Meeting software
 

With all the quarantine going on we are looking at two apps. Zoom and Gotomeeting. GTM is less expensive and is pretty ubiquitous but I hear lots of people talking about Zoom and have had a couple meetings with it. LOts of people talk about it, but I don't see ay advantage for more money, for what we would use.

Any ideas if it is worth the extra few $ per month per user?

Of all the software I've used I think Zoon has been the most difficult. Sounds issues, disconnects... Has been a few months but Blue Jeans was pretty solid.

I use both Zoom and an internal application on my VOIP system, 8x8. Zoom seems to work fine.

Where I work, the North American IT branch just switched to Zoom. It's currently internal only for us. I've been on several in the last week and not had on seen any issues. I think most folks are using their cell phones (it uses data, not cell audio), but I know there are also folks using their PCs.

We have used GoToMeeting for years since we have a dispersed engineering workforce, some admin as well.

Cheap and reliable. We often get Zoom invitations, Skype, etc, as well.

We will stick with GTM...we use it at least three times a day even before 19.

Comparison

https://zapier.com/blog/zoom-vs-gotomeeting/#Comparison

Zoom is free for up to 40 mins. per session.

These run 60-90 minutes.

Red-Beard, thanks for the comparison. Though It seems GTM is less expensive than Zoom if paid a year at a time opposite of when they said.

Are you running Windows and using Office365 ?

Windows, yes. O365, no.

Latter has a builtin conferencing tool.
https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/compare-microsoft-teams-options

I know teams is available on 365, but we aint going there.

Going to see if Zoom has a 501c3 policy.

We've used Zoom for a couple years here. It's excellent. Better, more consistent, higher quality audio and video than GTM, WebEx, Teams, etc.

Used teams yesterday on a customer call, not great.

For me, this whole work from home thing is BAU, except I'm normally on road visiting projects and customers 1/2 time, so being at home for so long I'm getting stir crazy.

No surprise there given you have somehow avoided Office.

Microsoft Teams and Join.me are other options.

Zoom. Skype. Go To Meeting. WebEx. Blue Jeans. Google Hangouts. MS Teams. Used them all. They all have their quirks. I did attend a two-day online class two weekends ago and Zoom worked pretty well.

My only gripe with it is by default, video is on.

Oh and our sales teams and customer care teams prefer Zoom for external meetings.

That’s a setting the presenter can setup. As an attendee it should prompt you. Earlier versions didn’t give you a choice.... we had some “situations” come out of that.... use your imagination.

Oh yeah... nothing too bad. My laptop has one of those sliding camera covers built in, but for those who don't, well, nothing R-rated but jeezuz the faces of some people when working from home.

How about that Zoom stock today!

I find Webex is the best, and free right now for about 3 months

It's interesting, at least to me, that our use of GTM may be driven by nothing more than routine.

I'm going to look at, and use, some of the alternatives mentioned here.

Thanks, folks.

We used Zoom last night for a musicians social meeting and it seemed to work fine with 7 people. I have no experience with any others so cannot offer a comparison.

We use microsoft teams. Its been rock solid. Audio and Video quality are perfect.
We dont use Skype anymore cause it was really bad with drop audio or video for no reason.

You can get Microsoft Teams, I believe is free nowadays

We use Office, but to meet with outside vendors and construction meetings we don't want to limit it.

We are going to give Zoom a try. They have a year subscription through Tech Soup much cheaper than the others as well if we like it.

I know this was posted elsewhere, but it belongs here!

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O-tjwY9BlJA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

TIL Zoom has attention tracking features.
Apparently they're not difficult to defeat.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kzq5x/looping-videos-to-fake-paying-attention-in-zoom-meetings

The tape over my camera works for me.
We use Webex at work, even though we use O365.
A lot of our vendors have switched to Zoom.
MS Teams, use it once and it sets itself to load every time you boot up, and they do it in a couple of places so it isn't trivial to disable it again. Attend another teams meeting and it sets itself to load again. Teams, at least how we've been using it, has no provision to dial in from a phone, you have to be on the app. As I've been working from home I often like to use the cell phone for audio, to save my limited bandwidth for screen sharing.

My work PC has no web cam or microphone so phone audio is a must.

No need for tape. Just turn is the camera using "stop camera"

Which is fine with Zoom. I've been using Zoom for 2 weeks on my personal cell, so I have either audio or video. I haven't tried to use it on my PC, and won't be.

I was replying to Rockfan about Teams not having the provision as the way they are setup.

It looks like all the local doctors doing telehealth will be using Zoom to talk to our residents.

I try to keep everything off my personal cell, but I do have VPN and RDP in case I get called while out and about.