It's all about the breakout rooms
July 05, 2014
It's all about the breakout rooms
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MaestroConference
I used MC to conduct complicated telephone calls with breakout rooms. I also used it for weekly teleconference classes with my e-learning school. The complicated conferences were only possible with Maestro Conference because of the breakout rooms.
- The breakout rooms are fantastic. It was complicated to move people in and out of them, but once we got the hang of it things went smoothly. The calls I ran had up to 10 breakout rooms, and it was difficult to manage it without two conductors.
- The chimes that tell people where they are time wise in the breakout rooms are really great. I made good use of them.
- The conductor panel is very good, once you learn how to use it. It does have an annoying glitch wherein you can't change a person's status on the fly.
- The call sound quality was often pretty poor, and we had a lot of trouble with calls being dropped. Over the years I would periodically throw in the towel and go back to Free Conferencing just to have reliable quality. But they only have 3 of 4 breakout rooms and I couldn't conduct the rooms easily. Then I try MC again to see if the engineering had improved. It was like a wave. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.
- The conductor interface has an annoying glitch wherein we could not change a persons attribute fields on the fly. I would interview my callers and assign them to one class or another based on their answers, and the partner up people into breakout rooms based on their answers. This meant editing the two attribute fields , and it just plain didn't work 75% of the time.
- Maestro Conference repositioned its business away from small educators like me, to large organizations like political action committees. The price became too high for me, and it just no longer made sense. I repositioned my product to work with less expensive and less complicated solutions.
- The add on features, like recording each conference room, were insanely expensive.
- VOIP and MC didn't mix. The MC dialer never worked. Neither did Skype. This meant that my international callers were out of luck. This was FRUSTRATING to say the least. Now I just use Skype. A picture is worth a thousand words.
- When the monthly call with breakout rooms was working well I had a lot of good conversion. When it was not, because of sound quality of dropped calls, I was giving people a poor experience. Since I was using MC as the centerpiece of my TRIAL calls, it was a two edged sword.
- Anymeeting,freeconferencing,Skype,google+,webex
Maestro Conference has breakout rooms. That is its point of difference. If you need breakout rooms, this is it. If you don't, this solution is not the best in any other regard.