted 241 meetings equaling over 160 hours meeting time. In 2017, we hosted 2800 meetings for almost 1800 hours of meeting time. The screenshots below paint a picture of our usage over the course of a year.
- I think LSC does a great job of connecting users together into a unified meeting regardless if they are calling in from individual devices or sitting in a conference room together. We often have meetings with 20-60 people all on the call from five offices and various mobile/PC devices for associates in the field, and it handles these kinds of mixed meetings quite well.
- I can honestly say that the experience is hands down better than Skype when it comes to the video quality, smart focus on who is speaking, and overall use of screen real estate – e.g. you can only see one person at a time (the speaker), with the focus always on the content shared. Conversely, the LSC app allows you to choose how much screen to give to the presentation vs. the other video feeds. Just an overall better experience.
- There are a couple of add-on services that we have subscribed to as well. The first is the recording service, which allows us to record LifeSize meetings at the push of a button, including all of the video feeds and presentation content, which we can then save and host on our intranet for future viewing. We also subscribed to the Stream and Share package, which allows us to host live streams/webinars, which we used to host our first live webinar on back in December. While the live stream functionality needs some maturity and doesn't have the feature-set of something like On24, for something like $500/yr add-on, it's solid.
- The chat functionality needs maturity. Would love to replace Slack w/ LSC, as LSC has most of the features that we are looking for, such as chat. However, it is missing support for images, rich text, and many other features you have come to expect from a strong IM platform.
- Notifications could be better. Would like to see icon badges on the taskbar icon, better use of Win10 notification center. Doesn't do a good enough job to highlight missed calls or messages while you were away.
- The live stream functionality is a good value for the cost, but is rough around the edges and needs polish.
- The recording functionality, while easy to use and quite valuable, is held back by the paltry 10 hours of recording space you are given. Since it has a video library and sharing capabilities, it is a shame that you can only keep 10 hours of content there.
- We have five locations across Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, with key stakeholders and cross-location teams that work together every regardless of physical location. This resource is critical in keeping our teams connected.
- Has improved collaboration and communication by having as close to face to face meetings as possible with remote team members. Conference rooms were often times double booked because of LifeSize, which as a determining factor in us moving to a cloud subscription.
- Nothing negative