GoTo Connect vs. HCL Sametime

I would give it a 10 out of 10 rating just because of the service and easiness it has offered us, which made our work effortless and stress-free. I do recall an instance where one of our clients' medical conditions suddenly deteriorated while he was traveling overseas. The doctors there could not understand his situation at that time. He asked them to connect with our team, and our team guided them with his medical records, and his life was saved

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

• GoTo Connect is a much more cost-effective solution rather than separate phone lines and video conferencing tools.
• I conduct daily team meetings and project brainstorming sessions using video conferencing using GoTo Connect.
• It integrates smoothly with our regularly used tools like Google Drive and has become very easy to share the documents we use.

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

• Making a dedicated button for "mute all" (other than yourself) for when someone "walks off before they mute"/has to quickly leave their computer....and FORGOT to Mute. Particularly when dogs are barking when someone working from home has a visitor at the door
• I'd like to see some of the functionality from GoTo Webinar enabled for GoTo Connect: see who's "actively watching" vs has their computer screen on another application

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• IBM Sametime just looks outdated.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

They are knocking it out of the park on all fronts. I love the service and support I am receiving and have no complaints. If they raised their prices substantially I would reconsider but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. They would have to mess up something consistently moving forward to make me want to move

Incentivized

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

Overall, it's a decent product for the price. It has the basic features our company needed when it was brand new and was not overly difficult to set up. As we've grown, it's become increasingly difficult to build out the features we want to implement within the PBX, and customer support can be less than helpful. Many of the more advanced features (dial plans, queues, etc.) take a lot of research to understand how to implement. Some of the features we paid for weren't even available when we were attempting to set them up.

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

I have never experienced or heard of unplanned outages when it comes to GoTo Connect. Most of the time the unplanned outage is always local power at a site or internet service provider having an unplanned outage. GoTo's service has never failed any of our orgs yet that I know of.

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

There is no lag in phone calls. There is no background noise or static/fuzz. Calls are crystal clear. With other dialers and phone systems, I have experienced delays between dialogue or delays with the caller picking up the phone and then being able to hear you. We do not experience this with Go To Connect.

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

Support used to be great when it was Jive support out of Utah. Now that they've offshored support it can be difficult to get a response. Our most common issues are least cost routing, and we run into support pushing back in stead of just figuring out which upstream carrier is having an issue like they used to. We often have to get our account manager involved, who is pretty strong.

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

The training videos could be more in-depth. This would help our user base so that they can feel impowered to look up information that they need without having to ask our admins every time they have a question about the system. Online training videos are also inferior to an actual person explaining systems.

Incentivized

The biggest challenge from implementation was deconstructing the mess that was our old system's config. After doing so, I believe there were primarily some methods that have worked better in the long run to implement up front, such as separating menus into separate dial plans for simpler updates, routing/re-routing.

Incentivized

I have nothing personal against Broadvoice and found their team pleasant to work with. The greatest difference has been the administrative portals. Where Broadvoice was confusing and I still hadn't really been able to figure it out over a period of years past some basic functions, I still had to call to get support just to provision or update phones. With GoTo, I had a functional understanding within a week and a couple years in, it is smooth sailing and no angst when needing to update or troubleshoot an issue and I have access to everything without a phone call. It is true freedom to meet my company's needs.

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

Its not readily apparent to me, other than cost, where you would run into any issues with larger scale deployments. When we went live on the product, the Jive team was always willing to do mass updates for us on our extensions, users, etc. in the system, so we didn't have to do too much manual one-by-one updates.

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

• We stopped losing calls due to poor routing or not being able to make them.
• It has helped us to be able to answer calls at any time or place, even outside of company hours.
• We have the possibility to access these conversations from our CRM system.

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