Webconferencing for the agile workplace

I use this product for countless meetings and I have always recommended it to co-workers. As a project manager, I often throw together meetings to have quick agile discussions with stakeholders and ZOOM allows me to do just that. Even external clients with no experience using ZOOM can access it and use it with little issue. As with all products, the more people are comfortable with the tools that ZOOM provides, the greater collaboration can be. Once people understand this, they find ZOOM to be one of the best tools for their day-to-day and begin scheduling their own web conferences. I think that alone demonstrates how useful ZOOM can be.

Pros

ZOOM is incredibly easy to use. The product is intuitive for the average user and can get you started with a web conference in little time. Most industries rely on some sort of off-site conferencing tool, particularly for large organizations with multiple locations. ZOOM has a quick turnaround, you can have you conference set-up and details to attendees right away. The ZOOM UI during a meeting is very helpful as well, you can switch between a presentation, to video conferencing, and teleconferencing with single commands. Other users are presented with a simple and intuitive dashboard to allow them to share and participate. I have never run into a technical issue that wasn't easily overcome, and almost never had any issues during a presentation. Participants have a wide array of participating as well, with a helpful and discrete chat box and ways to "jump-in" without needing to pause the conference.

Cons

Audio can be tricky depending on how you have your conference rooms set-up. When using at home or at a desk, this is not an issue, but in conference rooms with in-room audio connected to the presenting computer, there can be echo. This is mostly user-caused and can be easily fixed, but it is something that has come up more than once. Some users have trouble figuring out how to mute or turn their camera off, and the web conference client at times requires refreshing when it doesn't launch initially.

Standard for large group meetings

Zoom continues to be our go-to solution for Large group meetings (over 9 participants) and nearly all meetings with external participants. We often will use MS Teams for smaller meetings but we allows our users to chose based on personal preference.

Pros

I have used all of the video conferencing options on the Market and Zoom is the easiest to use while providing a consistent and stable experience for all.

Cons

The only feature that I see lacking in Zoom is the same tight integration with the Microsoft Stack that Teams has. With that said, it still integrates nicely with Outlook so it's easy to schedule meetings.

Zoom Meetings and Chat Review

We've used many different software programs to deliver our monthly webinar content and Zoom has proven to be the best program yet. It's ease of use and interactive functions are far beyond what we've used in the past and it allows us to successfully connect to our management teams monthly to deliver timely updates.

Pros

Zoom has been a great resource for our team when delivering our monthly webinars to our management teams. With over 50 people on each call, Zoom allows us to manage the groups audio and video components, display polls and whiteboards for interaction and monitor the chat box when questions arise. It's intuitive when new employees access webinars or other calls and usually they have no problem connecting and interacting during the sessions. It's been better than other meeting softwares we've used in the past and the interaction functionality has proved to increase audience engagement.

Cons

There are times that the connectivity lags but we never know if it's the software or our own connectivity issues. We do find that it does freeze resulting in some content being shared to be missed or audience members are behind.

Fun way to remote working

We started with free option at the beginning which allows 100 participant per meeting. The number of participants in a meeting is mostly less than 100 for our company. However, free option limits meeting period time to 40 minute. You need to restart the meeting every 40 minute. Therefore, after testing it for a week, we subscribed to Zoom. Overall, I am happy we chose Zoom for online meetings. In specific, online meeting tools becomes essential during these lockdown period and Zoom proved itself to us with its features and performance.

Pros

Zoom offers various useful features and as a medium sized company we benefit from most of these features. Before the lockdown period our teams were using Zoom for video meetings. They were doing product presentations to customers remotely. Nowadays, because of the lockdown, we all are using Zoom on daily basis. Video meetings are reliable, connection speeds are fast and there is almost no latency at all. Bandwith usage is also less when compared to previous tool we used. -Collaborative annotation feature is the most used feature amongst others for our company. -Zoom also allows to connect on mobile devices and share the screen on your mobile phone as well. -Instant messaging is good as it allows both public messaging and private messaging between participants. -File sharing is easy and fast. -Virtual background feature is fruitful even without a green screen when you are not sitting in an untidy environment and also virtual backgrounds makes meetings funnier. -Lastly, Zoom allows various ways to join a meeting. Direct landline calling option is splendid. As an admin of the tool, I can say that user management is also easy.

Cons

They can improve their virtual background library. Everybody loved virtual background feature, but it needs wider collection. Also image processing algorithm can be improved, as it sometimes filtering the person instead of the background.

Zoom is still good but has become a little bit more difficult to execute on task

There is not much to say. I simply say this - a few years ago people used to "skype" today it is only "Zoom"

Pros

Secured calling via zoom, password is set and has to be shared to guest. Participants will need to be allowed into meeting. This has raised the bar for this long standing winner. The app is simple to use - my staff gets it within minutes! It is a clear winner for video conferencing going forward. Having zoom on premise is ideal for my organization, this is one point that I see as a big plus for my organization with employees throughout many location. We are not bothered much by Internet bandwidth because of our local enterprise implementation.

Cons

As security concerns grows, the developers responded and administration and hosting functionalities became a bit more involved, sometime a bit annoying when you are looking for a function that once exist, but disappeared over the last few weeks because a security update.