CallFire vs. HCL Sametime

If you need to find a test candidate for your client quickly, this is one of the best ways. Pull yourself a hot list of a couple hundred potential candidates and load them in to CallFire. Then get ready to hit about 50-60 calls per hour. You should have a great test candidate for your client in about 24 hours! It's amazing how quickly you can show your clients the true speed of your company.

Incentivized

Overall, Sametime is a great feature for global teams to communicate, since you can chat quickly and efficiently with Sametime. Also, the file transfer is really fast and it downloads to any folder you choose. The chat history is easy to use and it is easy to find keywords. The feature of creating "emoticons" sometimes can jeopardize the team's efficiency.

Incentivized

• CallFire has amazing organization as far as categories and campaigns and all aspects go.
• It is very easy to use and understand! Very user friendly.
• Customer service and help is awesome! There have been some times when I have needed assistance and they were always so quick to reply.

Incentivized

• The license cost is comparatively low so almost all staff have it installed in our company. We can use it to contact all internal staff.
• It’s light and fast with almost no downtime. It also provides easy to use APIs for the user to build automation process on it. We have an internally built robot running on Sametime to answer frequently asked questions and do some repetitive tasks.
• Chat history can be saved as per user’s preference and it is easy to be searched.

Incentivized

• The services are easy to use and robust, but there is room for improvement. Unfortunately, not much has changed over the last 2 years of use. There haven't been any new features or innovations in that time.
• API integration and automation is not easy for most folks to jump into and there is very little technical support or documentation to take advantage of such features.
• The standard reports are generally sufficient, but there isn't any customization or intelligence available.

Incentivized

• The mobile app is not that great for anything outside of straight up messaging.
• We tried video chatting within Sametime without any real success. There were connection issues and the app would crash quite often. We switched to another product and had no problems.
• IBM Sametime just looks outdated. The menus and contact list are not up to date from a UX perspective compared to many other popular chat apps.

Incentivized

There is no reason not to, it has proven effective in the usage

Sametime is now an embedded experience for our users. They know it, they like it, they use it, and they expect it to be wherever they are. Because it is pretty easy to use and NEVER goes down, users know they can rely on it and won't be frustrated by it. Sametime is right up with there with Microsoft Office in terms of user adoption and appreciation.

Incentivized

Just about everything works the way you expect it would and it's relatively easy for users to figure out. Sametime was one of those things that we started with only a few people as a "test" and before the test period was done we discovered a few hundred people had figured out how to log in and most got it working all on their own. Many of our users want to use Sametime and do so regularly; we do not have to create policies enforcing its usage. Users find it practical to use Sametime to do things like chat, transfer files, share their screen, and so forth.

Incentivized

Typically if Sametime is not available, it's because Windows Updates were done on the servers and they were not rebooted. However, that's not a problem with Sametime -- in fact, if you have Linux you could probably run Sametime for years without any hiccups whatsoever. We have no internal Linux expertise.

Incentivized

Generally very good. Occasionally AV or screen-sharing will stutter and every now and then I hear of it dropping out altogether, but in all cases it was easy to re-establish

Incentivized

I have to use support for many customers. However, support is generally quite responsive and continues to see an issue through to resolution and I would recommend using their knowledgeable and well-trained staff.

Incentivized

We considered Trello before deciding on CallFire. Trello is a good service that seems to do much of what CallFire does, however we wanted to avoid the labor-hours necessary to get Trello up to speed, as it is very technically involved. We didn't want to hire any additional developers just to get Trello set up and maintained. With CallFire, it was very intuitive and easy to setup quickly.

Incentivized

Text chat is text chat. It's not a technically hard problem to solve. It's when you try and move out of text chat into more fully featured applications that allow for audio or video calling, transcripts, etc, it becomes apparent that the developers on Sametime gave up a long time ago. In my organization, Slack has nearly completely replaced Sametime for any and all purposes that Sametime used to fulfill.

Incentivized

Sametime is rock solid. It runs on WebSphere, DB2 and other related IBM technologies. This does mean the back-end is highly complex and very difficult to learn and get comfortable with, however.

Incentivized

• I sent out a broadcast message pretty deep in our data base, well three years out. I had one customer come in and buy thanking me for contacting her.
• Our holiday season was up 35% over last year, this year we used CallFire more than we did in the past.

Incentivized

• HCL Sametime is affordable thus it is cost-efficient for instant messaging compared to costs of phone calls, especially overseas calls.
• As Sametime is integrated with Lotus Notes it is convenient to use both of these together without separately using them.
• Still need to pay for other apps for effective video conferencing and webinar.

Incentivized