Zoom will take you over the moon.
January 26, 2017
Zoom will take you over the moon.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Business
Overall Satisfaction with Zoom
We are an educational/research organization, spread across multiple continents, that lives by collaboration. At one point, we had over 50 Polycom units to support. The growing trend toward cloud-based collaboration left many meetings with someone's laptop in the middle of the conference table, next to the Polycom mic, running Skype or GoToMeeting. This kind of duct tape solution was unsustainable. We found Zoom googling for something that could connect Polycoms, but with GoToMeeting like invites for outside collaborators. Now we are "all in" with Zoom having converted 23 Polycom conference rooms to ZoomRoom and installing Zoom clients on just about every staff computer, whether it is Windows, Mac, Linux, or tablet.
- Collaboration has never been easier with individuals, outside collaborators, and conference rooms all connecting seamlessly without IT assistance.
- ZoomRooms are simple to operate with a touch tablet instead of complicated remote control.
- Zoom is constantly improving and adding features. Pretty much everything I have put on my feature request list with Zoom has made it into an update. This is an innovative company with a product growing stronger with every release.
- Rarely, bugs are introduced in a version, so test updates on non-production systems before updating! (but that should be standard IT practice anyway)
- ZoomRooms are run by regular computers (either Mac or Windows), so unlike dedicated hardware like Polycom, it is up to you to properly secure and update this platform. It would be easy to forget that and let this PC become a security vulnerability.
- ZoomRoom is not a single vendor solution. Zoom recommends hardware, but when issues occure, you could have to deal with multiple vendors tech support/warranty to get the issue resolved.
- The cost for equipment in a conference room with ZoomRoom was one-third the cost of our previous Polycom setup.
- Audio and picture quality are noticeably better with ZoomRoom allowing presentations with small type or shared content with fine details to be discernable by all collaboration participants.
- Annual costs for Zoom and ZoomRoom licenses cost us the same as what we paid for just two of our Polycom room support. It cut reocuring costs for video conferencing and collaboration tools to one-fifth of what we were previously paying.
I have already addressed Zoom Rooms with my other comments, but in short, we are very pleased with functionality and reliability of our conference rooms.
If you plotted solutions based on reliability, features and cost, Zoom would be sitting alone in the upper quadrant. We actually installed (where applicable) and user tested every one of these products. It was a unanimous easy decision to select Zoom as our organization's collaboration and video conferencing tool.