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by Myasis Dragon » Tue, 31 Mar 2020 8:51 pm
If you want call/cloud PBX integration, you won't want to be messing with Teams. I've been implementing a new video conferencing system and upgrading our cloud PBX services, and at first, I thought that Teams was the logical solution. 40 person shop.
After all, it comes "free" with Office 365 Business Premium editions. But, there are so many problems with Teams as a collaborating tool, we decided not to use it.
First, using it as a video conferencing solution, we have time and again been plagued with video jitter and dropouts, audio dropouts, unsync'ed video and audio. Saving and retrieving presentations is complicated.
And Teams itself is kind of an arbitrary pain in the ass. For example, you start a chat. There's two of you. You want to add a third person. You can't do that because Teams has decided two person chats are "private". They call this a security feature. There are tons of irritating, pain in the ass, features in Teams.
So, you want to add PBX and phone services, is that right? Besides the fact that MS tech support in this arena is a complete bunch of cretins, it is also quite expensive, especially compared to other available services. I've forgotten half the steps you must go through but I guarantee you if you decide to go down this road, you'll wonder how MS came up with such an idiotic approach to integrating Teams with VOIP service.
I've looked at quite a few different video conferencing vendors (and a handful of cloud PBX vendors), including, Zoom, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, Cisco WebEx, Jive, and Ring Central. If money is no object (and it probably wouldn't be for an office of up to 10 or so), then Ring Central would work, with integrated facilities. But, it's expensive.
I ultimately came down to Zoom or GoToMeeting as the video conferencing solution of choice, based on cost, reliability, and ease of use. I would have preferred to go with Zoom but the GoToMeeting pricing was too good to pass up.
Now, Zoom started out as a video conferencing solution. They realized that the softphone/cloud PBX/VOIP market lay before them and have been offering an integrated solution. So, you get a phone number, fairly robust PBX, and video calling, all integrated in a softphone and your own transferable DID phone numbers. The room conferencing software is good. Zoom call reliability is said to be excellent. The only downside is that they have a lack of experience in the PBX world. OTOH, they've got tons on ethernet pipe for video calls so audio should be a piece of cake.
GoToMeeting has a different history. It was an independent company until a few years ago, when it was bought by LogMeIn, a company in the business of collaboration software. Then, a couple of years ago, they also bought Jive Communications, a well known cloud PBX provider. They have integrated Jive and GoToMeeting for a complete solution.
Their integration has some holes in it, and at times can be confusing, especially if you are an administrator. But, on the whole, it works well, and can be integrated with Outlook, offers your own permanent video links, etc. We have had no issues using GoToMeeting with respect to video and audio quality. Recording is super easy. The phones work well and there are lots of programming options. The PBX is very fully configured. GoToMeeting room conferencing software leaves a lot to be desired, though.
GoToMeeting/Jive offered us an extremely competitive pricing for bundled services... only about 3 dollars per month more per employee than my current PBX pricing, so it was sort of a no brainer, at least for management. As the IT person, I'd have preferred Zoom for several reasons but you really won't go wrong with either of them.
