Item: MiCloud Connect
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Implementation Rating

I feel that the current features that ShoreTel provides are pretty solid, but in future I would love to see it expand into more features to assist inter team communication if possible. Considering that there was not a single issue with ShoreTel in my whole work period of 6months I think it is safe to say that the implementation is pretty standardized.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ShoreTel is being used at my previous work place by the whole organization, it is being used for internal communication between the employees and also for external communication by marketing and support staff. As for my personal usage of ShoreTel, I had to interact with it in a very minimal manner considering that I was a software engineer seated right next to the whole software team, I only had to use it to either contact IT support or HR, so I would describe my usage as inter departmental. From personal knowledge, I do know that it was much more widely used by people who used to work in the marketing/customer support divisions which was of real value to the company unlike with the software department where it was used occasionally.

Pros and Cons

I can strongly say that the communication channels were always very clear and there was no breakdown of any kind throughout my 6 month work period.
Since ShoreTel associates your profile with the phone it feels like the experience is very personalized.
For internal communication purposes it is not necessary to dial a huge number, this makes it quick and efficient.

I don't think that ShoreTel is of much value to teams that are more closely located in the work space. I do believe that extending functionality in ways like integrating meetings schedule and reminders might make it more useful.
It is a wired device which restricts movement, adding a wireless device to the collection might be a good idea.
It does not have a specific feature to group people under a single name, I would have liked to have seen a feature that allows users to group a set of people under one particular tag and be able to send them voicemails and as so on.

Return on Investment

Since I was not working in departments that directly deal with ROI, I am not sure about it. I think that it was a positive ROI because of the purpose it served in the marketing department.
I think that in some cases, it has also helped in saving time. For example, in cases where a person is not checking his email, a phone call may alert him more spontaneously.

Reliability and Availability

I have never experienced an outage with ShoreTel which is why i believe that it is 100% available at all times. As for the mobile applications, I cannot speak for them since I have not used them.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think the best suited scenarios are places where there is a lot of inter departmental communication, for example HR contacting employees regarding various issues, and also for external communication like marketing and technical support departments.
A less appropriate scenario is to use it in a team which is seated in the same room, I can relate to this example. However, if it is being used organization wide then it does serve its purpose to such teams as well, since people from other departments can contact them for a lot of various purposes. I am sure that it can be made more useful for inter team communication as well by adding features considering inter team communication as a usecase.

Scalability

I believe that ShoreTel can be used by a minimum company size of about 25 to almost any size of a company and this can be achieved while the company grows, hence makes it pretty scalable when required. For companies which are smaller in size i.e. smaller than 25, I am not sure how useful it would be, it may be depending upon the type of business.

From the perspective of a single technology user.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with ShoreTel