Zoom in Education
Updated February 08, 2017
Zoom in Education
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Overall Satisfaction with Zoom
We use Zoom in the K12 education arena. As a BOCES (Board of Cooperative Educational Services), we support 21 school district across the eastern plains of Colorado. It is primarily used for providing content to high school students (shared teachers, college classes, etc) but is also used for administrative meetings, teacher professional development, special education services, and general meetings. We have over 38 Zoom Rooms that are placed throughout our coverage area in the local high schools. Zoom replaced Polycom and Cisco as our main video networking equipment/service provider.
- Ease of use is definitely off the charts. Training is a piece of cake. Even our most technology challenged users start using Zoom with minimum intervention.
- Multi device connect-ability. I brag that I can connect anyone to a Zoom conference within 2 minutes - Asides from occasional sound connection issues, I don't think I have been proved wrong.
- Sound and picture quality.
- While Zoom has been working hard on adding features to the remote management side, it is still lacking in this area. Most of our zoom rooms do not have adults in them, just high school students, that we do not want messing with the system. The controls that are being added are excellent but are limited to the host of the meeting which we should be able to claim as an Administrator for the account. The first Zoom Room to join a meeting is automatically made the host and this causes a lot of issues. The UI for the remote management is scattered all over the website - it needs to be consolidated into one area or at least have links from the Dashboard that take you directly to a Zoom Room device management page, or the meeting settings and end button.
- On premise support. For those of use that use on premise meeting and recording connectors, it is hard to get any support when something is not working correctly. Many of the new remote management features are not working correctly with corp meetings. New updates need to work across all platforms.
- It would be nice to see a feedback area for Zoom where customers could see other customer's feature requests and vote on them. This would be a more efficient way of giving the customers a voice with Zoom development and updates.
- Cost savings over Cisco have been huge. Not only did our equipment costs drop considerably but our annual costs are now about 10% of what they used to be.
- Ease of use has promoted more video use among our users. This is the first product we have used where people are constantly coming up with new uses for it.
Yes, see previous comments.
I will add that we would like to see the following added to Zoom Rooms that we now have in the basic desktop client: Chat (ideally something where individuals in a zoom room could use a phone to just connect to the chat session and nothing else). Whiteboard functionality - it would be a great feature if the mac that is running the zoom conference could also be used for content sharing/whiteboard functionality without the need for a second computer.
I will add that we would like to see the following added to Zoom Rooms that we now have in the basic desktop client: Chat (ideally something where individuals in a zoom room could use a phone to just connect to the chat session and nothing else). Whiteboard functionality - it would be a great feature if the mac that is running the zoom conference could also be used for content sharing/whiteboard functionality without the need for a second computer.
We selected Zoom very early on primarily due to cost. We truly didn't think it was really ready to take over for our H323 legacy system but it truly surprised and has exceeded our expectations in all areas.