Cisco Room Series vs. Lifesize Video Conferencing

Its a fantastic software and hardware. However from time to time as tech improves, these may require a facelift. Maybe a subscription based model could work better so that it can be used widely instead of purchasing it at a full price. It may not be easily customizable for smaller businesses. It is very useful for large scale organizations that are spread out and need live meetings with a better video support.

Incentivized

I think there's much better options out there. In a small setting, they might be suitable but I don't believe they scale very well in any medium-large size businesses. We wanted to take advantage of things like a Microsoft Exchange calendar, a "Join Now" button and integrating with Teams. These are all things that our company made a sizeable investment on and in order to take things to the next level, we had to move on from Lifesize Video Conferencing.

Incentivized

• Cisco Room kits, it's a video conferencing system, so it has the, compared to the old systems where you use a webcam in a conference room, we don't see the person, the participants in the room. So with the installation of this kind of devices, it has a speaker fracking. So you can see the person, it clearly captures the speaker, whoever. So let's say that are 15, 20, people are sitting in a room if someone is speaking among them. So this camera is actually focused that person, so we can see that person. And it just shifts from one person to other based on the speaker and the webcam. If you're going back in the old days, like a webcam, using a webcam, it just gives an overview of the room. If someone is speaking, you don't know who is speaking unless you know the voice. So this is much greater. And you have so many other features like digital signage, you can display signage on the, so there's a lot of other features out there. So those are cool features I would say.

Incentivized

• The touchpad makes it extremely easy to join or start conference calls with a single pushbutton.
• The Lifesize solution is affordable and has been extremely reliable for our video conference calls.
• Camera quality is great and provides clear video for our organization.
• The pan/tilt/zoom features are very helpful to focus in on specific people or items during a training or demonstration.

Incentivized

• Perhaps any downside I might see is not necessarily with this product, it's more interoperability with other products. And I think these are all roadmap items that are being addressed. For instance, when you're in a Cisco meeting, it's not as feature rich as it might be as if you joined from a computer. However, as I said, these seem to be roadmap items which are coming along soon. Things like integration with the text or chat rather in a meeting, and also whiteboard integration.

Incentivized

• International users have experienced spotty/jittery sound and video.
• Connecting to meetings that are on different conferencing services is very clunky and not end user friendly.
• Being able to remote control the camera from a mobile device would be nice. If a change is needed during a meeting, the menu is pretty large and draws plenty of attention and distracts the audience.

Incentivized

By the time we are up for an upgrade, this particular series of products might not even been in the market. The typical product cycle for such products in the market are about 5 years. More importantly, the codec supported by such devices may also change by the time we are up for an upgrade. Even so, getting this system to a level of functionality we require was a frustrating ordeal that I do not look forward to during the next cycle.

Incentivized

I have a lot of Lifesize hardware and I do like Cloud but I am always watching the market for a company that will finally nail this space. I feel like Lifesize has a solid head start but I hope they can create a vision for the marketplace and execute in a meaningful way.

Incentivized

With the recent updates to Microsoft Teams interoperability, commitments to enabling more features over WebRTC for better Zoom and Google Meet interoperability, and the enablement of USB Passthrough mode on select models there isn't really any situation where you can't use a Webex Room Kit. Paired with the Touch 10 control panel and the Webex App, the device is also incredibly easy to use.

Overall experience with Lifesize Video Conferencing has been great. While it serves it's basic purpose of allowing smooth video/audio meetings of people located at different places with option of screen sharing/chatting/ recording, what add to it's pros are it's accessibility from various platforms, flexibility to switch to a listen only mode in case of network issues and ease of operation.

Incentivized

Once the order was place we received very quickly

Incentivized

Since we are an educational institution we not only have scheduled classes which must be available, but we have staff members in a variety of areas ranging from recruiting and admissions to advancement and the President's office who need to connect with students, alumni and other interest groups, often at odd hours. I have not, since using Lifesize had anyone complain of not being able to connect

Incentivized

Great product with a great user experience

Incentivized

Lifesize is an amazing platform for VC. However, it is a costly solution for any scaling startup. However, implementation and user acceptability was fairly easy and worth the additional spend. Quality has always been on point and support has always taken care of us. Our account manager also ensured a seamless transition process for Google Hangouts. Will go with this solution again at any other organization.

Incentivized

Cisco has always stood out for the excellent support and documentation on its products, this is one of the reasons why they are so well positioned. The means by which you can create a case and the response times are very good. I especially like the support through the Webex teams.

Most of the front-line call takers are only as knowledgeable enough to tell you to reboot or reset. If your issue is more complicated than that, it will need to be escalated. On the other hand - most of our problems have been on our network side. The techs are ALWAYS super nice and try to be as helpful as possible. They do care about fixing the problem.

Incentivized

Sensus was really helpful in the initial setup and training of our technical Support Team. Sensus gave us training on site so that it would be our own equipment that was set up. Then the in house tech team took over to train other users who would be using the system. When needed the Sensus and Lifesize tech support were really helpful in trouble shooting or guiding us through any difficulty.

Incentivized

I gave this rating because Lifesize's website offers multiple quality videos that shows you exactly how the software works. The videos are divided into different categories which makes searching for a video fairly simple! If for some reason you have a question not answered in one of the how-tos you can always contact support. Excellent product, excellent service!

Incentivized

Very easy to implement. Integration into our Unified Communications platform was simple and quick

Incentivized

Great for companies that need to accomplish multiple things at once while at different places. From our experience, broadcasting news is most favorable considering the level of excellence you get with the product plus the affordability. It can be used both privately amongst employees, or shared publicly through covering events

Incentivized

Cisco has and is the only vendor currently doing native MTR integration within the video collaboration space. No other vendor stacks up against Cisco as you are getting all of the value that Cisco provides such as noise cancellation, cinematic meetings, cross view, intelligent framing. The other competitors don't stack up to Cisco from a reliability standpoint and a compatibility standpoint.

Incentivized

Select Lifesize Video Conferencing because it is an online meeting software that has a robust interface, a pleasant interface, and solutions that we can take full advantage of, it offers immediate solutions for screen sharing communication through the web or app. It has worked perfectly for me, offering quality and security as well as being fast and with a free trial, which adjusts to the needs of its users.

The product and backend systems are designed to scale from small to very large organization seamlessly and easily

Incentivized

With LifeSize Cloud, it's very easy to simply add another Icon to your system and join it to your cloud. You can easily and instantly create meetings and add users both in your organization and out without any difficulty. The cooperation between the Icons and cloud users running on their laptops makes it easy to scale this out to your entire company, including joint venture without difficulty.

Incentivized

• Not sure about ROI because I get a lot of the, I suppose, investor's side of it all, but we have it integrated with just about everyone in the business as well as having devices everywhere. So to be able to just press a button and ring somebody, it's almost invaluable.

Incentivized

• First the cost of licensing was significantly lower than other applications. We were able to experience an almost immediate return on investment now having the ability to bill the health plans for Virtual Visits.
• Again, the lower cost of licensing allowed us to provide more users within the company with license. I am unable to share the specifics of our contract with Lifesize Video Conferencing. What I can say is the price made it easy for us to subscribe to Lifesize.

Incentivized