In one word, Zoom is Reliable.
April 06, 2018

In one word, Zoom is Reliable.

Julián González | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Personal

Overall Satisfaction with Zoom

Our company has four locations across Canada and we need all to share information and have working meetings.
Zoom has become the preferred video conferencing service in all our departments. Sometimes one department has two or three meetings in a single week.
Even though the organization has a conference call system, we have more productive meetings when we can see each other on the screen. People tend to focus more and it is almost impossible to do other things during the meeting while the other members of the team are looking at you.
  • The most important strength we have identified with Zoom is its reliability. In 2016 our teams were using either Zoom or another well-known video conferencing service but little by little Zoom became the preferred option. It was almost natural selection, where the most reliable service survived. The audio and video have little or no problems, no lost connections, audio echoes, robot voice, frozen video, etc.
  • Zoom has one great advantage over its close competitor and it's the ease of use. The other service became too complicated as there were a lot of compatibility problems with their business and personal versions installed in the computers. Zoom works smoothly regardless of the version that every member of the meeting is running. You can run the browser version or the desktop app without any complications.
  • The meeting ID number is very helpful to organize meetings. Sometimes this feature is overlooked, but it is crucial to have perfectly clear what meeting you are attending. It's like having your own meeting room with the door closed, instead of having a conversation in the middle of the lunchroom in an open space.
  • Screen sharing in Zoom also runs smoothly. It is very convenient that you still have the small windows with the live video of the participants, while most of your display is showing the screen that is being shared.
  • Audio detection is a nice feature that promotes focus. Whenever one member of the meeting starts talking, the main window shows his/her video so you don't have to be guessing who is talking and saves you those fractions of a second where your brain is trying to match the audio with one of the many thumbnails showing the video of the participants. In conversations or discussions, this makes a big difference.
  • The interface is not that intuitive. Even for frequent users, it is common to go through some trial and error to do what you want to do, no matter what you did exactly the same last week. For example sharing your screen, muting your audio, etc.
  • Time management is not embedded in the interface, or at least it's not obvious. When running a limited time meeting it is annoying to get cut off all of a sudden because nobody noticed that the time was running out. It would be very helpful to have a warning clock during the last minutes of the conference.
  • Creating meeting IDs in advance is possible but is not that easy. You need to know your way in the application to find the way to schedule a meeting ID. I would like to see a simple button to do it easily.
  • Zoom has had a positive impact on our organization because the meetings are more productive. We don't waste time fixing technical problems, in the past with a different service, sometimes we had to mute the video conference and use the phone conference system for the audio. This was very distracting and time-consuming.
  • In the near future our organization plans to stop paying the monthly fee for the phone conference service, this will result in some cost savings.
  • Team building has been a priority in recent months in our organization. We have a lot of new people and Zoom has been a great way to put a face -and a voice- to each one of the new names in our organization chart.
For the moment we don't use Zoom Rooms in our organization.
Zoom cannot be compared to the video conference options offered by Whatsapp or Facetime, as they target different markets.
However, in our organization, Zoom has predominated over Skype and became not only the preferred video conferencing solution but the only one.
Our organization had a lot of compatibility problems when trying to have conferences between users that were using Skype for Business and normal Skype, this is not a concern when using Zoom. Most of the users have the Zoom desktop application installed but some still use the web-based Zoom, and with no problems at all.
People working in IT tend to forget that the immense majority of the users have limited computer skills, and a lot of times ease-of-use is more important than software capabilities.
Zoom is well suited for open meetings where multiple members need to interact. It is also a very good solution when there is a need to visually see the screen of another person, many times it is impossible to explain how a certain software or an Excel file work and with video conference and screen sharing this problem is solved.
Zoom might not be the best option for confidential meetings as most of the times the audio will come out of the computer speakers. This can be addressed with the use of headsets but then the video looks weird.
Zoom might also be less appropriate when audio clarity is extremely important, like speech analysis or transcriptions. This is not Zoom's fault because the audio clarity relies on the microphone used on each computer, and most of the times the microphones are very basic and the audio quality is not the best.

Zoom Feature Ratings

Not Rated
High quality audio
Not Rated
High quality video
Not Rated
Calendar integration
10
Meeting initiation
8
Record meetings / events
Not Rated
Desktop sharing
9
Live chat
Not Rated
User authentication
Not Rated
Participant roles & permissions
Not Rated