Cool, good to know that dial in is now available with Blue Jeans. It
was not previously available.
Maybe http://ist.berkeley.edu/videoconferencing/bluejeans could be updated.
That page says:
* Blue Jeans is geared toward video conferencing and not intended for
audio only use.
From your email, it looks like dial-in only is supported.
At this point, the PIs have had enough experimenting with
teleconferencing, so I'll need to stick with with ReadyTalk for a bit.
_Christopher
On 11/17/14 4:01 PM, Zane Cooper wrote:
Hi Christopher,
The Blue Jeans services at Berkeley have lately changed. Blue Jeans
increased the maximum number of endpoints in a meeting session to 100
- not 25 as published on the Berkeley web site. You also now have the
capability to record meetings. Also, dial-up is available -- when I
set up a Blue Jeans meeting, my participants are offered dialup as an
option, as you can see in the following example:
Inline image 1
If you want to test this out in Blue Jeans, I'd be happy to help.
Best Regards,
Zane
**
*Zane Cooper*
Chief Technology Officer
U. C. Berkeley - Haas School Of Business
t: (510) 642-7280 m: (510) 333 9146 Twitter
<http://s.wisestamp.com/links?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.twitter.com%2Fzane_cooper&sn=emFuZUBiZXJrZWxleS5lZHU%3D>
e: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>|
w:http://staff.haas.berkeley.edu/zcooper
On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 3:35 PM, Christopher Brooks
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
As some of you may remember, I was not that happy with ReadyTalk. We
tried WebEx and are now going back to ReadyTalk.
We tried WebEx because WebEx has an easy way for phone in callers
to be
identified in the app and all participants can see who else is on the
call and who is speaking
ReadyTalk calls from a cell phone into the system had lower audio
quality than WebEx and AT&T.
Our usage model is that we have 2-3 calls per week for two different
centers. We send out email to the center-wide mailing list. The
calls
have 8-28 participants on them. We do not require people to
register. Typically we have as many as 5000 minutes per month, with
most people dialed in as opposed to using VoIP.
The down sides of WebEx are below.
WebEx has at least three different products that all have slightly
different interfaces. We ended up using the Event Center, so my
feedback is mostly about that product. I've also used the
Training Center.
We went with EventCenter because we have more than 25 callers. With
Meeting Center, there was an additional charge for for more than
25 callers.
My understanding is that none of the WebEx products have a way to send
out reminder email to the invitees. Instead, they expect people to
register and then get reminded. Our model is that we don't ask center
participants to register for these regular meetings. Readytalk has a
way to remind invitees with an email message, (BTW - ReadyTalk
wants me
to upload each email address and send invitations individually. I
consider the list of participants to be somewhat restricted and am not
comfortable passing this list to ReadyTalk. ReadyTalk's
invitation does
allow people to opt out, but when people reply, they opt out the
entire
list. So, ReadyTalk is not perfect here, but better than WebEx).
The lack of invitation reminders is the primary thing that is
driving me
back to ReadyTalk.
WebEx's Event Center does not have an easy way to preview the
invitation
emails, or at least I have not found it.
Event Center is really for a 1:N style meeting where you don't
want the
participants to be able to speak. It is possible to enable all the
participants to speak, but the person running the meeting needs to
enable this for each participant. One needs to keep an eye on a
window
that does not resize and select a check box and then select
enable. As
people call in this is trick.
If I select all and then unmute, all the participants are unmuted,
including people that have selected mute. This is bad because all
of a
sudden what ever people are saying is heard by everyone.
We wanted to set up a recurring meeting so that the URL did not
change.
My understanding is that with WebEx's Event Center, there is no way to
set up a recurring meeting. We would need to upgrade to Training
Center.
WebEx changes $0.075/minute/person for toll free calling. I believe
ReadyTalk is $0.023/minute/person.
I've also used WebEx's Training Center. It works a bit better, but we
were quoted $225/month + long distance charges. I believe that for
3000 minutes, we were quotes $225/month, so going with TrainingCenter
for 5000 min would be $225/3000min. * 5000min. + $225 = $600. By
comparison, I had 5032 minutes of ReadyTalk in September for $146. I
don't see WebEx as 4x better than ReadyTalk.
TrainingCenter does not have the 1:N problem in EventCenter. Training
Center does have a Call Me button that is helpful.
One place where ReadyTalk really shines over WebEx is that ReadyTalk's
support is excellent. When I've had issues with ReadyTalk, their
support has contacted me promptly. I did not speak directly with
WebEx
support, but my staff stated that WebEx support was not that familiar
with product. I feel that ReadyTalk support really try to address
problems and get feature requests into the system.
Also, ReadyTalk's email includes calendar entries that easily work
with
Bcal, I just click on the link and it gets added to the calendar.
WebEx's email has an iCal attachment that I need to save and then
import
separately.
It would be really great if ReadyTalk made it easier for people to be
identified in the call. Also, the participants should be able to see
the names of the other speakers and who is speaking. ReadyTalk has
other issues, such as the invitation opt out issue.
ReadyTalk has international dial in numbers that are easily
included in
the invitation email.
I think WebEx is geared towards a different use case than my use case.
It expects people to register. It is not geared towards collaborative
meetings of more than 25 people. WebEx is over 4x the cost of
ReadyTalk. WebEx support is not as good as ReadyTalk support.
BTW - Blue Jeans is out of scope because there is no dial in
option and
it is limited to 25 people. For a comparison between ReadyTalk and
BlueJeans, see http://ist.berkeley.edu/videoconferencing/comparison
Also, AT&T's teleconferencing solution on the Mac is abysmal. One
of our
corporate collaborators uses AT&T. Under Mac OS X Firefox, when I
go to
the AT&T URL, the page does not open, it continually refreshes with a
status bar at the top about allowing a plugin or something. I have to
use Safari with AT&T. AT&T email uses iCal and the mail that is sent
does not include the time and date of the meeting in an easily
read format.
_Christopher
--
Christopher Brooks, PMP University of California
Academic Program Manager & Software Engineer US Mail: 337 Cory Hall
CHESS/iCyPhy/Ptolemy/TerraSwarm Berkeley, CA 94720-1774
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>, 707.332.0670
<tel:707.332.0670> (Office: 545Q Cory)
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CHESS/iCyPhy/Ptolemy/TerraSwarm Berkeley, CA 94720-1774
[email protected], 707.332.0670 (Office: 545Q Cory)
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