GLOBALINX has earned an A+ rating from TMC Labs for its Connex hosted unified communications (UC) solution, which supports mobile phones, IP phones, tablets, PCs and laptops, and offers a single identity across multiple devices.
TMC Labs put Connex through its paces to see how this hosted UC solution compared to others, such as Microsoft Office 365.
GLOBALINX has selected two popular SIP-based IP phone brands to support (Polycom and Yealink) and offers the GLOBALINX UC softphone client, which supports VoIP, video, desktop sharing, contact integration with Outlook and IM, including presence capabilities.
One big winner for TMC Labs was the user interface for the client, which is supported on Windows, Mac, Apple iOS and Android.
“The Connex client makes good use of colors to indicate presence status of your contacts, including green for available, yellow for away, grey for offline and red for busy,” said Tom Keating, executive technology editor, CTO and vice president of TMC Labs. “Clicking the Contacts icon lets you search your list of Connex contacts, Outlook synced contacts, as well as the “global” shared directory. It supports auto-match as you type so you can quickly find contacts.”
When it came to the search feature, dialing from the app “worked quite well,” though researchers has a slight quibble with the requirement to double-click with the mouse to dial a contact from within search results rather than hitting enter.
“Fortunately, we did find a keyboard workaround for power dialers – pressing tab first changes the focus on the app to the matched record and then you can press enter,” keating said.
Users can right-click any contact and then choose one of three options: call (via Connex softphone), call from phone (Polycom or Yealink IP phones are supported), or initiate a video call. Both audio and video quality were “superb,” according to TMC Labs.
The firm also tested the ability to seamlessly move a call from device to device, whether it’s an IP phone, the Connex softphone app, a cell phone or tablet. Users also can dial GLOBALINX and then initiate an outbound call so that calls from the mobile phone uses the GLOBALINX phone number as the CallerID.
“It can do this without dropping the call and without the user even noticing, except perhaps a change in call volume or call quality (i.e. cellular vs. landline),” Keating said.
When it comes to inbound calling, Connex also allows users to add up to 10 phone numbers or SIP URI addresses to the Simultaneous Ring Personal screen, so it will ring these numbers in addition to the primary IP phone and Connex softphone. You can also hide your Caller ID number from the Call Settings screen as well as configure your forward calls rules. This and other calling preferences can be administered from the client or via a Web portal.
“It may seem minor, but we particularly liked the synchronized call logs, buddy lists and service settings,” Keating said. “Since all your preferences are stored in the cloud, they are easily synchronized with the software on your device when you log in.”
In terms of other capabilities, Connex’s chat functionality is “pretty good,” with the typical features found in other platforms, like the ability to escalate to a voice call. The desktop sharing meanwhile “works well,” but has a slight failing in the fact that users can’t share control or “pass the ball” to others on a session. Also, desktop sharing is unavailable on mobile devices.
The lack of visual and video voicemail were other issues for the TMC Labs team. “We’d like to see the ability to leave video voicemail for internal-to-internal calls. That may be more of a consumer option right now, i.e. Skype video messaging, but when it comes to unified communications, having everything checked off the bucket list could be a competitive advantage in the crowded UC space,” Keating noted.
Overall though, it was a glowing review. “TMC Labs was impressed with both the voice and video quality of GLOBALINX Connex,” Keating said. “The calling features are excellent and we liked that we could set them both from the Connex UC client as well as from the web portal. GLOBALINX Connex is a superb hosted unified communication solution that certainly merits our praise and TMC Labs gives them high marks for bringing affordable and powerful hosted unified communications to businesses of all sizes, but especially the SMB space.”
