Item: Webex Meetings
Rating: 8
Author: Sudipto Sinha, PSM I

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use this product to attend town hall meetings organized by our service line. This is an excellent tool to collaborate over the meeting and to virtually connect with team members across the globe. My scope of use is currently limited to townhalls involving people from within our organization and from our clients.

Pros and Cons

Collaborate.
Vedio and audio.
Screen sharing and document sharing.

Unable to use webex on MacBook. Currently, I am able to use only on windows
I find it has fewer collaboration options for all team members in comparison to the Microsoft team.
It asks to install a Chrome extension, but I end up installing Webex on my laptop every time I use it.

Return on Investment

It reduces the cost to organize in-person town halls.
It's a good way to engage people across geography by means of a video conference call.
It has a web extension.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Teams

Webex is good for large scale townhall meetings, whereas team is good for teams collaboration in small teams. Webex has a chrome extension and is a light application, Teams is a heavy application and it comes with the whole set of office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Webex calls never drop in the middle but teams call drop if you open a parallel teams client in a virtual machine.

Key Insights

Do you think Webex Meetings delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Webex Meetings's feature set?

Yes

Did Webex Meetings live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Webex Meetings go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Webex Meetings again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Notepad++, Eclipse, VMware Horizon, Microsoft Teams, Asana, Zoom

Reliability and Availability

It takes some time to log in to Webex Meeting and i have to install the desktop application every time I have to join the meeting. So I have manually installed the desktop client to overcome the hassle. I have not faced any outage with Webex Meeting till now. But the collaboration fully needs lots of privileges which are sometimes a hassle.

Scalability

Currently, we use this product only for virtual town hall meetings but we continue to use Microsoft Teams as a primary means of our collaboration and day-to-day work. Webex needs to make its software more user-friendly and easy to manage privilege so that a small group of people can use it. Also, they should think about how to integrate it with email apps like teams does with Outlook. It's super easy to create team meetings with just a click of a button, but not the same with Webex.

Performance

Webex Meeting's performance is great no doubt, but occasionally I faced an issue where no audio was coming after joining a meeting. So I had to drop from the meeting and rejoin the meeting to get the audio back. I have not seen Webex being integrated with the mailing apps and would love to see if it can integrate with office apps.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for townhalls where few people speak and others just listen. The free version is good but comes with limited functionality. It's not suited for an internal team meeting where all people have to collaborate and some people use MacBooks. It also needs a lot of privileges to share files or download files.

A great vedio/audio conference cloud based application to collaborate with people across geography

Overall Satisfaction with Webex Meetings