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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