Zoom - Straight forward!
May 01, 2017
Zoom - Straight forward!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with Zoom
My organization has development and IT operations staff between 3 different remote offices, as well as several users who work from home. We use the agile methodology with one of the core tenants being that there is a daily standup with all team members attending. Zoom is the communications service of choice that allows for distributed teams to collaborate using open standards protocols on hardware with multiple monitors to show both the attendees, a presentation and still hear audio. For users who don't have a reliable internet connection, phone dial-in for a meeting is also available. Zoom is primarily used by the IT group but is also gaining traction with the executives, HR and legal teams who also sometimes require the use of remote communications.
- Service quality. If you have a sufficiently fast, reliable internet connection, the Zoom video conference service is rock solid.
- Ease of use of the "Zoom Rooms". Users just click a button on an IPad mounted on the wall, and the Zoom hardware initiates the call.
- Use of open-standards based technology. Zoom can be used with Polycom hardware, Zoom Rooms, Cisco, Lifesize hardware, etc.
- Zoom rooms do not support calling outside of the Zoom network.
- Unable to disable some services. We don't use the Zoom chat (there are better alternatives out there), but you can't completely disable it.
- No automatic updates on the Zoom desktop client. You have to remember to go in and check the software for updates.
- Zoom enables remote teams to collaborate using multiple screens. Sure, there are other solutions out there that are free (Skype, Google Hangouts), but if you want to present and see those being presented to at the same time, you need to step up to a solution like Zoom.
- Our internal users were restless and selecting their own solution before Zoom was brought in. We are now down to a single video conferencing system for all users in the business.
- We find that we are buying more Zoom Rooms, and having to be careful about buying too many licenses for our user base. Meetings under 40 minutes are free, but we have to be a little creative to minimize our license count.
We have two Zoom Rooms - one in the Portland office and one in the Boise office. The users absolutely love them. Buy quality components (microphones, cameras, TVs) and they are simple for the users to use. The use of Zoom Rooms also will enable us to not be tied in with any hardware vendor to add additional codec support that is added in the future. Maybe it's a video card upgrade, memory upgrade, camera upgrade, but the option to change any one particular component while not upgrading the whole system is very valuable.
Both BlueJeans and Zoom offered superior audio and video quality to our users. Either one of them would have been a solid choice. We ultimately selected Zoom not only because of the quality, but because of the effort that the Zoom team was putting into their product, while the BlueJeans product was beginning to feel stale. Zoom had the option of Zoom Rooms, and their support pages were extensive enough for us to feel comfortable.